Q&A with Charles Simic, Author of "Confessions of a Poet Laureate"
As former U.S. poet laureate Charles Simic has said, the secret to our identities lies not in grand events, but in the parentheses between events. In the brief essays collected in his first ebook original, Confessions of a Poet Laureate, we get a taste of this great poet's parenthetical observations and recollections. He takes us from the his rattling house on a stormy New Hampshire night, to a park bench in Washington Square where two old men sit discussing the women they've known, to a business convention in Topeka where he reads a poem, to the vanished subterranean jazz clubs of old New York, and beyond. Part autobiographical fragment, part waking dream, these pieces are marked by Simic's characteristic wit, audacity, and awe before life's strangeness. In anticipation of the book's publication on December 28th, I asked Simic a few questions about his writing life.
--Sasha Weiss, Senior Editor, The New York Review of Books
Sasha: In the title piece of the book, you write about some of the unexpected joys of being Poet Laureate. What was your favorite part of the job?
Charles: Meeting an incredible number of people around United States who care about literature, reading my poems to very different kinds of audiences, and being asked questions about poetry.
Sasha: When you set out to write about an incident that has ignited your imagination, how do you decide whether it will take the form of a poem or a short piece of prose, like the ones collected here?
Charles: Prose is like walking to the store to buy a holiday ham; poetry is like standing on the corner and whistling. It's a difference between wanting to tell a story or express a series of ideas, and wanting to speak in the fewest possible words about some experience for which there do not seem to be any words. I rarely mistake one for the other.
Sasha: New York--its charms, its grime, its mystery--provides the backdrop to several of these essays. How did you first get to know the city, and how has your relationship with it evolved over the years?
Charles: I first came to New York with my parents in 1954 and lived and went to school for a year there. Then we moved to Chicago, where I finished high school, and two years afterwards, we returned to New York where I have lived on and off since then. It was a very different city fifty years ago with distinct ethnic neighborhoods, more visible poverty, and less sophistication about things like fine dining and the arts. As for my relationship with it, it hasn't changed at all. I'm still as excited to be walking its streets as I was in my youth.
Sasha: And what about life in rural New Hampshire, where you live most of the time? Do you find your writing changes when you're in the country and when you're in the city?
Charles: I do more writing in the country because there are no distractions. I live in a quiet little village on a huge lake, and after the summer visitors are gone nothing much happens. A cat catches a bird, an old barn that's been tilting for twenty years falls, and your neighbor buys a new pickup truck.
Sasha: In the essay called "I Like My Plato Dog-Eared," you write about the pleasure you take in books as physical objects, and your habit of getting up close to the text, underlining, and commenting in the margins. So how does it feel to be the author of an ebook?
Charles: Like a dog given a movie camera. I'll probably first lick it for a long time and then take a bite of it to see what it tastes like.
James on 12/20/2010 at 09:53 PM
This is all well and good, but when are you going to address the issue of Amazon removing some fiction books (print and Kindle formats) that contain consenting adult incest scenes and not others? Do you really think this huge censorship issue is just going to go away on its own?