the lure of a more lurid laureate

Charles Simic has just been appointed as the new American Poet Laureate. Unlike in England, the position of Laureate in the US is for a year or two: there have been several recent laureates.

As in England, the idea is to use one's position to further the fortunes of poetry abroad in the land - or something like that. No one knows yet what Simic will decide to do. Recent laureates have interpreted the brief in a variety of ways:

"Robert Pinsky initiated his Favorite Poem Project, which energized a nation of poetry readers to share their favorite poems in readings across the country and in audio and video recordings. Billy Collins instituted the Web site Poetry180 (www.loc.gov/poetry/180), designed to bring a poem a day into high school classrooms. Most recently, Ted Kooser created a free weekly newspaper column (www.americanlifeinpoetry.org) that features a
brief poem by a contemporary American poet and an introduction to the poem by Kooser."

I've been wondering what it was that the last incumbent, Donald Hall, did. Unlike Ted Kooser he hadn't seemed to generate all that much press (or maybe I mean online debate; whatever). And look!

"Donald Hall participated in the first-ever joint poetry readings of the U.S. Poet Laureate and British Poet Laureate Andrew Motion in a program called 'Poetry Across the Atlantic,' also sponsored by the Poetry Foundation."

Well, you just never know. Maybe I've been more out of it than I thought.

Simic is an interesting choice, though. He may live in leafy New Hampshire, but his poetry opens out the definitions of "safe," in almost any of the senses one miught apply to that word in connection with poetry.

Kooser, for example, is a rural, plain-speaking, down-to-earth writer of very accessible poetry. His appointment seemed (to some, especially coming as it did hot on the heels of Billy Collins' stint as your-man-down-the-street) to rubber-stamp that kind of Mom-&-apple-pie approach, a sort of anti-urban-sophisticate, even anti-intellectual sensibility - or that's what people were saying, anyway - that is, in its way, even more tyrannical than outright elitism (that's me talking now).

This slightly corndog "look & feel" (as the branding people call it) chimed with the Bush administration's polemics in a way that felt almost sinister - unfortunately, because Ted Kooser is more interesting than that, and a better poet. He deserves better. However, the Zeitgeist that year was all about this particular schism in American cultural sensibilites, and Kooser got all caught up, in my mind anyway, with the fuss over Garrisson Keillor's middle-brow anthology Good Poems. This kerfuffle was itself summed up rather magnificently in a broadside attack on Keillor's middlebrowism* by August Kleinzahler, in Poetry magazine. The shock waves took months or more to subside. Altogether the most invigorating moment in recent American poetry.

Donald Hall, as I say, and whose poetry I like (but nowhere near as much as Donald Justice's, sorry, the man who wrote Ode to a Dressmaker's Dummy), last year gave us a trans-Atlantic initiative - or was it a reading? I'm not sure - in partnership with the Poetry Foundation,** but one whose ripples, if they did jostle the UK poetry scene at all, didn't reach Baroque Mansions.

And now we have Charles Simic, the Yugoslav-born poet whose Belgrade childhood "was complicated by the events of Word War II" - "a childhood in which 'Hitler and Stalin taught us the basics'" - who survived the US bombing of Belgrade and lived as a refugee around Europe before arriving in the US at the age of 15. He didn't even speak English then. Simic has told the Guardian he considers himself "a 'city poet', joking that he has 'lived in cities all of my life, except for the last 35 years'."

Simic's style, I suppose in keeping with the taste of the Library of Congress, is very clear and precise, relatively literal, and not clogged up with excess vocabulary. In this it might satisfy the requirements of Keillor (quoted here in his introduction to Good Poems):

"The goodness of a poem is severely tested by reading it on the radio. The radio audience is not the devout sisterhood you find at poetry readings, leaning forward, lips pursed, hanky in hand [?!];*** it’s more like a high school cafeteria. People listen to poems while they’re frying eggs and sausage and reading the paper and reasoning with their offspring, so I find it wise to stay away from stuff that is too airy or that refers off-handedly to the poet Li-Po or relies on your familiarity with butterflies or Spanish or Monet."

He also comes down on the side of the good guys every time. But Simic's clarity is a chilly one, and his imagery is surreal, absurdist. I'd say his take on the world is surreal and absurdist. In short, although he lives somewhere in leafy New Hampshire, and definitely does celebrate that fact, he brings the rest of the world - the dark, mid-century world of Ionesco, Kafka, Bulgakov, Günter Grass - in with him.



little Charles with his mother - click on the picture

"'He's sort of a Renaissance man. He's a very worldly and sophisticated and intelligent poet', said Jonathan Galassi, president of book publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux and a former president of the Academy of American Poets." (However, not to frighten the children:) 'He's a very open and accessible person with no pretensions who is kind, so I think he will be a very good public face for poetry'.''

His laureateship starts in October, so we'll have to wait till then to see what he plans to do with it. Here's a taste of his thinking, though: asked about the question of poetry's role in culture, he mildly replies, "That reminds me so much of the way the young Communists in the days of Stalin at big party congresses would ask, 'What is the role of the writer?'"

Both the Poetry Archive, and the Academy of American Poets have good pages on Simic, with audio files, poems and bios.


* "Poetry not only isn’t good for you, bad poetry has been shown to cause lymphomas and, in extreme instances, pancreatic cancer, in laboratory experiments. (I’ll have to dig around in my notes to find exactly what study that was...) I avoid Keillor’s poetry moment at nine a.m. here in San Francisco as I avoid sneezing, choking, rheumy-eyed passengers on the streetcar, lest I catch something. But occasionally, while surfing for the news, I get bit and am nearly always sickened, if not terminally, for several hours.

Keillor means well. Of course he does. That’s his problem. His execrable Almanac [morning programme on the radio] begins with a few bars of hymn-style piano. And how could it be otherwise? We are in church. Garrison is ministering culture..."

** Even the description of it sounds like a funding requirement.

*** the exclamation is Kleinzahler's. I for one have often attended poetry readings with, shall we say, an intense look on my face and a damp hankie in my hand... I won't say who was reading. There are people who refuse to sit next to me now. But I don't think this was the kind of thing Keillor meant.