Thank you very much

Babongile Zulu

I think we’d all have a much easier time cultivating awareness if we knew the woods were filled with, say, hungry saber-toothed tigers.

People want nature to be idyllic, damn it, and when it turns out not to be, blame nature rather than their own worldviews. I think our discomfort with carnivores and predation is a good measure of our estrangement from the natural world.

Dr. Omed – Yes, those two, plus Austerities and Charon’s Cosmology — I don’t think it’s your imagination that Simic began to imitate himself after that. I think Neruda had the right idea: completely reinvent one’s voice and style every few books. Not sure the modern American poetry establishment would tolerate that, though. Consistency is so rewarded.

My mother writes nature books, but has herself become a little uncomfortable with the “nature writer” label, especially since the genre has become so high-brow and so dominated by navel-gazers. Come to think of it, Simic’s criticism applies much more readily to contemporary nonfiction nature writers than to poets. At any rate, Mom tends to think of herself as a natural history writer or simply a naturalist-writer.

Interesting about the manholes. To write about a mystical experience is a kind of subterfuge, anyway, since words quite literally fail.
Good point, though as poets we come up against the incommensurability of world with language in every line we write. The mystical experience or any other state of heightened awareness is not necessarily more immune to accurate description than a more supposedly mundane experience. The secret to writing good poetry is learning to cultivate a state of continual surprise (which may or may not be what Cady May was talking about).

Finally, I can’t believe you went for that Jimenez quote, because I actually considered including it in the post before it got too long! (Jimenez really should be much more widely known. He was simply overshadowed by Lorca in the American imagination, which seems to have room for only one great Spanish poet.)

To call, say, Thoreau a “nature writer” is a species of litotes; to read him as a “nature writer” is a diminution . Yet, if Henry David Thoreau is not a nature writer, who is? May be it’s better to say in a particular instance, that he “writes from nature” rather paste on the label of “nature writer.”

What Cady says, I like a good deal of that. I have fewer mystical experiences than I did before I went on medication for Manic Depression, but I still have them on occasion. The manhole covers really used to do it for me. The quality of the mystical experience is not related to the quality of the articulation of the mystical experience, and vice versa. To write about a mystical experience is a kind of subterfuge, anyway, since words quite literally fail.

But I do think it is important to know the names, of trees, of birds, and of all natural and unnatural things, especially the things one sees everyday. I think of it almost as a sort of rudeness, not to know or inquire to know the names of the trees I walk under, just as it is rude not to know the names of the co-workers. Juan Ramon had it in a poem– “Intelligence, give me the name of things!…the exact name, and your name and theirs and mine, for things!”

Rachel – so much of what you say about bringing the real resonance of the natural world into the written word resonates for me on a spiritual level as well as an intellectual one.
I think I’ve said more than once that for me the thing that makes the Tanakh my favorite religious text is the abundance of concrete, natural imagery in it. Not even Zhuangzi is as rich. That, and the fact that it is completely lacking in theology. Your word “resonance” should serve to remind us, though, that many if not most oral “texts” also abound with vivid imagery – The Ifa corpus is one very good example. Therefore I agree with scholars who suggest that many portions of the anthology we call the Tanakh/Old Testament are very close to their oral antecedants. (And note the repeated suggestion that wisdom and faith come from hearing, not from seeing.)

A bit of a digression there; sorry! As for presence, though, yeah, I think this is an almost universal preoccupation of poets. As Simic says somewhere in another interview, we never quite get over the astounding fact that time passes.

Theriomorph – a sense of oversimplified hyper-masculinity in some of his work
I guess I know what you mean. Simic has been heavily influenced by American blues lyrics from the 20s, 30s, and 40s (which I also love) so some of this might come from that.

I always feel more positive toward a poet when I hear that s/he’s a good mentor – and conversely, I’ve lost respect for poets who, I’ve found out, treated their students shabbily.

any review, interview, momentary discussion of a poet’s work (even their assessment of their own work) is going to encapsulate only one moment’s understanding of the work, one particular point about the work, and can then be used, without context or in a particular context, to make a point –
Excellent point! Couldn’t agree more.

And I share your discomfort with global statements about what poetry should do. It baffles me that so many good poets themselves seem to specialize in these kinds of statements. Poets are contrary – some (many?) poets are total assholes – but poetry itself can only arise from the utmost freedom of thought.

That Yoruba poem is not an atypical example of the poems in the book, BTW. I sure wish someone would either reissue it, or come out with a new anthology.

Cady May – Thanks very much for taking the time to share your reactions (and I’m not sure what you mean about “crappy writing skills,” but whatever). Yeah, I would venture to say that Simic hadn’t spent much time in the poorer hollows and coves of Appalachia when he said that. Probably his decades of residence in rural New Hampshire since then have taught him better. Here in the Tyrone, Pennsylvania area, heroin is rife, and an hour’s drive north of us, in one of the most rural parts of the state, is an area Newsweek magazine dubbed Meth Valley. Wholesome it ain’t.

The fact is, though, that the majority of our population is now neither rural nor urban, but suburban. Clearly, if poets want to be authentic these days, they must write about life in the subdivisions. :)

“”I distrust poets who have a mystical experience each time they look at a tree or a falling leaf. It just doesn’t happen. It’s a kind of fakery. I’m all for nature and all the good, wholesome thoughts it produces in human beings, but in moderation. I mean it’s harder to deal with a city and that totally fucked up world of super highways, slums, subways, and the poor bastards who have to go to work every day in that world.””

There are weirdos in the city who have mystical experiences every time they look down a man hole cover. Some produce good writing over it, and some not. Does this make the ones who are poor writers fakers, or just poor writers? I am most definitely not a faker, but I do have a mystical experience every time I witness a falling leaf, I just don’t write about it as I am a weirdo too busy living it to improve my crappy writing skills. That makes it no less real, just not something that Simic relates to. Hence his distrust. Distrust of the unfamiliar is the first step toward blanket condemnation. I distrust distrust.

And I also don’t buy that it is harder to live in the city.
Living in nature cannot be separated from living rural. And the rural lifestyle is NOT wholesome; it is just as fucked up and difficult as living in the city, only in different ways. There is poverty, cruelty, ignorance, incest, and religious oppression. There is blatant, ongoing, careless environmental destruction, lack of regulation, lack of amenities of any kind, and not a single decent cup of coffee, or a lunch available that is not deep-fried. Hardworking rural stiffs suffer from lack of adequate or sophisticated mental health nets, education or cultural opportunities and protection from dangerous jobs. There is no OSHA or air quality protection and you see a lot of digit-less, limbless, asthmatic fellers down at the crossroads gas station, on their way to low paying jobs and hung over from the night before. Some of them probably have mystical experiences when looking at trees, who knows, but if they did, and they wrote bad poetry about it, I would not assume they were faking the experience.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/08/a_poet_who_deserves_his_laurel.html

And I also meant to say, thank you for the Yoruba leopard poem, Dave – made my day.

Part of me responded with: why? and started making a list of complaints: the primary one being what I have described in the past as a sense of oversimplified hyper-masculinity in some of his work, which I find annoying at times.

It was clear to me, though, that the flip side of simplicity (clean, spare lines, strong images, deep and unmistakable metaphor) is a real strength of Simic’s, and that also, he is clearly an excellent teacher, which Kate echoes above – one who cares enough about the work of his students to push them constantly deeper and simpler in their language, closer to the bone.

Reading the quote about urban landscapes vs. nature and that faux mysticism (which I also object to, often, even loving nature poems and having an entirely mysterious and awe filled relationship with nature myself, because the metaphors of these kinds of poems are often lazy), I flashed on a few vaguely remembered lines of Simic’s, and went and found them:

Fear passes from man to man
Unknowing,
As one leaf passes its shudder
To another.

All at once the whole tree is trembling.
And there is no sign of the wind.

(“Fear,” from Dismantling the Silence)

What I came to, re-considering these lines, the passage from the interview Dave excerpted, and the discussion here – Rachel’s point in particular – is that as all poets do, Simic is writing in and from a natural world, with a sense of longing, outrage, rebellion, hunger, and close observance.

I think any review, interview, momentary discussion of a poet’s work (even their assessment of their own work) is going to encapsulate only one moment’s understanding of the work, one particular point about the work, and can then be used, without context or in a particular context, to make a point –

Simic has specificity of language, though not by taxonomic tag. If someone pronounced that naming genus or subgenera is never appropriate in a poem, I suspect Simic would not sign on to the idea.

I do sense a disconnect between Simic’s ethos and mine, in the language itself – about nature, about urban landscapes, about what gets romanticized and how – but am never (okay, rarely) comfortable with global statements about what a poet does, believes, or can do, because in my experience, the moment someone says that, the poet will just go and do the opposite.

Maybe poets are just contrary.

Anyway, a few thoughts, and food for much more here.

Wonderful post and discussion – thanks, all.