FIFTY YEARS DEEP into his career, Charles Simic has created a new category of poetry, one that is easier to describe than name: dark and irreverent, it has an abiding humor, an underlying mysteriousness if not mysticism, a deceptively plain line and diction and often a plain subject, such as a knife, a spoon, or the title subject of the poem he brought in draft form to London's class in 1995, "Official Inquiry Among the Grains of Sand."
Born in Belgrade in 1938, on the eve of World War II, Simic lived through bombings, periods of hunger, the ten-year exile of his father, and the imprisonment of his mother. "Hitler and Stalin conspired to make me homeless," he has said. Not until he was in his mid-teens was his family reunited, settling in the United States. Simic began writing poetry as a high school student in the Chicago suburbs.
One aim of his poetry, Simic says, is "to restore strangeness to the most familiar aspects of experience." To London he says that "the foundation of poetry is based on chance," and as chance can run toward violence, violence, too, is at an edge not far away. "Official Inquiry" and its grains of sand run together with a snooping seagull of "a secret government agency." But even as Simic describes line by line the making of the poem, he laughs when London suggests that he might have an overall vision. "No. No, I never had a vision," he says. "Sometimes awkwardness is inevitable and important." Simic was still making "Official Inquiry Among the Grains of Sand" at the time of his visit. "Here's a little poem I'm working on," he wrote to her weeks earlier. "This draft will change, so I'll have another version when I come." The poem eventually appeared in his 1996 volume, Walking the Black Cat, a National Book Award finalist and one of five books of poetry he published in the 1990S. Simic, who has taught at the University of New Hampshire since 1973, became the U.S. poet laureate in 2007.

Năm mươi năm "ăn nằm" với thơ, Charles Simic đã tạo ra một thể loại thơ, mới, dễ miêu tả hơn là đặt tên cho nó: u tối, thiếu sự tôn kính, thường xuyên tưng tửng, bí ẩn “chìm”, nếu không muốn nói, thần bí; dòng thơ bằng phẳng đánh lừa người đọc; lời phán, và đề tài thường giản dị, như con dao, cái thìa, hay như tít bản nháp bài thơ mà ông mang vô lớp cho London coi, vào năm 1955: “Một cuộc điều tra chính thức giữa những hạt cát”.
Sinh tại Belgrade 1938, đêm trước Đệ Nhị Chiến, Simic "đau đáu" nỗi đau bom đạn, đói khát, và 10 năm lưu vong của ông già và bà mẹ đi tù. “Hitler và Stalin, hai thằng khốn này đã âm mưu làm cho tôi thành 1 kẻ không nhà”, ông đã từng nói. Phải đến khi ông được 15, 16 tuổi thì gia đình mới được đoàn tụ, và tái định cư ở Mẽo.
Simic bắt đầu làm thơ khi học trung học ở vùng ngoại ô Chicago.
Thơ tôi nhắm tái lập lại cái “kỳ kỳ cho hầu hết những sắc thái quen thuộc của kinh nghiệm”. “Cơ bản của thơ dựa trên cơ may, tình cờ”, và bởi vì cơ may thường chạy tới bạo động, thành thử bạo lực thì cũng ngay mép bờ, "thơ chẳng đâu xa". Và mặc dù ông làm thơ từng dòng, từng dòng, khi được hỏi, liệu ông có 1 viễn ảnh lớn, bao trùm lên nó, nhà thơ lắc đầu. “No”, tớ chẳng bao giờ có một viễn ảnh. “Đôi khi, cái sự lớ ngớ thì không thể tránh được, và nó thì quan trọng”

APRIL 19, 1995

"Official Inquiry Among the Grains of Sand"

PEARL LONDON: You have said, and said in many ways in many contexts,  that the successful poem is strangely anonymous. And in the poem you've sent us, "Official Inquiry Among the Grains of Sand," you write in the first line of the final version, "You're wholly anonymous." Is it a meditation on the idea of incognito?

CHARLES SIMIC: How this poem starts, it's really hard to know. I had the phrase "official inquiry," and then I think my wife said, "How come we have all this sand in the house? We live in the woods of New Hampshire." So I looked, and it's true. We've got a lot of sand. It makes no sense. We're some distance from the ocean. So she says, "The dog brings it in." That was puzzling, too, because there wasn't a sandlot nearby. So you suddenly make an idiotic connection between "official inquiry" and "among the grains of sand." This particular poem starts like that. Then some language begins to form slowly; you have no idea where you're going. My point of saying every poem is finally anonymous is that, after many, many versions-you've only seen, what, three or four; I probably will have more versions-this thing progresses; you discover things in it that are lurking that you can't see. By the end, well, in a way you have written the poem, but in a way the poem and the language of the poem, the situation, has sort of written itself. You were somebody who discovers the poetry in the situation, in what was there developing. Because at some point it isn't that I have something to say anymore. What's happening on the page is more interesting. I look at it and I see, Aha! It can go this way. You know, let it go this way-I don't care. Next version we'll see what that means. Then one day you look at it and you say, "Well, it's really not going anywhere; I was deluded here and had it wrong." Then you stop. Then you have a new idea, and so forth. It's a process that eventually emerges or evolves into a kind of thing where I feel, well, the poem is my poem-it is my poem, I suppose-

LONDON: You say it several times and in different places, "good poetry honors the here and the now." And yet-and yet-you do not name places, you do not name locations, you do not have dates. In your poetry of the period of Vietnam, Vietnam as such isn't. It's full of all the pain but as such it isn't.

SIMIC: Well, my subject is always contemporary history. ... The reason I don't name names is because I think names mean nothing.

LONDON: We come back to the anonymity.

SIMIC: You know, it's not the anonymity. If you read some classic Chinese poem about some great military campaign and you find out that one hundred thousand brave warriors died, these sorts of names are not too interesting for me. It's the event. The names also give a kind of phony authenticity. I'm always reminded of certain mystery writers, somebody who says, "I lit the Chesterfield, I tapped it on my Rolex." They continue to done that; I wouldn't have killed my neighbor"? I'm not excusing it, and I'm not approving of it. It's just the way it is.

LONDON: So, too, in the body of your work, the role of chance: "I believe in the deep-set messiness of everything." That's lovely.

SIMIC: Well, chance is a given. I have always been open to the god of chance. Anybody can offer me some words, suggest something, I'm open.  A lot of things that occur in writing are a product of chance. Something pops into your head, and you have no idea how it pops into your head. The foundation of poetry is based on chance. You cannot will a good metaphor, or even a crummy simile. "Compare your fingers to something in some brilliant new way"? All I could come up with now is "My fingers are like breakfast sausages." Which is terrible. You cannot will a great figure of speech; they happen. So at the foundation of poetry there is that element of chance, of accident, of something that cannot be ... so one is always open, one is always-

LONDON: What would you say to those who say that, in art, chance happens only by necessity? That whatever line, word, concept, metaphor, is introduced has to be so organic that it is necessary, no longer chance.

SIMIC: This is the idea of Yvor Winters, at one time a great literary critic who, I suppose, some thought a great poet. He used to say that whatever element you have in a poem, including figures of speech, has to be paraphrased and defended intellectually. There has to be a good reason for the choice. That's why he was a lousy poet. Because that's not how great inspired metaphors and figures of speech have occurred in the history of poetry since Homer. Not to mention the Chinese. There are things that cannot be paraphrased but are extremely understandable, too. Try to explain my black cat walking across the room; I have a beautiful black female cat. I mean, just the way she moves. If I were to attempt to sum her up I would betray her complexity and her beauty. The same thing about a magazine, you'd say "Wow! Some incredible image," you know? You wanted a poem that had incredible images. It's a terrific impulse, just to have one image after image after image.

LONDON: You said, "In my poetry, images think." I love that.

SIMIC: This has always been true-if you have a good image, a memorable image, you remember it. Think of Wallace Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." More than a few of the images are wonderful. You begin to tinker about them after a while. It isn't just the visual thing itself. You realize, there's more here than meets the eye. Depending what the relationship is, a metaphor could be symbolic at the end or simple.... But a good image leads to some intellectual content.  At the end that's why you stay with it. It won't let you go, if it's a good image. I'm sure when Kafka had the idea of that penal colony machine he knew-"Nothing to worry [about] here now, this is going to write itself."

Or the castle. Certain things like that are just invitations to endless reverie. But once you find it you have this moment and say, "Ooo, this is going to take a long time to work out, but I like this, I have to stay with this."

STUDENT: In looking at the different versions of "Official Inquiry" yesterday, I stumbled a little bit over the words "rat-infested and vacant seaside villas." And when I read the poem again today I also realized that you have "a previously unknown and secret government." Now, when we study writing with Pearl, she usually says, leave out connecting words. Use commas instead. SIMIC: It does sound a little prosy. Sometimes you want to put it in. This is still just a version. I mean, "and" is a perfectly fine word. Sometimes you put it in.

STUDENT: It doesn't have a specific reason.

SIMIC: No specific reason. You try to get the movement of the thing; you're working with description, you want to get the thing right. What happens in these poems, at this level, is still pretty much unconscious. You go by hunches. You see a thing developing in a certain way and it's only later, when you feel that you have more or less what needs to be there, that you begin to notice two "and's" in the first stanza, which is probably awkward. Makes it kind of sound prosy. But I'm tentative, thinking, Well, God knows what's going to happen to that vacant seaside villa; it might take some other form. Maybe some other detail is going to —

LONDON: When is it finalized? When do you know that this is exactly the way you want it? Because you can go on.

SIMIC: Not always. Sometimes you realize this is all you can do with it.

You get tired of it, too, sick of it. What happens, I think, in earlier versions-even this version, I was looking at it today on the plane-the syntax is a little plodding. It needs a little more snap. I don't hear the snap yet. Because too many things are pulling in my mind. I'm trying to find some details that are missing ... which I intuit are there, but I can't quite summon them at this point.

LONDON: Charles Simic, you said, "It took me years to realize that the line is what matters and not the sentence."

SIMIC: Well, the problem with the sentence is it's a Cartesian structure, a logical thing. There's an object. You want to get to the end of the sentence to find out what the sentence is saying. It's a complete thought; it's this or that; it comes to a period. [But] in poetry, you really think of lines. A line of poetry is a unit of attention, a rhythmic unit; you want to hear the line bounce or one line after the other. And at some point as one fools around with these things one has a kind of musical insight-that I still don't have in this poem-which has to do with that snap. It's like a stand-up comedian. He talks in lines; he doesn't talk in sentences. He says, "This ... this ... ," bits of language separated by silences, which send you in certain directions.

Hopefully, it all comes together to make this thing visible, to tell my relationship to the content. That's what determines the line. If you're lying under a tree after a great picnic lunch on a perfect day, when the sky is blue, the world is at peace around you, and you want to write, you're not going to write short lines. You're not going to say, "I am / lying / here." You're going to say "I am lying here under this great banyan tree," and you're going to go on and on-it's going to be a huge line. You really have no idea what is happening, in a sense. Which way it's going to go. It's going to find itself, hopefully.

LONDON: Do you become obsessed with it?

SIMIC: I have a lot of poems that I'm obsessed with.

LONDON: Now, one of the poems that I adore, one of your most complex and beautiful, is called "White." There is a sense of obsession there.

SIMIC: I rewrote that many times. "White." But I have many things like "Official Inquiry" that I put aside and, later, look at again-

LONDON: Let's look at the genesis of it, then. [After version I on page 300] in version 2 [see page 302], you have added [in handwriting] "head to foot, I heart and soul, I utterly and completely, I the indistinguishable you." And then, in the third version [see page 303J, which may not be the final version, there are very drastic changes. We have this entirely different thing: ':At the junction of I Visible-invisible, I Past the long lost .... " All this specific detail, very visual images-"the solitary sugar crumb" -and, finally, the jolt "There, with your pants down, I Clutching your mouth in horror. I Without a shadow of a doubt, I The indistinguishable you!" How different that is. What happened between?

SIMIC: It's just that the language is more interesting. To think of the grain of sand clutching its mouth in horror-totally unlike all its billion neighbors. Another grain of sand, discovered by the official inquiry, located finally, they say to it, "You! Aha! You, mister. We got you." So of course this grain of sand is a little shocked, astonished. I just thought it sounded better than the other thing. The other thing is kind of awkward. I was groping, not knowing quite what I was doing-

LONDON: What about the very emphatic: "With your pants down, / Clutching your mouth in horror."

SIMIC: I mean, the whole comedy of the thing, of course. After all, it's a grain of sand we're talking about. But even this grain of sand doesn't like

to be known as a grain of sand, right? "Leave me alone-I'm just a grain of sand. Go to some other grain of sand. Why me? You've got all these other grains of sand, you know? Why bother me?"

LONDON: I don't know if you remember that lovely essay that Borges wrote when he saw the Pyramids in Egypt for the first time. He stood there, absolutely awed by the sight, took some grains of sand, and let them drift through his fingers and said, "Now I've modified the Sahara." But let's come back to this. What about the gray gull? We find him in many versions ... once he's like an informant, and then you use the word "snoop."

He's a snoop. Why?

SIMIC: Although we are twenty miles from the sea, they come to my town dump and snoop around. You go and throw your garbage, and they go around, look at you [and say], "Loser." They have this kind of view, always conspiring to come over and say, "What's happening?" But the informant, snoop, I changed that. First it was a flea with a magnifying glass, and I thought that was just too surrealistic. First thing that popped into my head. Then I started really seeing much more just the way a seagull looks. The way it moves around. The notion is that the seagulls are in the service and they work for some agency going around. Interviewing a grain of sand.

LONDON: The lost sunflower seed has 'Aha!" at the junction. But early on, I didn't quite see why it was relevant.

SIMIC: Well, I was trying to find some small items, the kind of stuff that you would find at the beach. In the sand, bottle caps, the grain of sugar. Imagine somebody drops a grain of sugar in the sand, how are you going to tell them apart? And of course there are always dog hairs everywhere. But that will change, too. Something will come the next time I go to the beach ....

LONDON: Why did you decide on two stanzas instead of the four quatrains [in the second version]?

SIMIC: The stops were unnecessary. It became a little slow. If you have a poem of four stanzas, dearly in each stanza there has to be something that can occupy the reader and so it's necessary [for the poet] to make the reader stop and take it in. This is not very complicated stuff that is being conveyed in the poem. If there's a rich image-of such richness that the reader has to dwell on it, and you want the reader to dwell on it-that doesn't make sense here. If you have too many pauses, they create a false melodrama. You know, you stop after every line as if something tremendous is being said; it's not.

LONDON: Chekhov always said, "May my pauses be accurate."

Let's come back for a minute, though, to the long leaps of language.

"Visible-Invisible": tell us about that. Because I'm not sure that if some of my students had written "Visible-Invisible" I wouldn't have said, "Go home and make it simply 'invisible.' "

SIMIC: And maybe "junction" is wrong; maybe it should be "line of Visible-Invisible." [The published version has "intersection."] There's a line, obviously, where you squint, and there's a line where if you're looking at something-I don't know if you ever looked at a grain of sand, somebody loses a pearl earring, some little item on the beach, and everybody goes nuts trying to find it. It's amazing how hard it is to see in the sand. So I was thinking of that kind of thing. Once you look at the sand on the beach you're amazed at what's there. You would find, for example, on this minute level, as your vision becomes microscopic, what is obviously a piece of green glass reduced to just a shard, to a tiny little fragment.

LONDON: Is that "Visible-Invisible"?

SIMIC: If there was a line between the visible world and the invisible world, this is the Visible-Invisible; this is the place where they cross, the junction.

STUDENT: You go down to the beach and all of a sudden this thing is transformed by metaphor.

SIMIC: I was thinking, I don't have the words yet, it's almost like I was at the address: at "the junction of." If you said to someone, "Where do I find this particular grain of sand I'm looking for?" [He would say,] "Well, you got to make a left, go right, and then when you come to the junction of, over there, just where the invisible is on the verge of turning into the visible-there! Look! There's the one."

LONDON: That's nice.

SIMIC: Again, the language is not yet there, but that's the idea.

STUDENT: I was reminded of two obvious poems. One is the Bishop poem "The Sandpiper," which is the sandpiper running around looking, and the other, the Blake-"the world in a grain of sand."

SIMIC: I remember "The Sandpiper." I didn't remember, obviously, Blake.

It wasn't developed like that, but I think it's probably going to be a version body loses a pearl earring, some little item on the beach, and everybody goes nuts trying to find it. It's amazing how hard it is to see in the sand. So I was thinking of that kind of thing. Once you look at the sand on the beach you're amazed at what's there. You would find, for example, on this minute level, as your vision becomes microscopic, what is obviously a piece of green glass reduced to just a shard, to a tiny little fragment.

LONDON: Is that "Visible-Invisible"?

SIMIC: If there was a line between the visible world and the invisible world, this is the Visible-Invisible; this is the place where they cross, the junction.

STUDENT: You go down to the beach and all of a sudden this thing is transformed by metaphor.

SIMIC: I was thinking, I don't have the words yet, it's almost like I was at the address: at "the junction of." If you said to someone, "Where do I find this particular grain of sand I'm looking for?" [He would say,] "Well, you got to make a left, go right, and then when you come to the junction of, over there, just where the invisible is on the verge of turning into the visible-there! Look! There's the one."

LONDON: That's nice.

SIMIC: Again, the language is not yet there, but that's the idea.

STUDENT: I was reminded of two obvious poems. One is the Bishop poem "The Sandpiper," which is the sandpiper running around looking, and the

other, the Blake-"the world in a grain of sand."

SIMIC: I remember "The Sandpiper." I didn't remember, obviously, Blake.

It wasn't developed like that, but I think it's probably going to be a version of that, inevitably. Except here, it's kind of a totalitarian context. I mean, some kind of a snoop who goes around for a secret government agency, checking out, making sure that all the grains of sand are behaving.

STUDENT: Yes. These are feeling images. But would you talk a little bit about what music you're feeling or striving for? For example, why did you break the line after "weed-choked" in the final version?

SIMIC: "In the rear of a weed-choked, / Rat-infested" ... what happens is that if you break the line in free verse, the next line receives a kind of emphasis. If you had "In the rear of a weed-choked, rat-infested" you would not experience the "rat-infested" to the same degree .... One of the strange things about poetry is that if we have a longer line we tend to read it faster. If it's a very long line it becomes a rhetorical line, and the visual details get blurred. In one of those Creeley poems, or Williams poems: "So much depends / upon / a red" -if it was in one line, you would just run through. Because you're always in a rush to get to the end of the line. So I wanted to get "rat-infested" on a new line. There was a kind of rhythm there too, with "weed-choked / rat-infested." I don't have the music yet. I feel something probably going to emerge. How much more of your semester?

LONDON: Just until May 5.

SIMIC: If it happens before May 5, I'll fax it.

[Published version, "Official Inquiry Among the

Grains of Sand"] You're wholly anonymous.

You believe yourself living incognito In the rear of a weed-choked, Rat-infested, Long-vacant seaside villa.

A gray gull,

Most likely the chief snoop

Secret government agency,

Is tiptoeing around importantly.

Aha! At the intersection of

The Visible-Invisible,

Past the lost dog hair,

Past the solitary sugar crumb:

There! With your pants down.

Clutching your mouth in horror.

Without a shadow of a doubt

The indistinguishable you.

LONDON: You said a poem is a moment of lucidity. I think that's probably very true about your writing. There is a certain kind of distillation that we

feel in each of the poems. This goes way back. But my question is, at this point, all of these wonderful new books ... I don't want to use the word "goal," I think that's too grandiose ... but do you have a vision of the reality that you still feel you want to write?

SIMIC: [Laughs] I never had a vision. No. No, I don't have a vision. You see, Pearl, it doesn't really happen like that. For example, I have at least twenty

poems in various stages like this, some more advanced than others. So, my whole life is simply how to fix these things. I don't care what happens in the end. If it turns out that there's only one stanza here, I'll be perfectly happy.

If it works, it works. You have these things that are half-assed, and they need to be made good. So, you don't say to yourself, "Well, I would like to write this or that." And of course as you write, these things, they generate others. Others come out of them. This might split into two different poems.

STUDENT: I keep thinking of Joseph Cornell.

SIMIC: Yeah. Right. Joseph Cornell in the sense that he, too, worked simultaneously on dozens and dozens of different boxes. He would have two items in one, and then he would wait five, sometimes ten years to put another, totally inconsequential-seeming thing inside.

STUDENT: You said, "Even as I concentrate all my attention on the fly on the table, I glance fleetingly at myself" In "Official Inquiry Among the Grains of Sand," does that make you the sand, the gull ... ?

SIMIC: I think the sand, sure. I always find seagulls to be very frightening.

LONDON: Very what?

SIMIC: They're out there in that snowy Atlantic-icebergs out there, it's mean, you know Or Kittery or York-close by where I live-and it's a miserable day, just awful, snowing and some bitter wind from Labrador blowing down, and those gulls they're just ... [pantomimes gulls; laughter] I mean they're frightening, they're frightening.

STUDENT: The stomach acid of a gull will melt a nail.

SIMIC: Melt a nail! I didn't know that. So I could not possibly, God, compare myself to a supreme creature like that.

LONDON: I think you're never content unless the meditation elicits, finally, the merely personal connection for you-and then, at the same time and

in the same breath, you also say, "It doesn't seem necessary for one to equate the I with myself." Is that a contradiction?

SIMIC: No. Because if I can write a poem that works, and if in the process of writing this poem, everything I started to say-you know, quote unquote-became its opposite, and I don't sound like myself, I couldn't care less. My views are like anybody else's views. I think this about that, and I think this about something else. I'm not that smart or unusual.

Expressing myself ... it's not important to me. What is important is to have a poem that seems to work. If it works, that's what matters. Who made the famous comment about like a click of a box, a wooden box?

STUDENT: I think it was Auden.

SIMIC: It was Auden, right. One of those wonderful, well-made boxes,

and when it closed it has that wonderful click. There's a sense of something well made in the arts. Given what I had here and how it turned out, it

came together in a certain way; it works. I don't think, finally, if one has any sense, that most of one's poems truly work. If I look at most of my poems years after having written them, I can see they could have been a little better. Shoddy goods, you know? Sometimes awkwardness is inevitable and important. But there it is.