A knife, a fork, a spoon, my shoes: Charles Simic - 1938 - 2023 (1.10.23)

The news today reports the death of Charles Simic, national Laureate and naturalized American poet. I saw him read many years ago, to a large audience on the campus of Cleveland State University. Do poets still fill lecture halls, I wonder? 

I was in a business suit and sat at the back of the theater. During Q&A following his reading, I managed to get my raised hand acknowledged, and asked Simic whether and how he conceived of audience as he wrote - for whom was he writing? 

"For people who read poetry," he said with that kind of dismissiveness that shuts you up and sits you back down. That's where I learned never to ask an artist a question about the mechanics or the psychology of making, especially not in a public forum. 

It might have been the navy blue suit, starched shirt and necktie there at the back of a theater full of jeans, tie-dyed t-shirts, face piercings, beards and dreadlocks that put him off.

Years after that, he signed a book of his poems for me (I never met the man or shook his hand) at a dinner party in a suburb of Washington, D.C. He was visiting a patron, a spectacularly wealthy lobbyist who liked poetry. You know, one of those people with nannies, au pairs, live-in chefs. 

A neighbor friend, who fulfilled one of those roles for the rich man's children and cooked the dinners for certain of the rich family's entertainments, got Simic to sign my copy of one of his books (I've bought a good number, not all, of his 30 books of poetry).  Just his name in an almost illegible and deeply impersonal scrawl. (I mean, what more did I expect?) My neighbor's assessment of the man of the evening? Not too different from my experience at that poetry reading at Cleveland State.

Which is all to say, people are complicated. The kitchen-sink poetry hailed in the obituary, the plain-spoken voice of the poems, the appealing melancholy . . . we are one thing in the deeper recesses of our writing, another thing in public, and still something else altogether in private company.

Sourness aside, Simic has been a guiding voice for my own development as a writer since the 1970s. Now I will reread his poems in a post-mortem frame of mind.

Beyond that, maybe a project for Wednesdays@One: a knife, a fork, a spoon, my shoes.