by Charles Simic

from The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks

—They're not really object poems.
—What are they then?
—They are premonitions.
—About what?
—About the absolute otherness of the object.
—So, it's the absolute you've been thinking of?
—Of course.

Form is the visible side of content. The way in which the content becomes manifest. Form: Time turning into space and space turning into time simultaneously.

I admire Claude Levi Strauss's observation that all art is essentially reduction and Gertrude Stein's saying that poetry is vocabulary.

Chance as a tool with which to break up one's habitual associations. Once they're broken, use one of the pieces to launch yourself into the unknown.

We name one thing and then another. That's how time enters poetry. Space, on the other hand, comes into being through the attention we pay to each word. The more intense our attention, the more space, and there's a lot of space inside words.

Connotations have their non-Euclidean geometries.

A song sung while understanding each word—the way Billie Holiday or Bessie Smith did it.

Vitrac called chance a "lyric force." He's absolutely right. There's a kind of dreamy exhilaration in not knowing where one is going.

Seeing with eyes open and seeing with eyes closed. That's what Elizabeth Bishop's poem "The Fish" is about.

For imagination, inside every object there's another object hidden. The object inside is completely unlike the outside object, or the object inside is identical to the outside object, only more perfect. It all depends on one's metaphysics, or rather, whether one leans toward imagination or reason. The truth probably is that the outside and the inside are both identical and different.

My complaint about Surrealism: It worships imagination through the intellect.

Form thinks, not the content.
What the hell does that mean?
But, if form is time and time thinks. . .

The poem I want to write is impossible. A stone that floats.

Duncan's profound words: "The mysteries of here and there, above and below, now and then, demand new figures of me."

Avant-gardism: Seeing the history of art and literature as "progressing," the future being superior to the past, etc. For literary conservatives it's the other way around. There was once a Golden Age, and so on. We are just dwarfs on the back of giants, etc., etc.

Some twentieth-century intellectual types: Those who welcome the philosophical contradictions, those who ignore them, and those who despair because of them.

Form is not a "shape" but an "image," the way in which my inwardness seeks visibility.

Artaud: "No image satisfies me unless it is at the same time knowledge."

My ambition is to corner the reader and make him or her imagine and think differently.

The time of the poem is the time of expectation. I believe some Russian Formalist said something like that.

I'd like to show readers that the most familiar things that surround them are unintelligible.

There is a weather report in almost every folk poem. The sun is shining; it was snowing; the wind was blowing. . . . The folk poet knows that it's wise to immediately establish the connection between the personal and the cosmic.

Poetry is a way of knowledge, but most poetry tells us what we already know.

Between the truth that is heard and the truth that is seen, I prefer the silent truth of the seen.

If I make everything at the same time a joke and a serious matter, it's because I honor the eternal conflict between life and art, the absolute and the relative, the brain and the belly, etc. . . . No philosophy is good enough to overcome a toothache . . . that sort of thing.

Thought in art is customarily confused with didacticism, with paraphrasable content, with "message." Thought in genuine art is always none of these things.

Contradictory pulls when it comes to making a poem: to leave things as they are or to reimagine them; to represent or to reenact; to submit or to assert; artifice or nature, and so on. Like the cow the poet should have more than one stomach.

There are three kinds of poets: Those who write without thinking, those who think while writing, and those who think before writing.

Awe (as in Dickinson) is the beginning of metaphysics. The awe at the multiplicity of things and awe at their suspected unity.

To make something that doesn't yet exist, but which after its creation would look as if it had always existed.

The never-suspected, the always-awaited, the immediately-recognized new poem. It's like Christ's Second Coming.

The poet is a tea leaf reader of his own metaphors: I see a dark stranger, a voyage, a reversal of fortune, etc. You might as well get a storefront and buy some Gypsy robes and earrings! Call yourself Madame Olga.

"What do poets really want?" I was asked that once by a clever professor of philosophy. It was late at night and we were drinking a lot of wine, so I just said the first thing that came into my mind: "They want to know about things that cannot be put into words."

An object is an encyclopedia of archetypes. I've learned that writing "The Broom."

Ambiguity is the world's condition. Poetry flirts with ambiguity. As a "picture of reality" it is truer than any other. Ambiguity is. This doesn't mean you're supposed to write poems no one understands.

Metaphor offers the opportunity for my inwardness to connect itself with the world out there. All things are related, and that knowledge resides in my unconscious.

The poets and writers I admire stood alone. Philosophy, too, is always alone. Poetry and philosophy make slow solitary readers.

God died and we were left with Emerson. Some are still milking Emerson's cow, but there are problems with that milk.

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About the Author
U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1938, and immigrated to the U.S. in 1953. The author of numerous collections of poetry, prose, translations, and essays, he has received the Pulitzer Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship, among many other honors. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, and is the poetry editor of The Paris Review. His most recent collection, That Little Something, was published by Harcourt in the Spring of 2008. He lives in New Hampshire. (Author portrait by Saul Steinberg)

The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks
Ausable Press