Charles Simic at University of Cincinnati (3.03.2011)

The opportunity to hear Charles Simic read his poetry in Ohio is rare, so when I heard he was critiquing the poems of a graduate class at the University of Cincinnati before the evening reading I decided to make a day of my trip to Cincinnati. Both the three o’clock critique and the eight pm reading were free and open to the public, so I started skulking around the Elliston poetry room on UC’s campus a little after two o’clock in case a massive crowd gathered, or, more likely, every professor at UC required their English classes to attend. The last thing I wanted was to be squatting in the aisle while some undergrad who hadn’t heard of Charles Simic before last week lounged in the front row checking facebook on their iPhone. That being said, a small crowd accumulated outside the doors of Elliston while I leaned against a wall and pretended to send a text, got a drink from the water fountain, then stared at my phone some more and smirked to myself as if a friend had sent me a witty text. FYI—I get about one text a week. I’m sure my self-conscious little performance was unnecessary, but I had the sinking feeling that the event was actually not open to the public (it seemed too good to be true), and that any moment someone would ask me if I was a student, and then ask me to leave.

Charles Simic arrived with a miniature entourage right at three o’clock, and by then the crowd had migrated to the hall outside Elliston, so we all filed in while Simic (Or Charlie, as I was calling him by the end of the day) took a seat at a small podium facing the room. Elliston Poetry Room, on the third floor of Langsam Library, is a really neat space. Wide canvasses cover the walls, and several wooden bookshelves packed with poetry volumes fill one side of the room, blocking in a small area of chairs. It’s an intimate setting, which works well for poetry readings that are often sparsely attended. Sometimes a room that looks empty (regardless of how well attended) lends the room a disheartening kind of “Only a dozen people in the world give a shit” atmosphere. (Photo below is Simic in Elliston, courtesy of my cell phone.)

Simic was tall and lean, wearing green trousers, a silver collared shirt under a gray sweater, and brown loafers along with his round silver spectacles. (As opposed to pants, shoes, and glasses.) I also wrote in my notebook that he was wearing a “simple black wristwatch”, which I must have thought was significant at the time. Who knows. Maybe I just wanted to look busy. As people found seats up front or in back according to strategies only they knew, someone handed out copies of the student poems Simic was going to be discussing. Simic just sat behind the podium with his hands clasped between his knees, and after looking around the room of about thirty people, he cleared his throat, dry-washed his hands and said, “Am I supposed to start?”

Simic said he was mostly going to talk about the poems and make a few suggestions, which I think would have been a relief for me. A typical workshop can be stressful enough, but to have your poetry read by a master poet—and then commented on in a public forum!—must have been nerve-wracking. While it was clearly a great opportunity, I’m glad it was theirs and not mine. Much more fun to watch.

I won’t go into detail about any of the student poems except to say a couple of them were really nice. There were about ten on the handout, and each student had a turn to read their poem and listen to Simic respond. He would typically think for a moment, repeating a particular phrase to himself a few times, and then he would share an anecdote the poem reminded him of while the student author attempted to grind a finger through their temple or cheek and look nonchalant. Some of the stories were really funny, such as visitors in the early 60’s insisting that he take them to a terrible Greenwich Village poetry reading, or a recent trip to Greece he took, or working in a New York bookstore watching customers flip through poetry books to pass the time. Not funny? Maybe you had to be there.

Most of his comments on the actual poems focused on—and no surprise here to people who’ve read Simic—images. He pointed out when an image was “too much”, or overly self-conscious, and just as often his advice was to cut. He didn’t always say what needed to be cut, instead choosing to talk about how much should be cut. “This poem needs to be about two lines shorter,” he said about one poem. After one student read, and the room quieted, Simic cleared his throat a couple times, told a story, and then said, “This poem needs to be about half as long,” while the student mouthed “Wow.” Simic’s steady advice to reduce length might have seemed unreasonable to some—during an end Q & A, one observer asked if there were any long poems Simic respected, and some people chuckled. Not me. My face was like a stone. “Rodney Jones is a great poet,” Simic said, and a moment later added Tony Hoagland’s longer narrative poems.

Overall, Simic was genial and generous with the poems he read, often praising a line or image, and he had some great snippets of advice as well. One of my favorites was when he said, “Every poem is a clock. You set up a beat in the first line.” Frost said something similar about the first line directing the rest of the poem, but I must have known Simic would riff on the metaphor, which is why I instinctively took note of the wristwatch as an obvious symbol of his aesthetics. Towards the end of the session, one student read an epigram and Simic gave the advice that, “Even in short poems, several things must be going on.”

Obviously none of this is mind-blowing, but for me, it was good to be reminded and to hear what I already knew rephrased in ways that made me rethink how I write—in addition, the session (which lasted almost two hours!) provided some really interesting insight into how Simic operates, and what he values in poetry. Not just his aesthetic, which can be seen in his own work, but how he operates line by line—his composition process. For instance, did you know Simic values minimalism? Oookaaaayyyy, everybody knows that. It was interesting anyway.

I did think it was odd that there were so few people at the session, especially considering there are a number of major universities within an hour’s drive—UC, Xavier, NKU, and Miami—and also taking into account that everyone and their little brother is filling up Composition Notebooks with cruddy poetry. But when one of the most renowned living poets is providing a free public critique, under thirty people show up? Are a lot of creative writers working regular hours these days? Joking! This is what I pondered as I ate the grossest Chick-fil-A sandwich of my life (the spicy chicken breading was like red slime) at the student center, graded essays, and waited for the eight o’clock reading.

I arrived an hour early for this event as well, and since the lights in the auditorium were still off, I went back outside and tried not to look like I was lurking in the shadows. Note to self: it is unnecessary to arrive more than a half hour early to poetry readings. I was halfway hoping Simic would change clothes for the reading, which would have been interesting to write about—“For the eight o’clock event, Simic wore a black shirt with a black and red checkered fedora”—but instead he looked the same with the exception of one sleeve uncuffed and rolled up.

Discounting some minor microphone problems, due not only to the microphone but also Simic’s habit of talking to his crotch, the reading was great, albeit short. I think all factors considered—a typically late start (PRT=Poetry Reading Time. Anywhere from fifteen to forty-five minutes after the advertised time) and technical difficulties—the reading itself was just over a half hour. Simic was really funny at the critique, and was again at the reading. Highlights were “Factory” and “1938.” And while I’d seen clips of Simic reading online, I was still surprised at the prominence of his accent. It certainly wasn’t “heavy,” and he was easy to understand, but it was definitely there, and the way Simic read has made me see some of his poems in a new light. For instance, when Simic reads his list-like poems, his voice doesn’t remain steady—he’s not simply reciting like lots of American poets—but rather his voice will acquire a lilt, or a slightly higher pitch that rolls over each new line. It’s a much more subdued version of how Ilya Kaminsky reads his poetry, and it gave me a new appreciation for his written work.

Afterward, I bought two books—Jackstraws (1999) and My Noiseless Entourage (2005) because I wanted to get them signed, and also because I fiscally support poetry.

So, what do you say when you only get a few seconds to talk to an author? I’ve come to a point in my life where I’ll settle for banality rather than err into something outrageous, so I set my books down in front of him and said, “I really enjoyed hearing you talk about the master class poems this afternoon,” an obviously calculated statement to elevate my ten second status in the auditorium. Simic scribbled his name in my book and said, “Ah, thank you, yes, we got through, what, ten of them? I was really worried because, you know, someone comes, you want them to see your poem,” and then I jumped in pretending to be an angry student and said, “Yeah, Ahh, he didn’t look at my poem!”

And yes, as I write what I said it looks kind of idiotic, but it seemed funny at the time, and Charles Simic repeated what I said, laughed, and thanked me for coming.

(Above Photo: I'm a crappy photographer, but this is Simic leaving after the reading.)