Unending Blues: Poems

For fans of Kenneth Rexroth, Frank O'Hara Unending Blues (1983) is the kind of poetry collection that you can take around everywhere and read when the occasional minute frees up. I read this thing in a matter of two days (it's a very short book, being only 58 pages and forty-four poems long), but I also found myself reading poems multiple times not merely for understanding, but to ingrain Simic's wonderful, silent images into my head. That's the thing about his images--there are so many successful strays from cliche that each line or combination of lines finds difficulty in sticking upon a first reading. Like in "Painters of Angels and Seraphim," which goes far to capture a single visual essence or moment in time without dragging itself into oblivion with too many details, too little punch: After a long lunch of roast lamb And many heavy glasses of heavy red wine, I fell asleep in a rowboat That I never got around to untie From its mooring under the willows That went on fussing over my head As if to make my shade even deeper. I woke once to pull my shirt off, And once when I heard my name Called by a woman, distant and worried, Since it was past sundown, The water reflecting the dark hills, And the sky of that chill blue That used to signify a state of grace. The preponderance of imagery leads the poem into a healthy state of rhythm that almost avoids that dash and dabble of darkness that lies under the surface. And the book is abound with similar conflicts both strange and alluring. There is a sense of absence and a sense that the speaker, which in a Simic poem almost always feels biographical (much like O'Hara, whose poems of daily life concentrate the imagination on how the world is perceived in the first person rather than splicing creativity onto more displaced, fictive perspectives), only has a series of spitfire-image-presentation memories to deal with. In reading these poems, I'm reminded of films that use dream sequences with many choppy shots, that are more a compilation of isolated events that form a more unifying whole. Of course, Simic's poems are rarely fragmentary, at least in this collection, which is where I found most of my attraction--the everyday vernacular is paired with well-rounded, obligatory grammar and syntax which not only helps show that the speaker has retained some sort of sanity and stability (masculine, perhaps, sensibility?) but knows that there is an audience out there listening to him as poet not him as babbling buffoon. Like in "William and Cynthia," which transplants the biography of others onto Simic's speaker: Says she'll take him to the Museum Of Dead Ideas and Emotions. Wonders that he hasn't been there yet. Says it looks like a Federal courthouse With its many steps and massive columns. Apparently not many people go there On such drizzly gray afternoons. Says even she gets afraid In the large empty exhibition halls With monstrous ideas in glass cases, Naked emotions on stone pedestals In classically

Charles Simic, Unending Blues (Harcourt Brace, 1986)To call Charles Simic a poor man's Clayton Eshleman would probably not be giving Simic his full due. After all, Simic is a Pulitzer Prize winner (1990, for The World Doesn't End), a recipient of a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (Jackstraws), a finalist for the National Book Award (Walking the Black Cat), a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. I mean, the guy's good. Only a purist would find fault with Simic, right?Probably. And faults to be found with Simic are minor at best, for the most part (the odd "what was he thinking?" line break, etc.). But sometimes, while reading Unending Blues, one of Simic's over-sixty books, it occurred to me that the fundamental premise of what Simic has been trying to do since his first poems were published over forty years ago is one that invites failure. That he succeeds with it as much as he does is astounding.Simic is a surrealist in many ways (thus my comparing him to Eshleman, by far the foremost American surrealist of the latter half of the twentieth century), but at the same time he has a desire to write accessible, commercially viable work. This is not a bad thing in itself; the quest for commercial viability in poetry, the quest for accessibility, is one of the things that drives many of us. But to combine it with surrealism, one of whose main tropes throughout its existence has been the deliberately obscure? Flirting with disaster, one thinks. The hallmark of the search for accessibility in poetry over the past fifty years has been to provide easy answers to those whose first question upon completing a poem is "but what does it mean?" (and damn the eyes of all English teachers across the world who have led us to believe that what a poem means is the most important thing about it.) It would seem that surrealism, which forces the reader to think, would be anathema. And yet somehow Simic has been pulling it off for decades. And once again, in Unending Blues, he for the most part succeeds. He loses his way every once in a while, but far less than most poets treading such a dangerous path would; the majority of the work here resembles an odd, surrealist T. S. Eliot (in the early years, before Eliot got so wordy) more than it does Billy Collins (or Eshleman).Unending Blues is not a landmark book. It isn't as mind-numbingly brilliant as Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk, it isn't as commercial as Jackstraws, it doesn't ring with the bell of importance as does White or Walking the Black Cat. But as an intro to Simic, or as a lighter read between two more weighty works, Unending Blues can't be beat. Still in print, which is a tad surprising for a book that in the poetry world was printed in the ice age, and worth picking up. ****