Simic's Surrealist Metaphysics: A Review of Charles Simic, "The Voice at 3:00 A.M.: Selected Late and New Poems"

Abstract

For many readers the term 'surrealism' readily connects to Lautr?amont's description of Mervyn in Canto Six of Les Chants de Maldoror?that he is fair as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella (trans. Alexis Lykiard 1970). The description has become something of a definition, by way of example, of surrealist procedure. But Maurice Nadeau points out in his The History of Surrealism, this movement developed between the World Wars much more than a literary or artistic school. Rather, its practitioners, with their interests in dream states, chance, madness, and the unconscious, sought to free themselves from stultifying bourgeois convention and to discover new ways of understanding and being in the world. As Nadeau also points out, this European, decidedly French, movement has tended to show up something of a mongrel in the United States. Despite the work of a home-grown version, the Chicago Surrealist Movement (See Surrealist Subversions, ed. Ron Sakolsky, Autonomedia 2002), which developed in the sixties, surrealism has tended to have a rather haphazard existence in the artistic life of this country, even with the work of James T?te, the early Mark Strand, and certain strains of John Ashbery. But then the influence of surrealism has dispersed, strong influences tend to do, spreading through many parts of the poetry writing world. This dispersal is well demonstrated by Strand and Simic's well-known anthology Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers, composed of writers whom the editors claim influences, among them Julio Cort?zar, ?talo Calvino, and Vasko Popa, the latter of whom Simic has translated at length. These considerations form a helpful backdrop in taking up the poetry of Charles Simic. While no poet should be considered solely an exemplar of a given movement, it is illuminating to read Simic's poems in light of surrealist protocols. For example, his interest in the shadow life of the unconscious forms a strong link to surrealism's legacy. Much of the imagery of Simic's poetry comes from his childhood in Yugoslavia during the Second World War.