Congratulations to Charles Simic, who has been named the 15th U.S. Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress. Simic is an intriguing choice. To be sure, he’s been lauded, awarded, and lionized sufficiently to make this really no big surprise. But, his work has a surrealistic bite (deeply indebted to Russell Edson, as is Simic’s contemporary James Tate) and a way of attending to history strikingly at odds with both recent poetry and, well, recent politics.
Simic described himself to the New York Times as a “product of history; Hitler and Stalin were my travel agents,” he said. “If they weren’t around, I probably would have stayed on the same street where I was born. My family, like millions of others, had to pack up and go, so that has always interested me tremendously: human tragedy and human vileness and stupidity.” War and refugees? Human vileness and stupidity? Sounds hauntingly familiar in 2007.
Simic’s elegant “Late September” is a perfect example of how the surrealism of his earlier works has mutated into the haunted inevitability of history repeating itself and announcing its violent repetitions in the quietest of everyday occurrences. Here are the first two stanzas:
The mail truck goes down the coast
Carrying a single letter.
At the end of a long pier
The bored seagull lifts a leg now and then
And forgets to put it down.
There is a menace in the air
Of tragedies in the making.Last night you thought you heard television
In the house next door.
You were sure it was some new
Horror they were reporting,
So you went out to find out.
Barefoot, wearing just shorts.
It was only the sea sounding weary
After so many lifetimes
Of pretending to be rushing off somewhere
And never getting anywhere.
Here’s to never getting anywhere because of being haunted by a past that keeps happening with the same disastrous errors and consequences: dare we call this a new national anthem?