A review of Charles Simic's Come Closer and Listen

 

Koon Woon

Professor Gery

Book Review

 

“Unending Unevenness”: Charles Simic’s Come Closer and Listen.

Review by Koon Woon

 

Charles Simic. Come Closer and Listen. New York, NY, HarperCollins, 2019, 75 pages, $24.99.

     Come Closer and Listen is Charles Simic’s 25^th collection of poetry. The poet has won a Pulitzer, a MacArthur Foundation ”genius grant,” the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the appointment as US poet laureate (Poetry Foundation website). I purchased his ninth collection of poems, Unending Blues  in 1986 because I like blues music and there was that in the poems, except not of the American flavor but of a Serbian background that the poet grew up in WWII.

He was born in 1938. I knew then in 1986 that he was an unusual poet, as he wrote elsewhere that his mother shielded his eyes when they walked down the streets where men were hung on telephone poles.

And one memorable line I read of his is “Fear travels from tree to tree, leaf to leaf” in a poem called “Fear.”

     Come Closer and Listen has four sections, with each sections organized around a theme. The first section is metaphysical musings; the second section talks about the evil “out there.” The third section perhaps can be called love poems.  And finally the fourth section may be about mortality. No matter, in each section, regardless of theme, there is a sense of the surreal coupled with metaphysical musings in workman’s language rather than those of an academic philosopher from a prestigious institution.

     The book is introduced by an epigram from Ralph Waldo Emerson – “As if one needed eyes to see.” This is to alert the reader that if one is just looking, he may not see, because it is not the eyes but the mind that can make sense of Simic’s words. The first poem of the collection: “Some Birds Chirp,” and I quote:

                        Some Birds Chirp  

                       

                        Others have nothing to say.

                        You see them pace back and forth,

                        Nodding their heads as they do.

 

                        It must be something huge

                        That’s driving them nuts –

                        Life in general, being a bird.

 

                        Too much for one little brain

                        To figure out on its own.

                        Still, no harm trying, I guess.

 

                        Even with all the racket

                        Made by its neighbors,

                        Darting and bickering nonstop.

 

     This poem pretty much sets the tone of the all the poems in this collection. It involves thinking and it is self-referential in that he is referring to himself as a bird that does not chirp, that is, to made useless racket, but “trying to figure it all out,” even though is too much for one brain. Simic is at his best when using visceral language to discuss metaphysical musings. The title poem of the book is also in the first section, “Come Closer and Listen.” 

     “I was born – don’t know the hour -- / Slapped on the ass / And handed over crying / To someone many years dead / In a country no longer on a map…” He states further that he doesn’t know if he is cursed or blessed, and he no longer frets about it, because he heard about “A blind lady called Justice,” and she listens to everyone’s troubles, but people still have good days and bad, and he doesn’t blame her because she is blind and does the best she can. One begins to notice that Simic puts himself squarely in the middle of humanity as he caricaturizes thinkers in a skid road mission as “metaphysic anonymous,” where they are “estranged from family and friends” pondering “knowledge beyond appearance.” All the trappings of a Schopenhauer are here.

     Just about all the poems in this collection are one page in length or shorter, and so we do not get a symphonic build up of sonics and message, but pithy insights and wisdom. Because the poet is now 81, many of these poems have a sense of fate as in the poem “Blind Fate,” in which a mad woman grabs a man’s arm, which causes him to yank free of her, but only to knock the coins out of a beggars cup, which causes the beggar to swear at him. And this and similar fateful things are beyond our control.

     At his best in this collection, Simic is able to summarize great philosophical and political issues such as separation of Church and State in the poem, “Arson,” where a church is set on fire. The third and final quatrain of this poem reads:

                        As for the firebug, we were of two minds:

                        Some kid trying out a new drug,

                        Or a drunk ex-soldier angry at God

                        And country for making him a cripple.

 

But not all the poems in this collection are so insightful or revealing. Some poems seem to be just “fillers” as he publishes a book once every two or three years. That was the same feeling I had back in 1986 when I read his Unending Blues. But still, there are some 80 poems in this collection and for the sales price of $24.99, it is like getting a poem for 40 cents. And if just one or two can profoundly help the reader to delve deeper into things, it is worth it. And the language is everyday speech. You get wisdom and not machinery. And so yes, I think we should come closer to Charles Simic and listen to what he is musing about.