Pearl London: I think you’re never content unless the meditation elicits, finally, the merely personal connection for you—and then, at the same time and in the same breath, you also say, “It doesn’t seem necessary for one to equate the I with myself.” Is that a contradiction?
Charles Simic: No. Because if I can write a poem that works, and if in the process of writing this poem, everything I started to say—you know, quote unquote—became its opposite, and I don’t sound like myself, I couldn’t care less. My views are like anybody else’s views. I think this about that, and I think this about something else. I’m not that smart or unusual. Expressing myself… it’s not important to me. What is important is to have a poem that seems to work. If it works, that’s what matters. Who made the famous comment about like a click of a box, a wooden box?
Student: I think it was Auden.
Simic: It was Auden, right. One of those wonderful, well-made boxes, and when it closed it has that wonderful click. There’s a sense of something well made in the arts. Given what I had here and how it turned out, it came together in a certain way; it works. I don’t think, finally, if one has any sense, that most of one’s poems truly work. If I look at most of my poems years after having written them, I can see they could have been a little better. Shoddy goods, you know? Sometimes awkwardness is inevitable and important. But there it is.
- Charles Simic, in conversation with Pearl London and her students in 1995, from Poetry in Person: Twenty-five Years of Conversations with America's Poets (ed. Alexander Neubauer, Knopf, 2011).
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