Charles Simic

“When our souls are happy,” Charles Simic has written, “they talk about food.” When my soul is happy, often enough, I want to talk about Mr. Simic.
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“In that dive, in that all-night blues and soul club, we feel the full weight of our fate, we taste the nothingness at the heart of our being, we are simultaneously wretched and happy, we spit on it all, we want to weep and raise hell, because the blues, in the end, is about a sadness older than the world, and there’s no cure for that.”
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In it, he wrote, “Sadness and good food are incompatible.” He added: “A paella, a choucroute garnie, a pot of tripes à la mode de Caen, and so many other dishes of peasant origin guarantee merriment. The best talk is around that table. Poetry and wisdom are its company. The true Muses are cooks.” The essay described his “lifelong love affair with olives.” It spoke of how he and his brother, when their family moved to the United States in 1954, “visited the neighborhood supermarket twice a day to sightsee the junk food,” to gawk at the Spam, Fig Newtons and Hawaiian Punch. The only thing he couldn’t stomach was Wonder Bread.

Mr. Simic speaks often about his early childhood in these essays, the years in Belgrade with the “droning planes, deafening explosions, and people hung from lampposts.” He developed an innate loathing of strident nationalists, of ethnic divides, of “so-called great leaders and the collective euphorias they excite.”

About Serbia, he wrote in the late 2000s, with typical vividness: “It’s like a family that sits around the dinner table each evening pretending that granny had not stabbed the mailman with scissors and Dad had not tried to rape one of his little girls in the bathroom just this afternoon.”

Mr. Simic has lived for many years in rural New Hampshire, yet he’s not a fan of most pastoral poetry. “What about the farmer beyond that gorgeous meadow who works seven days a week from morning to night and is still starving?” he asks in an excellent essay reprinted here. “What about his sickly wife and their boy, who tortures cats?”

It is very Mr. Simic to add, “Nature as experience — making a tomato salad, say, with young mozzarella, fresh basil leaves, and olive oil — is better than any idea about Nature.”

It is also like him, in this same essay, to toss a lot of issues into the air and then comment, “Until we resolve these questions, a nap in a hammock on a summer afternoon is highly recommended.”

THE LIFE OF IMAGES Selected Prose By Charles Simic

THE LUNATIC Poems By Charles Simic

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