Unending Blues

Charles Simic

To call Charles Simic a poor man's Clayton Eshleman would probably not be giving Simic his full due. After all, Simic is a Pulitzer Prize winner (1990, for The World Doesn't End), a recipient of a New York Tiems Notable Book of the Year (Jackstraws), a finalist for the National Book Award (Walking the Black Cat), a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. I mean, the guy's good. Only a purist would find fault with Simic, right?

Probably. And faults to be found with Simic are minor at best, for the most part (the odd “what was he thinking?” line break, etc.). But sometimes, while reading Unending Blues, one of Simic's over-sixty books, it occurred to me that the fundamental premise of what Simic has been trying to do since his first poems were published over forty years ago is one that invites failure. That he succeeds with it as much as he does is astounding.

Simic is a surrealist in many ways (thus my comparing him to Eshleman, by far the foremost American surrealist of the latter half of the twentieth century), but at the same time he has a desire to write accessible, commercially viable work. This is not a bad thing in itself; the quest for commercial viability in poetry, the quest for accessibility, is one of the things that drives many of us. But to combine it with surrealism, one of whose main tropes throughout its existence has been the deliberately obscure? Flirting with disaster, one thinks. The hallmark of the search for accessibility in poetry over the past fifty years has been to provide easy answers to those whose first question upon completing a poem is “but what does it mean?” (and damn the eyes of all English teachers across the world who have led us to believe that what a poem means is the most important thing about it.) It would seem that surrealism, which forces the reader to think, would be anathema. And yet somehow Simic has been pulling it off for decades. And once again, in Unending Blues, he for the most part succeeds. He loses his way every once in a while, but far less than most poets treading such a dangerous path would; the majority of the work here resembles an odd, surrealist T. S. Eliot (in the early years, before Eliot got so wordy) more than it does Billy Collins (or Eshleman).

Unending Blues is not a landmark book. It isn't as mind-numbingly brilliant as Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk, it isn't as commercial as Jackstraws, it doesn't ring with the bell of importance as does White or Walking the Black Cat. But as an intro to Simic, or as a lighter read between two more weighty works, Unending Blues can't be beat. Still in print, which is a tad surprising for a book that in the poetry world was printed in the ice age, and worth picking up.