Charles Simic

He liked to quip in this way, implying that the man and the poems had the same problem: expertise that might not be to one’s taste. This was an important lesson for a young writer and editor to learn: that it was all right, in fact necessary, to develop my own sense of the world, my own aesthetics, my own value system.

Charlie approached being a bon vivant with the same gusto he dedicated to poetry. (Over hors-d’oeuvres in the West Village one night, he slipped me his copy of Donald Hall’s Remembering Poets: Reminiscences and Opinions. “I want you to have this,” he said. “It’s for you. Read the one on Pound.”) The two were inextricably linked for him; his writing grew out of a need to devour what life had to offer. Sex, food, jazz—these are all over his poems. He learned early to relish pleasure even as terror surrounded him. As he writes in his great poem “Prodigy,” about Belgrade in 1944, he spent the days learning to play chess in a small house as “planes and tanks / shook its windowpanes.” After building the scene of a child intently bent on his endgame, he pivots to the present:

More than anything, Charlie’s work was preoccupied by the surrealism that the gift of existence comes with an expiration date, at which point pleasure—of food, eros, music, and poetry—will be snatched away. How could this be, when we savor life so?

“Watermelons” is a tiny poem that demonstrates his brilliance and the way he used structure to build toward meaningful surprise. A quatrain—he liked stanzas for the way they brought order to the page—it uses compression and metaphor to evoke taking in pleasure and spitting out life’s sharper edges—a kind of ars poetica, exemplary of the way that his poems use subversion and detail to bring forward life’s shadows:

For years he would call me, wanting to tell a funny story about poetry, life. There was the time the poet Bill Knott invited him to visit, when they were both very young, and he rang the doorbell only to hear a strange crunching sound, crunch, crunch, crunch. He waited minutes, the crunching continuing the whole while. Finally Knott opened the door, revealing a floor covered—and Charlie said, “I mean covered, like a carpet”—in Coca-Cola cans. When Charlie became poet laureate, he told me, he got a phone call saying that the Library of Congress had nominated him, but the senator that oversaw the role was worried about how many breasts were in his poems. “So early in the morning, the phone rings, and it was the senator, saying, ‘Professor Simic, I don’t know much about poetry, but can you explain why there are so many breasts in yours?’” I don’t recall Charlie’s answer (probably: “Because I like them!”) but I remember his laugh, rich, generous, amused by the absurdity.

We enjoyed our last dinner together in New York in 2017, with his longtime friend and editor Dan Halpern and the poet Deborah Landau. It was fall; there was an invigorating chill in the air. We sat at a table that was soon covered with wine and food, and we drank and talked and laughed. Charlie was hard of hearing at this point and had a habit of speaking too softly to be heard in loud restaurants, so we leaned close, conspiratorially. He was happy, mischievous. The wine made me more tired than usual—the next day I would realize that I was pregnant with my second son, a fact that delighted Charlie—and by dessert I felt I was watching the meal from a remove, savoring the evening with the quiet sense of a child surrounded by family. Everyone wanted dessert, but we couldn’t decide what to order, and soon, thirteen different desserts appeared on the table. The four of us took our spoons and tasted and glided from sweet to sweet, taking it all in. Afterward he emailed Deborah,

He signed many of his notes to me, “To be continued.” How I wish it were. I would eat all the desserts on the menu with him any time. What a joy it would be to call him and say: “The whole thing, once again.”