A very, very short inter­view I con­ducted with Charles Simic is in this month’s (i.e. April’s) Chicago Mag­a­zine. Check it out…

For more on Simic see here and here and here.

1/ From “Late and Soon,” Dan Chiasson’s review of Robert Hass and Mark Strand in this week’s New Yorker:

The zero-​sum fluc­tu­a­tions of Hass’s mate­r­ial, some intel­lect fol­lowed by some feel­ing, cool­ness here, warmth there, at times become a formula—more a recipe for soup than soup—but at other times yield work that, exquis­itely recep­tive to actual hap­pi­ness, has opened up new ter­ri­tory for the per­sonal poem.

2/ From “The Cat Went out for Good,” Charles Simic’s much-​lamented review of Robert Creeley’s Col­lected Poems:

The aes­thetic theory—and there is always a theory behind such reduc­tive views—may sound per­sua­sive, but it was fool­ish on Creeley’s part to believe that it could ever val­i­date a poem. If poet­ics were like cook­ing and one could write down a recipe for all of one’s future poems, that would be true. How­ever, great cooks rarely bother to con­sult cookbooks.

2.5/ A bonus View, from Chi­as­son again:

Being a poet doesn’t help you cook a meal or bathe your three-year-old daughter…

Yesterday Ron Sil­li­man jumped into the dis­cus­sion of Charles Simic’s review of Robert Creeley’s Col­lected Poems. Not sur­pris­ingly, Sil­li­man comes down firmly on the side of those who saw the review as an attack on a whole tra­di­tion of poetry. Echo­ing Mark Weiss’s orig­i­nal sen­ti­ment, Sil­li­man writes “[Simic] uses Cree­ley to make a larger—and much more pernicious—argument. His real target is the post-avant.”

Noth­ing in the dis­cus­sion on the POET­ICS list­serv that fol­lowed my orig­i­nal post con­vinced me on that point, though Simic’s hand in this year’s National Book Award nom­i­na­tions has cer­tainly made me recon­sider it. But since no one seemed espe­cially inter­ested in the point I was actu­ally con­cerned with—the effect of Creeley’s social stand­ing in cer­tain cir­cles on the recep­tion of his work—it didn’t seem worth car­ry­ing on, espe­cially since I wasn’t much in the mood to defend a poet (Simic) whose work I don’t par­tic­u­larly care for and whose idea of good poetry seems blink­ered at best.

Silliman’s post takes apart the Simic review para­graph by para­graph,

First reports had it that the new New York Review of Books includes a “hatchet job” by Charles Simic on Robert Creeley’s two-​volume Col­lected Poems. “Let no one think that the other side merely ignores us out of carelessness,” said Mark Weiss in a post to the Buf­falo Poet­ics List, “This is true venom.”

But with the arti­cle now avail­able online (albeit for a fee), it’s hard to see what’s so upset­ting. Simic is any­thing but spite­ful, and his basic judgment—that Cree­ley did his best work early on—seems pretty accurate.

Simic, taking refuge in “broad agreement,” calls For Love Creeley’s best book. He finds Words “uneven,” says Pieces “doesn’t amount to much,” and thinks things go quickly down­hill from there.* Still, he makes sev­eral efforts to qual­ify his judg­ments on the later books. For instance, “On rare occa­sions, when he comes out of him­self and remem­bers William Carlos Williams’s injunc­tion ‘no ideas but in things,’ to actu­ally look closely at the world around him, he is a far better poet.” And: “In the last years of his life Cree­ley recov­ers some of his old touch.”

The dis­joint between Simic’s arti­cle and the vitu­per­a­tions that it has already prompted might seem mys­te­ri­ous to an out­sider. But it points to the leg­endary qual­ity that Creeley’s life took on during his years teach­ing at Buf­falo.