Simic's 'Picnic Night' provides dark comforts

It is perhaps an all-too-telling sign of our times that I've found the most solace in the past month in the poetry of Charles Simic—one of the last remaining men for whom `surrealist' is not meant as an insult. In a world where melting watches and bowler hats have been peddled into clichés by the pop culture organs of movie producers and magazine editors, a good surrealist has become increasingly hard to come by. Moreover, it seems that any discussion of surrealism involves an emphasis on the visual arts, which denies the movement's true literary origins. And so recently when the world appeared to make little sense, it was with desperation that I opened Simic's new collection of poems, Night Picnic.

I first read Charles Simic's poems at the prompting of my 11th-grade English teacher and found in his poetry none of the laziness and pretension that ended my interest in the likes of Charles Henri Ford and Salvador Dali. Hotel Insomnia, a collection of poems released in 1992, seemed a most wonderful fusion of allegory and dream, consisting of real ideas artfully woven together with confusion and intuition. He has written some twenty volumes of poetry since the late 1950s, along with a number of memoirs and his Pulitzer Prize- winning collage of biography, prose, and poetry about Joseph Cornell, Dimestore Alchemy. He lives, writes, and teaches in New Hampshire and yet remains in constant contact, poetically at least, with his native Belgrade, from which he was displaced following the Second World War.

Night Picnic could not have been released at a better time, indirectly addressing the uncertainty that's persisted since early September with a distrust of easy answers. Charles Simic has shown himself deftly suited to a style and experience for creating poetry that is downright therapeutic. He wrestles with disparity time and time again in his new poems, juxtaposing the real and the surreal, the rich and the poor, the happy and the sad in ways that often lead to new understandings.

The narrator of Simic's "The Bible Lesson," for example, does not hesitate to "roast" the old woman who has more regard for her birds than the suffering of those in the "grubby vacant lot." Indeed, other poems, most specifically "Views from a Train," flash between images of American comfort and American tragedy. And he is most interested in the space between them, which he knows he occupies. This is not static poetry; it cackles with the energy of the often unintelligible world but possesses none of the tired surrealism that's grounded in sheer nonsense. It is little wonder that he chalks up much of his inspiration to jazz, of which he says "I found Rollins, Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk far better models of what an artist could be than most poets."

His sense of America is fresh and real. He loves it for its jazz, food, and ideas, not its flags and Monday-night football games. Having grown up first being bombed by the Nazis and then later by Americans, Simic is in a unique position to understand both the ravages of conflict he saw as a boy and the comforts of America that he has known for the last 40 years.

Night Picnic is his most skillful volume yet. He is aware that it is his task as a poet to somehow reconcile the messes that have been left by our political, religious, and philosophical inadequacies. He wrestles with this each page and each poem of the book, and at the same time manages to deal with the paradox that has glared at every modern poet: How is it that one both respects and subverts the poetic tradition that spurs one to write in the first place? Similarly, what do I do with a country, a world, and a system that I need and love, but that also needs more subversion and change than one person could ever possibly enact? Simic's poetry provides a fantastic framework through which we address these questions, and he somehow makes it a real pleasure to do so. He says something beautiful about how intuitive truth is in the end, and one feels securely in touch with truth on the pages of this book.

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