Araf unemployed

Long live the poems of Charles Simic (1938-2023) on the edge, in the footnotes, and deeply around it; at the borders, always, and upon it: "Where everything sways on the edge of everything." On that hanging letter between time and history, and between time and eternity. As if language, in its specific essence, is a temporary state of what cannot be described or said. As if the poem, in its dizzying existence, is nothing but that whispering sound we hear, deeply, in the late night. The poem-shadow that is everything else. All of that which is only realized in the afterlife of anything else. The lyrical self in confrontation with the world, at its utmost capacity, against its evils and chaos. Also, the subject of poetry, for Simic, is "the subject of poetry in the time of madness": that "reminds people of their imagination and their humanity." And the poet, in his view, is only "a metaphysician in the dark." A poet who seeks, with the non-emotional perspective he possesses of the world, to write an eternal worldly poem; a poem that accepts tragedy, that "delicious gloom," lives in it, then moves forward. The oppressive realism that turns tragedy into a kind of poetry that is happiness: "Old happiness that has become a new happiness." The dissecting of gloom that leads to the subterranean chambers of the soul that sees. And there is a dual perspective in the poem that Simic writes. From the imaginary and the ordinary. Surreal worlds where mythological elements clash with the banal, and where the everyday clashes with what is beyond it: the poet closes his eyes, as much as he can, "to see the world better." Also, humor, irony, the presence of intuition, and mockery are essential features in the structure of the poetic project he works on; because "humor, like poetry, is transgressive and provocative." And Charles Simic never ceases, in his poems, to return to the places of his childhood, as if he still lives there. As if the poem, in itself, is "his lost paradise," or rather, "Ithaca" that he insists remains vivid in his mind. As if it is written for him to reach there, as Cavafy says in his famous poem. But that return is more like solitude; the solitude of the individual who looks at himself through a small hole in memory. A solitude that is not the solitude of the other—distant, remote, strange, and foreign—but is that existential mirror into which we, his readers, desire to dive deep, to be a vital part of the whole scene. To dismantle the layers of silence that envelop the poem, to see our faces shining, without any masks, not only on the surface but deeply within the existence of our very being. To see words, poetic images, and metaphors, in all their states and levels, having become a luminous path that takes us on an "inner journey," to find the meaning; the meaning of our existence. The existence that "possesses no history, but endless nostalgia." Few contemporary poets have had as much influence as Simic, or in his uniqueness. And there is no other poet in America today who writes with such a great sense of clarity of image, as he does. Author: Charles Simic Publisher: Khutut wa Zilal Translator: Tahsin Al-Khati Number of pages: 192