The Friends of Heraclitus

Notes on the passing of Charles Simic

I’ve always loved this particular press photo of Charlie. It caught his smirk, which was legendary. I would argue it tells you everything you need to know: you could see this smirk on a passing stranger and know immediately there was a hidden world carried in it—but it’s conspiratorial, it says “you get the joke, right?” A welcoming smirk.

Saying that Charlie’s passing is a loss is a bit like describing a sunset as “you know, pinkish.” He’s irreplaceable: everyone is, but with Charlie we lose a genuine poet—by which I mean he had that gift of alchemy, where a whole world could change with a well placed (and often funny) word. More than that, he was truly generous in his genius, as well as in his success. He had a rare gift for editing poems almost by perfect pitch. He would listen to you read it in class, nod along, and find three wrong notes and then add a line, and what had been hiding behind an excess of form would suddenly show itself, shining and new.

He rather infamously claimed that he spent his MacArthur grant on trips to Europe and wine, which was a fabulous lie hiding acts of charity I won’t reveal here. But that was his spirit. He told me once that when he got the MacArthur, he was convinced for a week that he would break his leg. That too much good luck had to be balanced out, somewhere. A deep slavic sense that somewhere there is a bill come due.

Thinking of Charlie now, I’m struck by how many of my memories involve wine. He had a heavy pour for guests and friends, and was even more generous when it came to the department billing. He was like a sufi in this way: wine was a pleasure, wine was inspiration, wine was poetry, wine was a gift, wine was the symbol and the thing itself at once. We weren’t allowed to serve wine at department events: the rumor was that it was because Charlie and Seamus Heaney had long ago blown the year’s budget on one glorious evening sampling the best wines the local restaurants had to offer. I later confirmed this was true, and that it was “one of the world’s greatest conversations, never to be repeated.” That’s a small price to pay.

Charlie would reminisce about the way poetry workshops had changed over the years: how in the 80s they used to bring in a jug of wine and chat over the poems. Then he would sigh and say that we couldn’t do that anymore. We lost a few classes that winter to weather, and Charlie was determined to make it up for us, and came in on a Saturday. A few of us got together to bring in bottles of wine and the combination of a deserted English building upper room, good chats about poems, and plausible deniability made for a lovely afternoon.

There’s no doubt about Charlie’s public legacy: a collection of moving and surreal poems and essays that enrich the magic of everyday life: cafes, cats, restaurants, even your friends. But his private legacy, or his legacy as a teacher and human being is something that could too easily vanish. He was incredibly kind. That does not mean that getting criticism from Charlie was soft: that pitch perfect method could be daunting and he asked casual questions that made you wonder if you even understood what a poem was. But this was because Charlie was treating your work the way he treated everyone’s poems.

When he was the poetry editor at the Paris Review, he had me and a couple other students go through the slush pile. This was an incredible gift, as I got to see hundreds of poems a week sent in from everyone who had the ability to send in a self addressed stamped envelope. In many ways, this was the heart of my poetric eduction. But Charlie’s dictum was clear: maybe two poems a week. And he was clear that this would require telling a lot of famous people no on a regular basis. He didn’t want poems by famous poets. He wanted good poems, which meant that he wanted the same thing from you as he wanted from the two or three poet laureates I said no to with a form letter. It had to be real and delightful, or it wasn’t worth the time.

And this was the gift that has stayed with me most. Charlie took me seriously. When someone who everyone agrees is one of the best in the world at what they do looks at your beginning work and takes you seriously, it changes your life. No tribute I can ever write in prose will pay that gift back. But I hope that in the same way they can tell lineage by looking at the brush strokes of the old masters, I hope that my poems carry the marks of Charlie’s music: a mischievous sparkle and a deep romantic love of the world.

But that is far too serious an ending. I’m writing this sitting at a bar with a glass of red wine, with an plaque in the rail that says “Doo-Doo Dave”. I shit you not. And I guarantee you that Charlie would have found that really funny. Not just the name: but the fact that someone was memorialized that way. That centuries from now, this metal plaque could be discovered, and determined by future archaeologists to be a ritual item of great significance. Therewas nothing pompous about Charlie.

I remember the story of a dinner he had with a famous poet who was going on about how the inhalation was the breath of life. That we nourished in silence, and that when we spoke, that was our dying breath. So all poetry was truly about dying. There was a lot of silence after this statement, and someone asked Charlie what he thought. He grinned and said, “Sounds like a lot of bullshit,” and the timing and good humor was so perfect that even the other poet laughed.

That grace is something I will always aspire to reach and I am grateful I got to see.

You really can’t go wrong with one of Charlie’s poems, but I wanted to link to The Friends of Heraclitus at the Poetry Foundation because you can hear him read it there as well. And that is very much worth your time.

The Friends of Heraclitus

The Friends of Heraclitus 
BY CHARLES SIMIC
Your friend has died, with whom
You roamed the streets,
At all hours, talking philosophy.
So, today you went alone,
Stopping often to change places
With your imaginary companion,
And argue back against yourself
On the subject of appearances:
The world we see in our heads
And the world we see daily,
So difficult to tell apart
When grief and sorrow bow us over. 

You two often got so carried away
You found yourselves in strange neighborhoods
Lost among unfriendly folk,
Having to ask for directions
While on the verge of a supreme insight,
Repeating your question
To an old woman or a child
Both of whom may have been deaf and dumb.

What was that fragment of Heraclitus
You were trying to remember
As you stepped on the butcher’s cat?
Meantime, you yourself were lost
Between someone’s new black shoe
Left on the sidewalk
And the sudden terror and exhilaration
At the sight of a girl
Dressed up for a night of dancing
Speeding by on roller skates.