simic

I'm currently reading Charles Simic's memoir A Fly in the Soup, and it has me thinking again on some issues I have with contemporary poetry. Simic lived through some incredibly adverse situations in war torn Yugoslavia as a kid. These experience enrich his life perspective. This shows in his poetry. He is one of the most influential poets (among a plethora of others) I think we have seen in contemporary poetry. And so I worry.

Poetry that comes from his generation is infinitely more worldly and contextualized in a sense of deeper human trauma. Love becomes enormous - because to love when death is at every corner is an awe inspiring thing.

Then we have my generation. What have we lived through exactly? Poetry turns inward on itself and there comes another bout of self confessional poets. Not that this is bad in any sense. Some of my favorite younger poets are self confessional in a way that touches on the world and their place in it. But I can't help but be reminded of the romantic poets (Keats, Shelley, Byron) who were truly just so enamored with themselves and their feelings and experiences in a sensory manner, that I wonder if we are entering another era of the self examinatory poet.

Obviously this generation will be much more concerned with repression than flowers and woods and other Wordsworthian themes. The repression of the self and the instability of the future seem to be emerging themes. Who are we and where are we going?

And yet, poets like Levine who ask those same questions are not really self confessional, but rather observational and emotively charged to aggressively seek change, not recompense. And that is what I fear new poetry may lack. The ability to step outside one's experiences and to look at things on a larger scale and then be able to step right back inside oneself and have a sense of understanding. Simic writes how he understands it is all just circumstance that he was the one on the other side of the gun, but it could have just as easily been reversed.

And so we get great stories of how Simic meets Richard Hugo and they discover that Hugo was dropping bombs on Simic's street when he was five years old. And they transcend that. They become friends. How beautiful is that?