[In the following interview, Simic discusses influences on his work, his personal experiences in Eastern Europe and the United States, and the act of writing poetry.]

[Santos]: Would you mind talking a little about the conditions in Yugoslavia just before you left?

[Simic]: I had what Jan Kott calls “a typical East European education.” He means, Hitler and Stalin taught us the basics. When I was three years old the Germans bombed Belgrade. The house across the street was hit and destroyed. There was plenty more of that, as everybody knows. When the war ended I came in and said: “Now there won't be any more fun!” That gives you an idea what a jerk I was. The truth is, I did enjoy myself. From the summer of 1944 to mid-1945, I ran around the streets of Belgrade with other half-abandoned kids. You can just imagine the things we saw and the adventures we had. You see, my father was already abroad, my mother was working, the Russians were coming, the Germans were leaving. It was a three-ring circus.

I don't want to sound overly psychological, but there is in your work that peculiar element which blends so naturally horror and fun. Do you think it had its origin in those days?

Very probably. I'm the product of chance, the baby of ideologies, the orphan of History. Hitler and Stalin conspired to make me homeless. Well, then, is my situation tragic? No. There's been too much tragedy all around for anyone to feel like a Hamlet. More likely my situation is comic. It's “the amazement of the thinking spirit at itself” and its predicament—or so said Schlegel. One just has to laugh at the extent of our stupidity.

So what happened after 1945?

Well, from 1945 to 1948 it was just poverty. I remember being very, very hungry, and my mother crying because she had nothing to give me. Still later, it became clear to my mother that if I was ever going to become an American poet, we'd better get moving. that's Phil Levine's theory. Actually, my father was already in the U.S.A. working for the same telephone company he had worked for in Yugoslavia before the war. Anyway, we ended up in Chicago, and my father took me out one day to hear Coleman Hawkins. You could say the kid was hooked. Jazz made me both an American and a poet.

What was it about jazz that seemed to you so distinctly American?

I heard in it, experienced in it what it feels like to be sad or happy in America. Or more idiomatically: how to raise hell, or how to break someone's heart and make beautiful music in the process. I mean, it's fine to read the great lyric poets of the past, but one also has to know how the people in the language you're writing in sing.

Is there an identifiable influence jazz has made on your work? I'm wondering, for example, if you see surrealism in any way as a literary equivalent to jazz?

The poet is really not much different from that tenor player who gets up in a half-empty, smoke-filled dive at two in the morning to play the millionth rendition of “Body and Soul.” Which is to say that one plays with the weight of all that tradition, but also to entertain the customers and to please oneself. One is both bound and free. One improvises but there are constraints, forms to obey. It's the same old thing which is always significantly different.

As for surrealism, I think there's more of it in the blues. The early stuff, especially. Most people know Bessie Smith and perhaps Robert Johnson, but there are many others. Incredible verbal invention. What one would call “jive,” but also eroticism, the tragic sense of life. If the blues was French we'd be studying it at Yale. As it is, hardly anyone knows my heroes, people like Cripple Clarence Lofton; Frankie Jaxon, or Bessie Jackson, who also called herself Lucille Bogan. They are our Villons.

Anyway, blues taught me a number of things. How to tell a story quickly, economically. The value of gaps, ellipses, and most importantly, the virtues of simplicity and accessibility.

That erotic element, since you mention it, is an important part of your work as well; and now that I think about it, you use it in ways that are actually quite similar to the ways it's used in the blues. The last two stanzas of your poem “Breasts” is a good example:

O my sweet, my wistful bagpipes.
Look, everyone is asleep on the earth.
Now, in the absolute immobility
Of time, drawing the waist
Of the one I love to mine,
I will tip each breast
Like a dark heavy grape
Into the hive
Of my drowsy mouth.

I don't know if I still care for the ending of that poem. “Wistful bagpipes” is awful. Also, the pace of these stanzas is awkward. The earlier ones are better, I think.

As for eroticism, isn't it synonymous with imagination? Eros as the cause of logos, and that sort of thing. The one lying in the dark and trying to visualize the loved one is at the mercy of both. … There's not much more that I can say.

Abstract painting is important to you as well—and, I assume, for many of the same reasons. Does that interest go back as far?

You know, I was in Washington D.C. last fall, and I had a chance to see some paintings I'd known for a long time and to my great surprise I no longer cared for a couple of my old heroes, Pollock and Rothko. Their conceptions struck me as being simple-minded. The work had no depth. The problem with abstract art is that it restricted itself so much. Let's admit, in the end, Mondrian is pretty boring. it's like using only a few keys on the piano. One admires the purity, but that's about it.

Was it because the paintings had finally abandoned representation that made them seem so restricted?

Not necessarily. I mean, I like de Kooning, Guston, Frankenthaler, to speak only of Abstract Expressionists. The two I mentioned just don't have the range of these others. That day in Washington I realized that my early admiration was really an intellectual appreciation of what their work means in the history of modern painting.

Analogies between the arts aren't always accurate, but do you think poetry has ever reached that same level of abstraction?

Hmmm. Perhaps Creeley's Pieces, and the work of Bob Grenier. I don't know what to say! Language is much better when it's concrete. “The bride unramples her white dress, the minute-hand of the clock moves slowly,” says Whitman, for example. Abstraction is precisely what one should avoid in poetry.

Was that ever an ambition of yours, to be an abstract poet?

Only in the sense that I wanted a poem with just a few elementary verbal gestures.

So there was jazz and painting, but what poets did you start out reading?

The first two poets I truly liked were Vachel Lindsay and Hart Crane. Lindsay is like those primitive painters. He throws everything in, angels and pigs. I mean, you have Salvation Army Generals, Chinese laundrymen, Bible-pounding blacks, factory windows that are always broken, etc. That's how I see the world too. Crane made me go to the dictionary. I realized certain words are very beautiful, very apt. It was a lesson in lyric poetry as well as a lesson in making associations, in using my imagination in a certain way.

Can you say more precisely what that “certain way” is?

Words call to other words and so on. Words know much better what needs to be said than I do. That sort of thing.

Eliot once remarked that a poet's material is his own language as it's actually spoken around him. That would seem to have been a much more complicated issue for a writer like yourself whose first language was not the language actually spoken around him.

I was never at any point capable of writing a poem in Serbian. By the time I started writing poetry in high school all my serious reading had been in English and American literature. So, it was inevitable. I read American poets and wanted to write like them. At that time, I didn't have the slightest idea of Serbian poetry.

What language do you dream in?

The language I dream and know best I speak with an accent.

About 1958 you moved from Chicago to New York. What was your life like there?

I worked during the day and went to school at night. I did just about every kind of work imaginable. I was a shirt salesman, a house painter, a payroll clerk, I had no thought of the future. No plans to be a professor or a poet. I mean, I wrote poetry, even published it, but that was it. That lasted twelve years. New York is, of course, a place that could have been imagined by Hieronymous Bosch. Rome must have been like that at the end of its days when all the barbarians got in. It's a city which either proves that the end of the world is near, or that human beings will survive no matter what. I always get that sense of hope when I watch those guys on street corners peddling stolen umbrellas, or some kind of idiotic wind-up toys. I love to breathe that air.

The more I read your work, the more I think of you as a poet of the city—in that particular way one thinks of poets like Baudelaire or Eliot or Auden or even Lowell—not so much in the landscape itself as in the way the city functions, both internally and externally, as a symbol of modernity.

When I close my eyes I go into cities. Others, I suppose, sail the ocean blue. The rat is my totem animal, the cockroach my wood thrush. My mother is calling my name out of a tenement window. She keeps calling and calling. My entire psychic life is there.

I'm sure you're familiar with The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. At the end of that book Kundera, who also comes from an East European background, draws a pretty sad picture of the West, sad because it seems to him rather soulless.

That's a version of the old “suffering ennobles” argument. I suppose the more political repression one experiences, the greater one's chances are for spiritual growth. The guys in the Gulags are overflowing with soul. Stalin was like Buddha. The problem with us is that we don't shoot poets. Meanwhile, millions have been running in our direction. it's one-way traffic. You don't find anyone going the other way to embrace all that soulfullness.

I see your point, but do you really think Kundera was suggesting, even indirectly, that political repression gives rise to a more meaningful life for the individual? In Kundera's book the West is, after all, still clearly “the free world.”

Of course. There are many things wrong with the West. I guess I just don't like the way East European intellectuals, at least since Dostoyevsky, have patronized the West and especially this country. One ends by claiming, say, that only Serbians know how to sing and drink, and that the stuffed peppers made by our grandmothers are superior to all French cooking. And then, of course, there's the local wine which is the best in the world, and the women—oh boy! those dark eyes and gypsy black hair …

John Bayley has commended Max Hayward for pointing out to us our great debt to Soviet literature: in Bayley's words, “that only a man who has joyfully prostrated himself to embrace an idea, and had a boulder rolled on top of him, has any idea what freedom is. We may all need that awareness and that example in time to come.” Is East European and Soviet literature making us more aware of our own freedoms?

It ought to be that way. But I met people in Paris, poets and intellectuals, who assured me that Albania is a wonderful place. For the most part, Western writers have no idea how free they are. You even hear people say that we live in a police state. America is no heaven on earth, but let's not exaggerate. Nadezhda Mandelstam's books ought to be required reading.

Admittedly, you came here at a much younger age, but do you feel any affinity at all with writers like Milosz, Brodsky, Solzhenitsyn?

I admire the people you mention but feel no kinship with the Russians. The Poles I understand better, especially their sense of history. As for Yugoslavia, I feel like a foreigner there. Everything I love and hate with a passion is over here. I'd die of grief if I left this country for long. Still, I'm not so naive as to pretend there aren't certain East European elements in my poetry. They are biographical and temperamental. I am still haunted by images of that war, and then when it comes to history, I'm like one of those late Byzantine intellectuals. I don't believe in History anymore.

Once that belief is gone, what takes its place?

Now you've got me. I don't believe in History as a road to Utopia and the accompanying idea that the present is a kind of fertilizer, in human terms for that future flower garden. Which is to say, I no longer believe in the Marxist model, which is basically a version of the Christian model, that history ends in some sort of paradise on earth.

At what point did you stop believing in the Marxist model?

When I realized that Marx lacks the most elementary psychology. it's not just classes and economics that make men what they are. Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and Freud knew a thing or two about that. Anyway, the world is cruel, humankind is probably insane, but I don't have a solution. Except, I want everybody to disarm. I'm not even asking whether this is possible, but it's the only thing worth yelling about. You could say, I refuse to play the game anymore. Instead of history, we are left now only with the present moment, in which we are all, collectively, like that wild-eyed suicide with the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth. Ergo, first things first. Take the gun away.

In the face of all that, do you ever still feel, as you said more than a decade ago in “Summer Morning,” that “It seems possible / To live simply / On the earth”?

Not with all these madmen in charge of the world!

To what extent do you think poetry is able to engage those issues?

I never liked the term “political poetry.” It implies a cause, partisanship, petitions for this or that, and finally propaganda, regardless of how worthy the reason. On the other hand, the world is mean, stupid, violent, unjust, cruel. I read in the Times this morning that 40,000 children die every day in the world from hunger and disease. Well, what do you say to that? And you must say something. A poet who ignores the world is contemptible. I find the narcissism of so much recent poetry obscene. I don't mind people talking about themselves—we all do—but all the time! Mao had the right idea. Send the crybabies to dig turnips. I'm kidding, of course. The Chairman wouldn't find my poems so amusing either. Too many tyrants and torture chambers in them. I make sure the executioners are included. Obviously, I'm uncomfortable with poetry which just keeps telling me how wonderful nature is, or how much the author is misunderstood.

Could you name a particular poem which in your mind best exemplifies that commitment to “saying something” without being partisan or propagandistic?

Whitman's “Drum-Taps.” Many others since. Quasimodo speaks of “the black howl of the mother gone to meet her son crucified on the telegraph pole.” The poet is one of the crowd of witnesses watching her go. Poetry about human suffering requires empathy of course, and humility. It's no place to parade one's ego and make political editorials. That poor woman has been doing that since the beginning of time. One must not presume to understand.

Given all that, do you think it's possible for poetry to be a public force for good?

In the long run, I'm sure. Many souls were ennobled reading Chaucer or Whitman … It reminds them of their humanity—poetry does. But the act is private, intimate. Poetry works, one reader at a time.

Okay, then let's talk for a moment about the act itself. Is it for you—as it was apparently for poets like Blake and Whitman—an ecstatic one?

Are you kidding me? My mother almost married a guy who used to compose his symphonies while sitting naked in an empty bathtub. I one've been his son. Anyway, that's not my style. Breton says “poetry is made in bed like love.” I too have to be horizontal, and a bit lazy.

In your essay, “Some Thoughts About the Line,” you say, “In the end, I'm always at the beginning. Silence—an endless mythical condition.” Obviously you mean by silence something more than just that condition out of which poems grow.

I call silence what precedes language: the world and the sense of oneself existing. I always thought, if you will, that speaking is a bit like whistling in the dark. The universe, in my humble opinion, doesn't require me saying anything. When I'm attentive and silent I seem to be closer to the way things are. A number of my early poems are attempts to make that predicament into a myth of origins.

What is it then that makes you break that silence?

To speak as the translator of silence rather than its opposer. I think Thoreau said something like that, seeing language as but a minor ripple on the great pool of wordless silence, which, I agree, is our true environment.

In that same essay you say, “To see the word for what it is, one needs the line. … For me the sense of the line is the most instinctive aspect of the entire process of writing.” One of the noticeable features of your lines is how often they are end-stopped; how often a sentence is a line by itself, or if not a line then a stanza. Is that done to further emphasize the silence?

Yes, the line is the unit of measure, the unit of attention. it's the way one slows down and speeds up the language, the place for the “counterpoint of eye and ear,” as Robert Morgan says. I'm still learning how to do it right.

Could you describe the particular way in which an image functions within your poems?

Olga Freidenberg, Pasternak's aunt, says in their correspondence: “A poetic metaphor is an image functioning as a concept.” I agree with that. In my poetry images think. My best images are smarter than I am.

Your work has always stood somewhere outside the narrative mode, but do you ever find yourself drifting in that direction?

I hope not. Most of the so-called narrative poems just plod. They have no sense of the line, nor do they imagine well. When poets forget what imagination can do they get into these linear, prosy, redundant, long-winded poems. It's possible to tell a story, the whole story, in twenty lines. The art consists of making a few details and images say everything. They should study Strand's “The Untelling.” There's a masterpiece for you.

But don't most poems of any kind just plod? I was really wondering about the exceptional few. Or are you saying that at some point the imagination and the narrative are antithetical?

No. Imagination and narrative go fine together. Consider myths, fairy tales, prose poems, etc. However, most narrative poems I see operate largely in the framework of realism.

I notice in reading reviews of your books that critics at times have a tendency to read your poems as parables. Is that the result of your working beyond the framework of realism?

I don't know. I don't write parables. If I say “rats in diapers” that's to be taken literally.

Then do you think of your poems as having a clearly communicative function, on rational or cognitive levels?

I don't know about “clearly communicative” and “cognitive,” but the point of writing a poem, actually the need to do so, is to give, pass on, relate to someone something of value. I don't want to waste people's time. It matters to me (I mean, what goes on in the poem), and I want them to know about it. One can't always make it simple because many things are not simple, but it's worth trying.

You read a good deal of philosophy, and, I'm told, have a particular interest in Heidegger.

I always read philosophy. I suppose I'm a bit envious of that kind of disciplined thinking. Also, I am curious what human beings have been thinking for the last three thousand years about the nature of things. As for Heidegger, I admire the phenomenological impulse to reexamine the simplest, the long-taken-for-granted things. That's what a poet is supposed to do, too.

Is that the most important thing a poet is supposed to do?

No! You must have a pencil handy when the Muse barges in. My father told me that many poems came to him in his lifetime but just in those moments when he couldn't find anything to write with. Otherwise, it's pointless to say what a poem should do. Someone always comes along and does the opposite, and it's perfectly fine. What all good poetry has in common is the use of the imagination. Imagination, on the other hand, is like the universe of which only a small part has been explored.

You've just recently had an incredible piece of news about the MacArthur Foundation Grant. What sort of effect do you think that will have on your work?

I really don't know what to say, and I have no opinion about it yet. I realize it beats breaking a leg, but at the same time the idea that I have five years to just write is frightening. Thank God I still have to finish this busy semester and make the usual ends meet.

We're very happy to have these new poems, particularly “Birthday Star Atlas,” which speaks of an interesting connection between you and Emily Dickinson.

Yes, Miss Emily is my great love. In fact, I'm the long lost lover to whom she wrote all her poems. I used to play for her all my Billie Holiday records.

Any particular song she was especially fond of?

“I can't believe that you're in love with me,” of course. She dug Buck Clayton's muted trumpet and Lester Young's supremely melancholy playing.