Direct from the Rotterdam International Poetry Festival: Charles Simic's "Defense of Poetry"

Poetry

Filed In:

Poetry

Dateline: 7/15/97

Mid-June, 1997. A huge stage. Assorted objects piled in metal shelves: a balalaika, a cold lava lamp, a Ming vase, suitcases, a milk jug, a clock, an umbrella. These objects represent themselves! and the fact that soon poets will take this stage for a group reading of Poems about Objects.

. . .you should not fret as long as the poets are there doing the worrying for you, night and day	A large red feather is lowered by fishing line. Tatjana Daan, the first new director of the Rotterdam International Poetry Festival in its 27 years, enters past the projected B&W aerial view of Lower New York at night, past the straw bales of shredded poems. The red feather twirls in the Rotterdam Theater air. There’s plenty of air, this is the big
moment, the opening words of the world’s most famous international poetry festival. "It falls up," as Tatjana says, and while we’re falling, 1997, there are plenty of empty seats.

We’re at the very post modern Schouwberg Theater in Rotterdam. Schouwberg is the medieval German word for theater, so you could say we’re at the "Ancient Theater Theater,"

which redundancy is the opposite of poetry, which we are here for. This is the beginning of a new direction of the festival, though it’s hard to say exactly what that is. Tonight will begin with a new feature of the Fest: a lecture on "The Defense of

Poets know
the only way
to tell the Truth
is to lie. . .

Poetry." Then will come the group reading: 14 poets, with four under 55. These four are also the only non-white males: two Africans, one Asian, one woman. There are no ties, though, and the French desconstructivist, Jacques Robard, is in sneakers. In between acts the Dutch vocal poet, Greetje Bijma, will improvise, crossing Diamanda Gallas, Edwin Torres, and a muted trombone. Pick a direction.

Our clownish introducer, a Bacchus/Pan cross, calls up Mr. Simic. Simic takes a sip from a glass of water, slams it down glass on glass, and proceeds:

Ladies and gentlemen, fellow poets, good people of Rotterdam, I’m delighted to be here in the City of Erasmus, making a fool of myself. Any defense of poetry is a praise of folly.

He then launches into the Confessions of a 2,000 Year Old Poet, finding his origins not in the wandering poetics of Sappho (that’s a 3,000 year old poet), nor Mel Brooks’s 2000 year old man, but in the urban voice of Ovid and Sextus Propertius. There is nothing obvious here, and Simic makes no reference to his being from old Yugoslavia, a Serb who came to this country when he was 15.

The job of a poet can be defined,

If you take off your shirt, Dear
and let my tongue get acquainted with yours
You will live forever in my poems.

The job of lyric poetry: to connect our eternal souls to our genitals.

The poet is the eyes of every living and every inanimate thing.

Poetry is nothing less than a divine communication. God does not speak prose.
--Emerson

The United States are the greatest poem!
--Whitman (Walt Whitman’s poems: the invention of the catalog)

The poet when he’s writing is a priest. The poem is a temple.
--Levertov

Literalists of the imagination!
--MMoore

A few sashay after finagle
Some make whoopee some make good
But most make diddlysquat
I tell you this is what I love about America
The words it puts in my mouth
--HMcHugh

And finally back to Simic:

You can’t see the angels without noting a blade of grass. . . . Sooner or later the delicious meal gets eaten. . . . Poetry is inevitable, irregular, necessary as daily bread. . . . Poets know the only way to tell the Truth is to lie. . . . Poetry is the place where an incorrigible liar can make a modest existence as long as he lies real good.

Life would be perfectly pointless if the poets didn’t tell you that all your loves and pains are significant and intelligible and you should not fret as long as the poets are there doing the worrying for you, night and day.

--Bob Holman