Classic Ballroom Dances: Poems

by Charles Simic

Poems describe private worlds, fairy tale lands of observation, solitude, and ultimately, death

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

U.S. Poet Laureate, 2007-2008

Dušan Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, former Yugoslavia, on May 9, 1938. Simic’s childhood was complicated by the events of World War II. He moved to Paris with his mother when he was 15; a year later, they joined his father in New York and then moved to Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, where he graduated from the same high school as Ernest Hemingway. Simic attended the University of Chicago, working nights in an office at the Chicago Sun Times, but was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1961 and served until 1963.

Simic is the author of more than 30 poetry collections, including The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems (1989), which received the Pulitzer Prize; Jackstraws (1999); Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (2004), which received the International Griffin Poetry Prize; and Scribbled in the Dark (2017). He is also an essayist, translator, editor, and professor emeritus of creative writing and literature at the University of New Hampshire, where he taught for over 30 years.

Simic has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His other honors and awards include the Frost Medal, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the PEN Translation Prize. He served as the 15th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, and was elected as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2001. Simic has also been elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Reviews

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this! Such a slim little volume of short, stunning poems. I picked it up used at Powell's this weekend - only $3. What a stroke of luck.

Here are my favorites:

School for Dark Thoughts
Empire of Dreams
Great Infirmities
Whispers in the Next Room
Furniture Mover
December Trees

These were also charming:

Roll Call
My Widow
Classic Ballroom Dances
My Little Utopia
Peaceful Kingdom
Nowhere
The Tomb of Stephane Mallarme

Interestingly, the poem "Green Lampshades" is very similar to "El Libro de la Sexualidad" from Jackstraws (probably my favorite of Simic's books), and he also has a poem titled "My Little Utopia" in Jackstraws - similar, but nowhere near identical to the one in CBD. Revision? Re-worrying a topic? Anyway, this was a great read - a book I'll return to often.

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Charles Simic, Classic Ballroom Dances (Braziller, 1980)

With Classic Ballroom Dances, Simic's eighth book of poetry, he hit his best stride. Better than Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk, better than Charon's Cosmology, better even than his Pulitzer Prize-winning The World Doesn't End, Classic Ballroom Dances may, in fact, be the finest single book of poetry released in the twentieth century in the English language. It certainly stands on a short shelf with The World Doesn't End, Carruth's Collected Shorter Poems, Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle, the Collected Poems of Aime Cesaire, etc.

Surrealism is not an easy thing to come by in English. One may think it so, judging by all the surrealist wannabes that have been scampering around for the past half-century or so, but true surrealism requires both a deep understanding of the French poetry upon which it is based (this is where most surrealist wannabes fall short) and an aptitude for combining the form and function of surrealist poetry with English, integrating the linguistic wordplay of English with the French diction. (This is where a lesser number of surrealist wannabes fall short, but note the two often overlap in truly untalented individuals.) The handful of American surrealists who do it right-Eshleman, Stroffolino, Simic, a few others-have an understanding of this so ingrained it's almost second nature. That's why Eshleman can write The Gull Wall, or Simic can write Classic Ballroom Dances, and have them come out sounding just as fresh and witty as the best translations from the French (Benedikt's, Hamburger's, et al). Simic's "Ditty" may be the perfect English surrealist poem:

"...live as a bride of no one
the sister of algebra
could you love and remember
and remember only to forget
could you live as a dog without a master..."
("Ditty")

Simic's charms are, of course, not limited to being the illegitimate child of some secretive tryst between Guillaume Apollinaire and Paul Eluard, however. He is equally a child of the more traditional imagist school, and is capable of painting sparse pictures of undeniable beauty:

"...In a clearing,
They sized me up and then took their distance.
Quiet folk, bent, emaciated,

For such is the season. Without clues,
With hands raised, I stood like a mare
In a blacksmith's shop, Smoke
Of a late December sunlight..."
("December Trees")

It is quite impossible for me to actually say how good Classic Ballroom Dances is; it has redefined the measuring stick. With it, Simic stamped himself not only one of the finest poets working in the latter half of the twentieth century, but put himself to the head of the class. This will almost certainly top my Ten Best Reads of the Year list. *****

[Matt McBride · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maybe my favorite Simic collection, which is no small statement from me. The first section (not counting the opening poem which gets its own section) is Charles Simic doing Charles Simic particularly well. The poems are elliptical, surreal, half-memory, half-dream, with the ghost of his childhood during WWII haunting them. The second section is the more whimsical Simic, and also lovely. But, the thrid section, composed of two long poems, is unique. Here is Charles Simic pushing himself somewhere new. These poems are long (for Simic). They keep his elliptical verse but are more philosophical. I think of "classic" Charles Simic poems as giving us a polaroid of a dream. These are more organic. They move and grow. If a "typical" Charles Simic poem haunts me, these bloom in me.

[Beelzefuzz · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators"
or the one where his parents test windup toys after hours on the assembly line.

[Courtney Johnston · Rating 4 out of 5]

The two things that struck me about this collection of Simic's poems (my third, andI think the earliest I have read - from 1980) were the slightly more abbreviated nature of the poems (slightly less lush, slightly more abstract than others I have read) and the theme of childhood experiences and childlike - not childish - tone. This theme is rapidly becoming one of my favourites in his work. These are not necessarily poems about being a child, or remembering being a child, or "looking at the world through a child's eyes" - it's more a ... what? It's hard to articulate. It's perhaps the way they use these things as a vehicle, a propulsion, a way to get the reader somewhere (but not to a distinct destination.

Two poems in this vein:

Primer

This kid got so dirty
Playing in the ashes

When they called him home,
When they yelled his name over the ashes,

It was a lump of ashes
That answered.

Little lump of ashes, they said,
Here's another lump of ashes for dinner,

To make you sleepy,
And make you grow.

School for Dark Thoughts

At daybreak,
Little one,
I can feel the immense weight
Of the books you carry.

Anonymous one,
I can hardly make you out
In that large crowd
On the frozen playground.

Simple one,
There are rulers and sponges
Along the whitewashed walls
Of the empty classroom.

There are windows
And blackboads,
One can only see through
With eyes closed.

I fell hard for the two facing pages that bore 'Bedtime Story' and 'Nowhere', works that take two little notions for a walk; when a tree falls in the wood, who does hear it?; why is there a nowhere but not a yeswhere?

Bedtime Story

When a tree falls in a forest
And there’s no one around
To hear the sound, the poor owls
Have to do all the thinking.

They think so hard they fall off
Their perch and are eaten by ants,
Who, as you already know, all look like
Little Black Riding Hoods.

Nowhere

That's where No lives,
Happily ever after.

Its sky has no stars,
No morning or evening,
No earth under its feet.

It's happy because
It only has a word for them,
And the poor Yes
Has a place,

Has a kitchen and a window
To go along with the place,
And an onion
That makes him cry.

But my favourite poem in the collection was, by far and away, 'Ditty'. Partly because 'sweetheart' has always and ever been my favourite term of endearment. And the other partly because of the strength embedded in there. Just like how being 'nowhere' might not be so bad - might even be preferable - there is something comforting in knowing that when asked the question 'Could you live ....? Could you live ...?' the answer can be 'Yes. Of course I can. Of course I can.' Or at least, that is how I choose to read it.

Could you live in the middle of
nowhere Virginia
could you live as in the game
of tag

live as a bride of no one
the sister of algebra
could you love and remember
and remember only to forget
could you live as a dog without a master

and you do of course you do
with the river the wind and the evening star
your little insomnia their big insomnia
each night clenching your eyes hard
clenching them with a sigh

Could you live knowing nothing
of why and where and how
live as a balmy day in dead winter
live as the kitchen radio
blaring all the sad old lyrics

and you do sweetheart you do

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

read it

[Emily Weber · Rating 3 out of 5]

furniture mover

[Mills College Library]

811.54 S589cl 1980