Dismantling the Silence

by Charles Simic

Book by Simic, Charles

Genres: Poetry

81 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

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

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

When Charles Simic emigrated to America as a teenager, he carried the War and Belgrade along with him. “My travel agents were Hitler and Stalin,” Simic says.

Although he published a few books before Dismantling the Silence, Silence was the first of his books I read, and it made a great impression on me. I thought of abandoned cities, hallowed-out buildings. Walls strafed with bullets, spattered with blood , . . Everything about the place screams out “Hunger!” But there is some very funny graffiti left on the walls.

He’s nearly eighty now, but I don’t think Simic has changed much with the years. The same loss, the same pain, the same death’s dead humor. I don’t think he grows much. But he survives.

This is a helluva book. You should read it. I highly recommend the poem on pages 52-57: “BESTIARY FOR THE FINGERS OF MY RIGHT HAND.”

Below you will find a few of its shortest poems, by way an of introduction.

POEM

Every morning I forget how it is.
I watch the smoke mount
In great strides above the city.
I belong to no one.

Then, I remember my shoes.
How I have to put them on,
How bending over to tie them up
I will look into the earth.


FEAR

Fear passes from man to man
Unknowing.
As one leaf passes its shudders
To another.

All at once the whole tree is trembling.
And there is no sign of the wind.


BONES

My roof is covered with pigeon bones
I do not disturb them. I leave them
Where they are, warm
In their bed of feathers.

At night I think I hear the bones,
The little skulls cracking against the tin,
For the wind is blowing softly, so softly,
As if a cricket were wining inside a tulip. . .

What is joy to me is grief to others.
I feel grief all around my house
Like a ring of beasts circling a camp fire
Before dawn.


HEARING THE STEPS

Someone is walking through the snow.
An ancient sound. Perhaps the Mongols are migrating again.
Perhaps, once more we’ll go hanging virgins
From bare trees, plundering churches,
Raping widows in the deep snow?

Perhaps, the time has come again
To go back into forests and snow fields,
Live alone killing wolves with our bare hands,
Until the last word and the last sound
Of this language I am speaking is forgotten.

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fear passes from man to man
Unknowing.
As one leaf passes its shudder
To another.

All at once the whole tree is trembling
And there is no sign of the wind.

- - -

We have before us
A magician's coffin
Sawn in half
With a girl in it

A knuckle knocking on wood
For its lips to be read
A heap of sucked wish-bones
Snoring on a plate

A bridge
Over nothing in particular
A stone that thinks
Itself a flower

A period a careless dot
After what sentence
A void big enough
For the universe
To make its kennel in it.

- - -

I say to the lead
Why did you let yourself
Be cast into a bullet?
Have you forgotten the alchemists?
Have you given up hope
Of turning into gold?

Nobody answers.
Lead. Bullet. With names
Such as these
The sleep is deep and long.

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this book about 30 years ago, and have kept coming back to it.

In my opinion, this is one of the best books by a great American surrealist poet. Such poems as "Fear," "Butcher Shop," "The Inner Man," "Fork," "My Shoes," "Ax," "Invention of Nothing," and "errata" are powerful examples of Simic's ability to dig deeper than language, far down into pre-literate culture, to discover primal, one could even say elemental, relationships.

Here is "Fear":

Fear passes from man to man
Unknowing,
As one leaf passes its shudder
To another.

All at once the whole tree is trembling
And there is no sign of the wind.

[Brandon Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every morning I forget how it is.
I watch smoke mount
In great strides above the city.
I belong to no one.

Then, I remember my shoes,
How I have to put them on,
How bending over to tie them up
I will look into the earth.

[Layla Elqutami · Rating 5 out of 5]

writing a paper on Simic means i am revisiting a Great. he does everything differently than i do in creating verse. it's almost laughable. and yet i love him. he picks up the mundane and makes it literally insane. favorites are "Butcher Shop," "Errata," "Bestiary for the Fingers of my Right Hand"

[Noah]

Remove all periods
They are scars made by words
I couldn't bring myself to say

[Brandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was deep into William Blake when I discovered this book. The contrast between stanzas of bended knee prayer asking forgiveness and Simic's blanetnet blasphemy shocked my conscience. A little excited by the torment found within his work , I carried the book of poems from the library with the title facing out, hoping others might see what I was reading. Instantly, I was older. No one noticed.

[Donald Armfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another collection by Mr. Simic that amazes me. His style to take the surreal and with two dozen words flip those words into poetic masterpieces. Section III I strongly recommend reading. One title called "Eating Out The Angel of Death" ......dirty minds, maybe?

Favorites

*Forest
*Hunger
*Sleep
*Bones
*Last Supper
*Hearing Steps
*Bestiary for the fingers of my right hand
*Fork
*Stone

[Dan Petegorsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

I used to read a LOT more poetry than I read now - but this early collection of Simic's is one I keep coming back to.

[Gerardo Farías · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una excelente antología. Un gran poeta. Yo la leí en la versión bilingüe publicada por Paraíso Perdido. Un gran libro.

[Eric Shaffer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charles gets full marks from me on creativity. Damn, the ideas that this guy generates for poems are amazing. And then, when I read the poem, I too often say to myself, "No, wait, not that way." That's the reason for the missing star. Charles often surprises me in a pleasant way with his choice of direction, but too often, I am left wondering.

Charles writes some great lines, too, but other times, I feel like I am watching a ballgame without a ball or bases or pitches, and I don't even like baseball.

The man has penned some classics, which will always be mentioned when his name is mentioned, like "Butcher Shop" and "Bestiary for My Right Hand" (another freaking brilliant idea and a damned fine execution). But many I would never recommend to many readers or beginning writers of poems for . . . reasons.

Some other day, I'll add a list of my personal po-faves and some good lines of which I made note, but the book is in the other room now, and I'm finally comfortable tonight.

So read this book, a good one from which you will learn some things, perplexing and productive.

[Bradley Filice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Simic writes grizzly bears like "a stone cracks a knuckle" and "when the black creeps out of milk."