Charles Simic: Poetry and Utopia
“Poetry dwells in a perpetual utopia of its own,” wrote William Hazlitt.. I think he has a point. In relation to the future, a poem is like a note sealed in a bottle and thrown into the sea. Writing one is an act of immense, near-irrational hope that an image, a metaphor, some lines of verse.. will have a long, posthumous life. “The poem wants to reach an Other, it needs this Other,” Paul Celan has said. And it happens sometimes..
My aversion to utopian thinking comes from growing up under Communism in Yugoslavia. Photographs of Marx, Stalin, and Marshal Tito hung over the blackboard in my schoolroom, the three of them gazing confidently into the future. Our teachers told us how fortunate we were to be living in a society that is going to be a model for the rest of humanity for thousands of years to come. I was inoculated against any such belief at home by a grandmother who brought me up and who had lived through two world wars, Austrian and German occupations, and a civil war, and who could recall every misfortune our family had met with going back a century. She, like my mother, expected nothing good of the future—only more misery, more bombs falling, and more suffering. Neither one of them believed in life after death, though they were descendants of a long line of priests. They’d call on God to witness when they heard bad news, cross themselves when we had a stroke of luck, and light candles in church for the dead, but would regard you with pity if you asked them if they believed in heaven or hell.
“Poetry dwells in a perpetual utopia of its own,” wrote William Hazlitt, the great British essayist of the Romantic Period. Despite everything I’ve been saying, I think he has a point. In relation to the future, a poem is like a note sealed in a bottle and thrown into the sea. Writing one is an act of immense, near-irrational hope that an image, a metaphor, some lines of verse and the voice embodied in them will have a long, posthumous life. “The poem wants to reach an Other, it needs this Other,” Paul Celan has said. And it happens sometimes.
A young man in a small town in Patagonia or in Kansas reads an ancient Chinese poet in a book he borrowed from the library and falls in love with a poem, which he reads to himself over and over again as the summer night is falling. With each reading he brings the voice of the dead poet to life. For one unforgettable moment, he steps out of his own cramped self and enters the lives of unknown men and women, seeing the world through their eyes, feeling what they once felt and thinking what they once thought. If poetry is not the most utopian project ever devised by human beings, I don’t know what is.
