… the American poet, has died at 89. UD recently wrote about one of his poems here. Simpson’s sensibility was odd, original; the language of his poetry is less interesting than its moods, the things his eye notices. As in his poem titled There Is.
Nice title, There Is. It strips the propositional, look at this, feel of poetry right down. The poet writes that there is this, and there is that; the poet names things… Yet in this particular poem (I’m reprinting most but not all of the stanzas), the poet can’t get it together to say there is anything. He’s in one of those moods… the city’s getting to him…
Look! From my window there’s a view
of city streets
where only lives as dry as tortoises
can crawl — the Gallapagos of desire.
Look! There is… an island of dry hardbacked tortoises crawling about. The dynamic city’s gone — at least I don’t see it. I see aridity, paralysis.
There is the day of Negroes with red hair
and the day of insane women on the subway;
there is the day of the word Trieste
and the night of the blind man with the electric guitar.
It’s a city, full of charged, fraught moments. All these there ises I need to tell you about: the red hair, the insane women, the day I encountered and was haunted by the word Trieste, and what about that blind musician… These things mean something, add up to something…
But I have no profession. Like a spy
I read the papers — Situations Wanted.
Surely there is a secret
which, if I knew it, would change everything!
A silent flaneur, the poet ranges the city, reads the paper, looking for the situation, the secret, the word (Trieste?), that will crystallize into a there is worthy of our attention – a scenery of meaning.
I have the poor man’s nerve-tic, irony.
I see through the illusions of the age!
The bell tolls, and the hearse advances,
and the mourners follow, for my entertainment.
The problem seems to be self-consciousness, sophistication, cynicism; even the serious essentials – death, for instance – seem mere entertainments.
I tread the burning pavement,
the streets where drunkards stretch
like photographs of civil death
and trumpets strangle in electric shelves.
The mannequins stare at me scornfully.
I know they are pretending
all day to be in earnest.
And can it be that love is an illusion?
The flaneur poet walks the arid tortoise street in search of inspiration, waiting for the real to come at him and cut through irony. But like the red-heads and the insane women and the blind man with the guitar, the surreal, poignant, belligerent city visions he now experiences (drunkards, trumpets) instantly become photographs, shelved silences. The guitar was electric; the trumpets strangle in electric shelves; actual suffering human beings on the streets are mechanical snaps — Part of the problem is the alienating and distancing technology of the modern city, and the way our embroilment in that technology makes us see things as pictures, as already-aesthetically-messed-with elements. Which leaves the poet with nothing to do.
O businessmen like ruins,
bankers who are Bastilles,
widows, sadder than the shores of lakes,
then you were happy, when you still could tremble!
All locked up now, the city dwellers, like the poet, once had an erotic past (“the air is filled with Eros” at night on the streets), an innocent and avid receptivity to the wonder of being. Out of this trembling life might come the poetic inspiration the poet – arid, ironic, disillusioned – lacks.
But all night long my window
sheds tears of light.
I seek the word. The word is not forthcoming.
O syllables of light … O dark cathedral …
God knows the world still expresses itself, still beckons the poet to his window so that he can see it. This light that comes through is the sorrow of the world, a word for which he seeks. But the word is not forthcoming. Trieste is nice – so close to triste. But Trieste was another day, and he’s lost it. All he can do is listen to the syllables as they strike his window, as they murmur from the dark cathedral where irony is forever silenced.