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    The Monster Loves His Labyrinth
    The Monster Loves His Labyrinth
    The Monster Loves His Labyrinth
    Ebook114 pages50 minutes

    The Monster Loves His Labyrinth

    By Charles Simic

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    About this ebook

    “Nabokovian in his caustic charm and sexy intelligence, Simic perceives the mythic in the mundane and pinpoints the perpetual suffering that infuses human life with both agony and bliss. . . . And he is the master of juxtaposition, lining up the unlikeliest of pairings and contrasts as he explores the nexuses of madness and prophecy, hell and paradise, lust and death.”—Donna Seaman, Booklist

    "As one reads the pithy, wise, occasionally cranky epigrams and vignettes that fill this volume, there is the definite sense that we are getting a rare glimpse into several decades worth of private journals--and, by extension are privy to the tickings of an accomplished and introspective literary mind."—Rain Taxi

    Written over many years, this book is a collection of notebook entries by our current Poet Laureate.

    Excerpts:

    Stupidity is the secret spice historians have difficulty identifying in this soup we keep slurping.

    Ars poetica: trying to make your jailers laugh.

    American identity is really about having many identities simultaneously. We came to America to escape our old identities, which the multiculturalists now wish to restore to us.

    Ambiguity is the world’s condition. Poetry flirts with ambiguity. As a “picture of reality” it is truer than any other. This doesn’t mean that you’re supposed to write poems no one understands.

    The twelve girls in the gospel choir sang as if dogs were biting their asses.

    What an outrage! This very moment gone forever!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopper Canyon Press
    Release dateDec 11, 2012
    ISBN9781619320598
    The Monster Loves His Labyrinth
    Author

    Charles Simic

    Charles Simic was a poet, essayist, and translator who was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. He published more than twenty books of poetry, in addition to a memoir and numerous books of translations for which he received many honors, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Wallace Stevens Award. In 2007, he served as poet laureate of the United States. He was a distinguished visiting writer at New York University and professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire, where he taught since 1973. He died in January 2023 at the age of eighty-four.

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      Book preview

      The Monster Loves His Labyrinth - Charles Simic

      I

      Late night on MacDougal Street. An old fellow comes up to me and says: Sir, I’m writing the book of my life and I need a dime to complete it. I give him a dollar.

      Another night in Washington Square Park, a fat woman with fright wig says to me: I’m Esther, the goddess of Love. If you don’t give me a dollar, I’ll put a curse on you. I give her a nickel.

      One of those postwar memories: a baby carriage pushed by a humpbacked old woman, her son sitting in it, both legs amputated.

      She was haggling with the greengrocer when the carriage got away from her. The street was steep so it rolled downhill with the cripple waving his crutch, his mother screaming for help, and everybody else laughing as if they were in the movies. Buster Keaton or somebody like that about to go over a cliff . . .

      One laughed because one knew it would end well. One was surprised when it didn’t.

      I didn’t tell you how I got lice wearing a German helmet. This used to be a famous story in our family. I remember those winter evenings just after the war with everybody huddled around the stove, talking and worrying late into the night. Sooner or later, it was inevitable, somebody would bring up my German helmet full of lice. They thought it was the funniest thing they ever heard. Old people had tears of laughter in their eyes. A kid dumb enough to walk around with a German helmet full of lice. They were crawling all over it. Any fool could see them!

      I sat there saying nothing, pretending to be equally amused, nodding my head while thinking to myself, what a bunch of idiots! All of them! They had no idea how I got the helmet, and I wasn’t about to tell them.

      It was in those first days just after the liberation of Belgrade, I was up in the old cemetery with a few friends, kind of snooping around. Then, all of a sudden, we saw them! A couple of German soldiers, obviously dead, stretched out on the ground. We drew closer to take a better look. They had no weapons. Their boots were gone, but there was a helmet that had fallen to the side of one of them. I don’t remember what the others got, but I went for the helmet. I tiptoed so as not to wake the dead man. I also kept my eyes averted. I never saw his face, even if sometimes I think I did. Everything else about that moment is still intensely clear to me.

      That’s the story of the helmet full of lice.

      Beneath the swarm of high-flying planes we were eating watermelon. While we ate the bombs fell on Belgrade. We watched the smoke rise in the distance. We were hot in the garden and asked to take our shirts off. The watermelon made a ripe, cracking noise as my mother cut it with a big knife. We also heard what we thought was thunder, but when we looked up, the sky was cloudless and blue.

      My mother heard a man plead for his life once. She remembers the stars, the dark shapes of trees along the road on which they were fleeing the Austrian army in a slow-moving ox-cart. That man sounded terribly frightened out there in the woods, she says. The cart went on. No one said anything. Soon they could hear the river they were supposed to cross.

      In my childhood women mended stockings in the evening. To have a run in one’s stocking was catastrophic. Stockings were expensive, and so was electricity.

      We would all sit around the table with a single lamp, my grandmother reading the papers, we children pretending to do our homework, while watching my mother spreading her red-painted fingernails inside the transparent stocking.

      In the biography of the Russian poet, Marina Tsvetaeva, I read that her first poetry reading in Paris took place on February 6, 1925, and the newspaper announcement says that there were also three musicians on the program, Madame Cunelli, who sang old Italian songs, Professor Mogilewski, who played violin, and V. E. Byutsov, who was on piano. This was astonishing! Madame Cunelli, whose first name was Nina, was a friend of my mother’s. They both studied with the same voice teacher, Madame Kedrov, in Paris, and then somehow Nina Cunelli ended up in Belgrade during the Second World War where she taught me Russian and French children’s songs, which I still know well. I remember that she was a beautiful woman, a little older than my mother, and that she went abroad after the war ended.

      There was a maid in our house who let me put my hand under her skirt. I was five or six years old. I can still remember the dampness of her crotch and my surprise that there was all that hair there. I couldn’t get enough of it. She would crawl under the table where I had my military fort and my toy soldiers. I don’t remember what was said, if anything, just her hand, firmly guiding mine to that spot.

      They sit on the table, the tailors do. At least, they used to. A street of dim shops in Belgrade where we went to have my father’s coat narrowed and shortened so it would fit me. The tailor got off the table and stuck pins in my shoulder. Don’t squirm, my mother said. Outside it was getting dark. Large snowflakes fell.

      Years later in New York, on the same kind of afternoon, a dry-cleaning store window with an ugly, thick-legged woman on the chair in a white dress. She’s having the hem raised by a gray-headed Jewish tailor, who kneels before her as if he is proposing marriage.

      There was an expensive-looking suitcase on the railroad tracks, and they were afraid to come near it. Far from any station, on a stretch of track bordered by orchards where they had been stealing plums that afternoon. The suitcase, she remembers, had colorful labels, of what were probably World-famous hotels and ocean liners. During the war, of course, one heard of bombs, special ones, in the shape of toys, pens, soccer balls, exotic birds—so why not suitcases? For that reason they left it where it was.

      I always wondered what was in it, my wife says. We were talking about the summer of 1944, of which we both had only a few clear recollections.

      The world was going up in flames and I was studying violin. The baby Nero sawing away . . .

      My teacher’s apartment was always cold. A large, almost empty room with a high ceiling already in shadow. I remember the first few screechy notes my violin would make and my teacher’s stern

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