New York Days, 1958-1964

Charles Simic

Even the old Romans knew. To have a poet for a son is bad news. I took precautions. I left home when I was eighteen. For the next couple of years, I lived in a basement apartment next to a furnace that hissed and groaned as if it were about to explode any moment. I kept the windows open in all kinds of weather, figuring that then I’d be able to crawl out to the sidewalk in a hurry. All winter long I wrote bad poems and painted bad pictures wearing a heavy overcoat and gloves in that underground hole.
    At the Chicago newspaper where I worked, I proofread obituaries and want ads. At night I dreamed of lost dogs and funerals. Every payday I put a little money aside. One day I had enough to quit my job and take a trip to Paris, but I treated my friends to a smorgasbord in a fancy Swedish restaurant instead. It wasn’t what we expected: there was too much smoked fish and pickled herring. After I paid the bill, everybody was still hungry, so we went down the street for pizza.
    My friends wanted to know: When are you going to Paris? “I’ve changed my mind,” I announced, ordering another round of beers. “I’m moving to New York, since I no longer have the money for Paris.” The women were disappointed, but the fellows applauded. It didn’t make sense, me going back to Europe after being in the States for only four years. Plus, to whom in Paris would I show my poems written in English?
    “Your poems are just crazy images strung arbitrarily together,” my pals complained, and I’d argue back: “Haven’t you heard about surrealism and free association?” Bob Burleigh, my best friend, had a degree in English from the University of Chicago and possessed all the critical tools to do a close analysis of any poem. His verdict was: “Your poems don’t mean anything.”
    My official reply to him was: “As long as they sound good, I’ll keep them.” Still, in private, I worried. I knew my poems were about something, but what was it? I couldn’t define that “something” no matter how hard I tried. Bob and I would often quarrel about literature till the sun came up. To show him I was capable of writing differently, I wrote a thirty–page poem about the Spanish Inquisition. In the manner of Pound in his Cantos, I generously quoted original descriptions of tortures and public burnings. It wasn’t surrealism, everybody agreed, but you still couldn’t make heads or tails of what was going on. In one section, I engaged Tomás de Torquemada in a philosophical discussion, just as Dostoyevsky’s Ivan did with the Grand Inquisitor. I read the poem to a woman called Linda in a greasy spoon on Clark Street. When we ran to catch a bus, I left the poem behind. The next morning, the short–order cook and I tried to find it buried under the garbage out back. But it was a hot summer day, and the trash in the alley smelled bad and was thickly covered with flies. So we didn’t look too closely.
    Later, I stood at the corner where we caught the bus the night before. I smoked a lot of cigarettes. I scratched my head. Several buses stopped, but I didn’t get on any of them. The drivers would wait for me to make up my mind, then give me a dirty look and drive off with a burst of speed and a parting cough of black smoke.

I LEFT CHICAGO in August 1958 and went to New York, wearing a tan summer suit and a blue Hawaiian shirt. The weather was hot and humid. The movie marquees on 42nd Street were lit up twenty–four hours a day. Sailors were everywhere, and a few mounted policemen. I bought a long cigar and lit it nonchalantly for the benefit of a couple of young girls who stood at the curb afraid to cross the busy avenue.
    A wino staggered up to me in Bryant Park and said: “I bark back at the dogs.” A male hooker pulled a small statue of Jesus out of his tight pants and showed it to me. In Chinatown I saw a white hen pick a card with my fortune while dancing on a hot grill. In Central Park the early morning grass was matted where unknown lovers lay. In my hotel room I kept the mirror busy by making stranger and stranger faces at myself.
    “Sweetheart,” a husky woman’s voice said to me when I answered the phone at four in the morning. I hung up immediately.
    It was incredibly hot, so I slept naked. My only window was open, but there was a brick wall a few feet outside of it and no draft. I suspected there were rats on that wall, but I had no choice.
    Late mornings, I sat in a little luncheonette on 8th Street reading the sports pages or writing poems:

In New York on 14th Street
            Where peddlers hawk their wares
            And cops look the other way,
            There you meet the eternal—
            Con–artists selling watches, silk ties, umbrellas,
            After nightfall
            When the crosstown wind blows cold
            And my landlady throws a skinny chicken
            In the pot to boil. Fumes rise.
            I can draw her ugly face on the kitchen window,
            Then take a quick peek at the street below.

            It was still summer. On advice from my mother, I went to visit an old friend of hers. She served me tea and cucumber sandwiches and asked about my plans for the future. I replied that I had no idea. I could see that she was surprised. To encourage me, she told me about someone who knew at the age of ten that he wanted to be a doctor and was now studying at a prestigious medical school. I agreed to come to a dinner party where I would meet a number of brilliant young men and women my age and profit by their example. Of course, I failed to show up.
    At the Phoenix Book Shop in the Village, I bought a book of French stories. It was on sale and very cheap, but even so I had only enough money left to buy a cup of coffee and a toasted English muffin. I took my time sipping the lukewarm coffee and nibbling my muffin as I read the book. It was a dark and rainy night. I walked the near–empty streets for hours in search of the only two people I knew in the city. Not finding them home, I returned to my room, crawled shivering under the covers, and read in the silence, interrupted only by the occasional wailing of an ambulance:

    Monsieur Lantin had met the girl at a party given one evening by his office superior and love had caught him in its net.
    She was the daughter of a country tax–collector who had died a few years before. She had come to Paris then with her mother, who struck up acquaintance with a few middle–class families in her district in the hope of marrying her off. They were poor and decent, quiet and gentle. The girl seemed the perfect example of a virtuous woman to whom every sensible young man dreams of entrusting his life. Her simple beauty had a modest, angelic charm and the imperceptible smile which always hovered about her lips seemed to be a reflection of her heart.

    After midnight my hotel was as quiet as a tomb. I had to play the radio real low with my ear brushing against it in the dark. “Clap your hands, here comes Charlie,” some woman sang, a hot Dixieland band backing her up, but just then I didn’t think it was very funny.

WHILE THE WEATHER was still good, I sat on benches in Washington Square Park or Central Park, watching people and inventing stories to go along with their faces. If I was wearing my only suit and it rained, I sat in the lobbies of big hotels smoking cigars. I went window–shopping almost every night. An attractive pair of shoes or a shirt would make me pay a return visit even after midnight. The movies consumed an immense amount of my time. I would emerge after seeing the double feature twice, dazed, disoriented, and hungry. I often had a toothache and waited for days for it to go away. I typed with two fingers on an ancient Underwood typewriter, which woke my hotel neighbors. They’d knock on my walls until I stopped. On a Monday morning while everyone else was rushing off to work, I took a long subway ride to Far Rockaway. Whenever the subway came out of the ground, I would get a glimpse of people working in offices and factories. I could tell they were hot and perspiring. On the beach there were only a few bathers, seemingly miles apart. When I stretched out on the sand and looked up, the sky was empty and blue.
    When I was on the way home late one night, a drunk came Out of a dark doorway with a knife in hand. He swayed and couldn’t say what he wanted. I ran. Even though I knew there was no chance he would catch up with me, I didn’t stop for many blocks. When I finally did, I no longer knew where I was. Around that time, I wrote:

            Purse snatchers
            Keep away from poor old women
            They yell the loudest.
            Stick to young girls,
            The dreamy newlyweds
            Buying heart–shaped pillows for their beds.
            Bump into a drunk instead,
            Offer a pencil to sell.
            When he pulls out a roll of bills,
            Snatch all he’s got and split.
            Duck that nightstick
            Or your ears will ring
            Even in your coffin.

I AM NOT EXAGGERATING when I say that I couldn’t take a piss without a book in my hand. I read to fall asleep and to wake up. I read at my various jobs, hiding the book among the papers on my desk or in the half–open drawer. I readeverything from Plato to Mickey Spillane. Even in my open coffin, some day, I should be holding a book. The Tibetan Book of the Dead would be most appropriate, but I’d prefer a sex manual or the poems of Emily Dickinson.
    The book that made all the difference to my idea of poetry was an anthology of contemporary Latin–American verse that I bought on 8th Street. Published by New Directions in 1942 and long out of print even then, it introduced me to Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Jorge Carrera Andrade, Drumond de Andrade, Nicholas Guillen, Vicente Huidobro, Jorge de Lima, César Vallejo, Octavio Paz, and so many others. After that anthology, the poetry I read in literary magazines struck me as pretty timid. Nowhere in The Sewanee Review or The Hudson Review could I find poems like “Biography for the use of the birds” or “Liturgy of my Legs” or this one, by the Haitian poet Emile Roumer, “The Peasant Declares His Love”:

            High–yellow of my heart, with breasts like tangerines,
            you taste better to me than eggplant stuffed with crab,
            you are the tripe in my pepper–pot,
            the dumpling in my peas, my tea of aromatic herbs.
            You’re the corned beef whose customhouse is my heart,
            my mush with syrup that trickles down the throat.
            You’re a steaming dish, mushroom cooked with rice,
            crisp potato fried, and little fish fried brown...
            My hankering for love follows you wherever you go.
            Your bum is a gorgeous basket brimming with fruits
            and meat.
    The folk surrealism, the mysticism, the eroticism, and the wild flights of romance and rhetoric in these poets were much more appealing to me than what I found among the French and German modernists that I already knew. Of course, I started imitating the South Americans immediately:

            I’m the last offspring of the old raven
            Who fed himself on the flesh of the hanged...
            A dark nest full of old misfortunes,
            The wind raging above the burning tree–tops,
            A cold north wind looking for its bugle.

I WAS READING Jakob Boehme in the New York Public Library on 42nd Street on a hot, muggy morning when a woman arrived in what must’ve been last night’s party dress. She was not much older than I, but the hour and the lack of sleep gave her a world–weary air. She consulted the catalog, filled out a slip, received her book, and sat down at a table across from mine. I craned my neck, I squinted in my nearsighted way, and I even brushed past her a couple of times, but I could not figure out what she was reading. The book had no pictures, and it wasn’t poetry, but she was so absorbed that her hair fell into her eyes. Perhaps she was sleeping.
    Then, all of a sudden, when I was absolutely sure she was snoozing away, she turned a page with a long, thin finger. Her fingers were too thin, in my opinion. Was the poor dear eating properly? Was she dying of consumption? Her breasts in her low–cut black dress, on the other hand, looked pretty healthy. I saw no problem there.
    Did she notice me spying on her? Absolutely not, unless she was a consummate actress, a budding Gene Tierney.
    Of all the people I watched surreptitiously over the years, how many noticed me and still remember me the way I remember them? I just have to close my eyes, and there she is, still reading her mysterious book. I don’t see myself and have no idea what I look like or what clothes I’m wearing. The same goes for everyone else in the large reading room. They have no faces; they do not exist. She’s reading slowly and turning the pages carefully. The air is heavy and muggy and the ceiling fan doesn’t help. It could be a Monday or a Thursday, July or August. I’m not even certain if it was 1958 or 1959.

I WENT TO HEAR Allen Tate read his poems at New York University. There were no more than twenty of us all together: a few friends of the poet, a couple of English professors, a scattering of graduate students, and one or two oddballs like me seated way in the back. Tate was thin and dapper, polite, and read in what I suppose could be described as a cultivated Southern voice. I had already read some of his essays and liked them very much, but the poetry, because of its seriousness and literary sophistication, was tedious. You would have to be nuts to want to write like that, I thought, remembering Jorge de Lima’s poem in which he describes God tattooing the virgin: “Come, let us read the virgin, let us learn the future . . . / O men of little sight.” Not a spot on her skin without tattoos: “that is why the virgin is so beautiful,” the Brazilian poet says.

ON A HOT NIGHT in a noisy, crowded, smoke–filled jazz club, whiskey and beer were flowing, everyone was reeling with drink. A fat woman laughed so hard, she fell off her chair. It was hard to hear the music. Someone took a muted trumpet solo I tried to follow with my left ear, while with my right I had to listen to two women talk about a fellow called Mike, who was a scream in his bathing suit.
    It was better to go to clubs on weeknights, when the crowd was smaller and there were no tourists. Best of all was walking in after midnight, in time to catch the final set of the night. One night when I arrived, the bass and drums were already playing, but where was Sonny Rollins, whom I came to hear? Finally we heard a muffled saxophone: Sonny was in the men’s room, blowing his head off. Everybody quieted down, and soon enough he came through the door, bobbing his shaved head, dark shades propped on a nose fit for an emperor. He was playing “Get Happy,” twisting it inside out, reconstituting it completely, discovering its concealed rhythmic and melodic beauties, and we were right there with him, panting with happiness.
    It was great. The lesson I learned was: cultivate controlled anarchy. I found Rollins, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk far better models of what an artist could be than most poets. The same was true of the painters. Going to jazz clubs and galleries made me realize that there was a lot more poetry in America than one could find in the quarterlies.

AT ONE OF THE READINGS at NYU given by a now forgotten academic poet of the 195 os, just as the professional lovers of poetry in the audience were already closing their eyes blissfully in anticipation of the poet’s familiar, soulstirring clichés, there was the sound of paper being torn. We all turned around to look. A shabby old man was ripping newspapers into a brown shopping bag. He saw people glare at him and stopped. The moment we turned back to the poet who went on reading, oblivious of everything, in a slow monotone, the man resumed ripping, but now more cautiously, with long pauses between rips.
    And so it went: the audience would turn around with angry faces, he’d stop for a while and then continue while the poet read on and on.

MY FIRST JOB in the city was selling dress shirts in Stern’s Department Store on 42nd Street. I dressed well and learnedhow to flash a friendly smile. Even more importantly, I learned how to let myself be humiliated by the customers without putting up the slightest resistance.
    My next job was in the Doubleday Bookstore on 5th Avenue. I would read on the sly while the manager was busy elsewhere. Eventually I could guess what most of the customers wanted even before they opened their mouths. There were the bestseller types and the self–help book types, the old ladies in love with mysteries, and the sensitive young women who were sure to ask for Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet.
    But I didn’t like standing around all day, so I got a job typing address labels at New York University Press. After a while they hired another fellow to give me help. We sat in the back room playing chess for hours on end. Occasionally, one of the editors would come and ask us to pick up his dry cleaning, pay an electric bill, buy a sandwich or a watermelon.
    Sal and I took our time. We sat in the park and watched the girl students go by. Sal was a few years older than I, and a veteran of the Air Force. When he was just a teenager, his parents died suddenly and he inherited the family bakery in Brooklyn. He got married and in two years had ruined the business.
    How? I wanted to know. “I took my wife to the Latin Quarter and Copacabana every night,” he told me with obvious satisfaction. He joined the Air Force to flee his creditors. Now he was a veteran and a homespun philosopher.
    Sal agreed with H. L. Mencken that you are as likely to find an honest politician as you are an honest burglar. Only the church, in his view, was worse: “The priests are all perverts,” he confided to me, “and the Pope is the biggest pervert of all.”
    “What about Billy Graham?” I asked, trying not to drop my watermelon.
    “That’s all he thinks about,” Sal assured me with a wink.
    The military was no better. All the officers he had met were itching to commit mass murder. Even Ike, in his opinion, had the mug of a killer.
    Only women were good. “If you want to have a happy life,” he told me every day, “learn to get along with the ladies.”

AFTER SEVERAL FLEABAG HOTELS, I finally found a home at Hotel Albert on ioth Street and University Place. The room was small, and of course the window faced a brick wall, but the location was perfect, and the rent was not too high. From Friday noon to Sunday morning, I had plenty of money. The rest of the week, I scraped by on candy bars for lunch and hamburgers or cheap Chinese food for dinner. Later I would buy a glass of beer for fifteen cents and spend the rest of the night perfecting the art of making it last forever.
    My first poems were published in the Winter 1959 issue of The Chicago Review, but other publications came slowly after that: the mail brought me rejection slips every day. One, I remember, had a personal note from the editor that said: “Dear Mr. Simic, you’re obviously an intelligent young man, so why do you waste your time writing so much about pigs and cockroaches?”
    To spit on guys like you, I wanted to write back.

AFTER WORK ON FRIDAYS, my friend Jim Brown and I would tour the bars. We’d start with a few beers at the Cedar Tavern, near our rooms, then walk over to the San Remo on MacDougal Street, where Brown would have a martini and I would drink red wine. Afterwards, we would most likely go to the White Horse, where Brown had a tab, to drink whiskey. With some of the regulars, Brown would discuss everything from socialism to old movies; I didn’t open my mouth much, for the moment I did and people heard my accent, I would have to explain where I came from, and how, and why. I thought of printing a card, the kind deaf panhandlers pass around, with my life story on it and an abbreviated account of the geography and history of the Balkans.
    Around midnight Brown and I would walk back to the Cedar, which was packed by then, and have a nightcap. Over hamburgers, Brown would harangue me for not having read François Rabelais or Sir Thomas Browne yet. Later, lying in my bed, with drink and talk floating in my head and the sound of creaking beds, smokers’ coughs, and love cries coming from the other rooms, I would not be able to sleep. I would go over the interesting and stupid things I had heard that night.
    For instance, there were still true believers around in those days who idealized life in the Soviet Union and disparaged the United States. What upset me the most was when some nice–looking, young woman would nod in agreement. I reproached myself for not telling her how people over there were turned into angels at the point of a gun. My shyness and cowardice annoyed me no end. I couldn’t fall asleep for hours and then, just as I was finally drifting off, one of my rotten teeth would begin a little chat with me.

WITH THE ARRIVAL of the Beats, both as a literary movement and as a commercial venture, the scene changed. Coffee shops sprang up everywhere in the Village. In addition to folk singing and comedy acts, they offered poetry readings. Where the Beat Meet the Elite, said a banner over a tourist trap. “Oh God, come down and fuck me!” some young woman prayed in her poem, to the horror of out–of–town customers.
    But New York was also a great place for poetry: within the same week, one could also hear John Berryman and May Swenson, Allen Ginsberg and Denise Levertov, Frank O’Hara and LeRoi Jones. I went to readings for two reasons: to hear the poets and to meet people. I could always find, sitting grumpily in the corner, someone with whom it was worth striking up a conversation. The readings themselves left me with mixed feelings. One minute I would be dying of envy, and the next with boredom and contempt. It took me a few years to sort it all out. In the meantime, I sought other views. I’d spot someone thumbing an issue of The Black Mountain Review in The Eighth Street Bookstore and end up talking to them. Often that would lead to a cup of coffee or a beer. No matter how hip you think you are, someone always knows more. The literary scene had a greater number of true originals then than it has today—autodidacts, booze hounds, and near–derelicts who were walking encyclopedias—for example Tony, an unemployed bricklayer, who went around saying things like: Even the mutes are unhappy since they’ve learned to read lips, and It took me sixty years to bend down to a flower.
    Then, there was the tall, skinny fellow with graying hair I talked to after hearing Richard Wilbur read at NYU. He told me that the reason contemporary poets were so bad is because they were lazy. I asked what he meant, and he explained: “They write a couple of hours per week, and the rest of the time they have a ball living in the lap of luxury with rich floozies hanging on their arms and paying their bills. You’ve got to write sixteen hours per day to be a great poet.” I asked him what he did, and he muttered that he worked in the post office.
    During one of my rare trips back to Chicago to visit my mother, Bob Burleigh told me about a terrific young poet I ought to meet. His name was Bill Knott. He worked nights in a hospital emptying bedpans and was usually at home during the day. He lived in a rooming house not too far away, so we went to see him.
    An old woman answered the bell and said Bill was upstairs in his room. But when we knocked there was no answer. Bob shouted, “It’s me, Bob.” Just as we were about to leave, I heard a sound of hundreds of bottles clinking together, and the door opened slowly. Soon we saw what it was: we had to wade through an ankle–deep layer of empty Pepsi bottles to advance into the room. Bill was a large man in a dirty, white T–shirt; one lens of his glasses was wrapped with masking tape, presumably broken. The furnishings were a bed with a badly stained mattress, a large poster of Monica Vitti, a refrigerator with an old TV set on it, and a couple of chairs and a table with piles of books on them. Bob sat on the bed, and I was given a chair after Bill swept some books onto the floor. Bill, who hadn’t sat down, asked us: “How about a Pepsi?” “Sure,” we replied. “What the heck!” The fridge, it turned out, contained nothing but rows and rows of Pepsi bottles.
    We sipped our sodas and talked poetry. Bill had read everything: we spoke of René Char, and Bill quoted Char from memory. Regarding contemporary American poetry, we were in complete agreement: except for Robert Bly, James Wright, Frank O’Hara, and a few others, the poets we read in the magazines were the most unimaginative, dull, pretentious, know–nothing bunch you were ever likely to encounter. As far as these poets were concerned, Arthur Rimbaud, Hart Crane, and Guillaume Apollinaire might never have existed. They knew nothing of modern art, cinema, jazz. We had total contempt for them. We bought magazines like Poetry in those days in order to nourish our rage: Bob and I regularly analyzed its poems so we could grasp the full range of their imbecility. I did not see any of Bill Knott’s poems that day, but later he became one of my favorite poets.

BACK IN NEW YORK, I had a long talk with Robert Lowell about nineteenth–century French poetry. We were at a party following a reading at the Y. It was late, and most people had gone home. Lowell was seated in an armchair, two young women were sitting on the floor, one on each side of him, and I was on the floor facing him. Although he spoke interestingly about Charles Baudelaire, Tristan Corbiere, and Jules Laforgue, what had me totally captivated were not his words, but his hands. Early in our conversation, he massaged the women’s necks; after a while he slid his hands down inside their dresses and worked their breasts. They didn’t seem to mind, hanging on his every word. Why wasn’t I a great poet? Instead of joining in, I started disagreeing with him, told him he was full of shit. True, I had flunked Out of school in Paris, but when it came to the French vernacular, my ear could not be faulted. Lowell did not seem to notice my increasing nastiness, but his two groupies certainly did. Finally, I said good night and split. I walked from the upper West Side down to my room in the Village, fuming and muttering like an old drunk.

ANOTHER TIME I was drinking red wine, chain–smoking, and writing, long past midnight. Suddenly, the poem took off, the words just flowing, in my head a merry–go–round of the most brilliant similes and metaphors. This is it! I was convinced there had never been such a moment of inspiration in the whole history of literature. I reread what I’d written and had to quit my desk and walk around the room, I got so excited. No sooner was I finished with one poem than I started another even more incredible one. Toward daybreak, paying no attention to my neighbor’s furious banging on the wall, I typed them out with my two fingers and finally passed out exhausted on the bed. In the morning, I dragged myself to work, dead tired but happy.
    When evening came, I sat down to savor what I wrote the night before, a glass of wine in my hand. The poems were terrible! Incoherent babble, surrealist drivel! How could I have written such crap? I was stunned, depressed, and totally confused.
    Still, it wasn’t the first time this had happened: nights of creative bliss followed by days of gagging. With great clarity I could see every phony move I had made, every borrowing, every awkwardness. Then I found myself in a different kind of rush: I had only seconds left to rip up, burn, and flush down the toilet all these poems before the doctors and nurses rushed in and put me in a straightjacket. Of course, the next night, I was at it again, writing furiously and shaking my head in disbelief at the gorgeous images and metaphors flooding out of my pen.
    I have thrown out hundreds of poems in my life, four chapters of a novel, the first act of a play, fifty or so pages of a book on Joseph Cornell. Writing poetry is a supreme pleasure, and so is wiping the slate clean.

TODAY PEOPLE SOMETIMES ASK me when I decided to become a poet. I never did. The truth is, I had no plans: I was content merely to drift along. My immigrant experience protected me from any quick embrace of a literary or political outlook. Being a suspicious outsider was an asset, I realized at some point. Modernism, which is already a collage of various cultures and traditions, suited me well. The impulse of every young artist and writer to stake everything on a single view and develop a recognizable style was, of course, attractive, but at the same time I knew myself to be pulled in different directions. I loved Whitman, and I loved the Surrealists. The more widely I read, the less I wanted to restrict myself to a single aesthetic and literary position. I was already many things, so why shouldn’t I be the same way in poetry?
    One evening I would be in some Village coffee shop arguing about Charles Olson and Projective Verse, and the next evening I would be eating squid in a Greek restaurant, arguing in Slovenian with my father or uncle Boris about Enrico Caruso and Beniamino Gigli, Mario Del Monaco, and Jussi Bjorling.
    On one such evening, a nice, old, silver–haired lady, pointing to three other silver–haired ladies smiling at us from the next table, asked Boris and me: “Would you, please, tell us what language you are speaking?”
    Boris, who never missed an opportunity to play a joke, made a long face, sighed once or twice, and—with moist eyes and a sob in his voice—informed her that, alas, we were the last two remaining members of a white African tribe speaking a now nearly extinct language.
    That surprised the hell out of her! She didn’t realize, she told us, now visibly confused, that there were native white African tribes.
    “The best kept secret in the world,” Boris whispered to her and nodded solemnly while she rushed back to tell her friends.
    It was part of being an immigrant and living in many worlds at the same time, some of which were imaginary. After what we had been through, the wildest lies seemed plausible. The poems that I was going to write had to take that into account.

Charles Simic is the author of two recent books: A Wedding in Hell (poems, Harcourt Brace) and The Unemployed Fortune-Teller (prose, the University of Michigan Press). His new book of poems, Walking the Black Cat, will be published this autumn.

“New York Days, 1958-1964” appears in our Summer 1996 issue.