There is an upbeat metaphysics at work in Simic's crooked world, things don't quite line up right, and he doesn't even have to try to 'find' oddball juxtapositions -- they're just there, and he just needs to wait and observe, as he did with a "Cockroach" early in his career, where he provokes the reader by saying he doesn't see cockroaches the same 'icky' way he presumes the reader does. It's a playful tactic that makes the reading a kind of agent provocateur's test.
In one interview, he tells J.M. Spalding of Cortland Review, "I'm a hard-nosed realist. Surrealism means nothing in a country like ours where supposedly millions of Americans took joyrides in UFOs." It would still be surrealism in most other places, but, uh, in America, the road of excess doesn't necessarily lead to the palace of wisdom -- at all. He continues, "Our cities are full of homeless and mad people going around talking to themselves."
In "Metaphysics Anonymous," homeless, downtrodden truth-alkies seek Salvation:
A storefront mission in a slum
Where we come together at night
To confess our fatal addiction
For knowledge beyond appearances.
......
...we line up with bowed heads
For coffee and cookies to be served.
For Simic, there are only these places we go, lost, to stand up and attest to our powerlessness before our addiction, and tell our story, often poignant, of how the search for Truth has torn apart our lives and left us ruined. People holding up their 3-month or 6-month badges of sobriety smiling, full of genuine support, knowing, though, it's just a matter of time before they fall off the wagon again -- into the gutter, where all truths run in the end.
Simic decided to duck out of re-upping for another year as America's Poet Laureate in 2008. He noted humorously: "It was just too much. I had at least 50 or 60 interviews and countless number of other things I had to do. I would receive 30 emails every day relating to poetry. It's enough to make you hate poets and poetry. Enough! You know? I want to do other things."
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