The Uncertain Certainty: Interviews, Essays, and Notes on Poetry by Charles Simic

"Sherod Santos: In your essay “Some Thoughts About the Line,” you say, “In the end, I’m always at the beginning.  Silence—an endless mythical condition.”  Obviously you mean by silence something more than just that condition out of which poems grow.

Charles Simic: I call silence what precedes language: the world and the sense of oneself existing.  I always thought, if you will, that speaking is a bit like whistling in the dark.  The universe, in my humble opinion, doesn’t require my saying anything.  When I’m attentive and silent I seem to be closer to the way things are.  A number of my early poems are attempts to make that predicament into a myth of origins.

Sherod Santos: What is it then that makes you break that silence?

Charles Simic: To speak as the translator of silence rather than its opposer.  I think Thoreau said something like that, seeing language as but a minor ripple on the great pool of wordless silence, which, I agree, is our true environment."