Charles Simic, 1978
POETRY MISCELLANY: In the Introduction to Another Republic you make the distinction between mythological and historical writing, and in doing so you describe a form of "phenomenological interrogation" in which there is an "elaborate narrative which tells the story of its own formation." In your essay "Composition" in a recent issue of NLH you talk about how in moving from the "origin" of the poem to the language of the poem, one moves from a "simultaneous" and timeless world to a finite world of linear time. The poem, at least the mythical poem, becomes a "myth of origins" or a "place where origins are allowed to think." Could you elaborate on your notion of the mythic, of the movement from the timelessness of a mythic impulse into the language of the poem?
CHARLES SIMIC: I used to think the way to introduce mythic consciousness into poetry would be to study texts from various mythic traditions, both Western and non-Western. By cataloging the archetypal structures one would, I thought, understand how to cast one's own poems. The problem with that approach is that one makes a false separation between form and content. If you look at a Navaho myth you can intellectually deduce its form, but the content, and the deeper psychological impetus for that content, would be missing. Unless you were a Navaho living when the myth was set, you could only provide a generalized content. I began to realize that these structures would be imposed from the outside, and so there would