Another luminary has faded from the scene: Louis Simpson. Overlooked in his later career—even I haven’t read him in many years—he nonetheless exerted a quiet influence on American poetry. Much the way Philip Levine gave us all permission to write in bare-knuckled fashion about real work and real workers, so did Simpson give us a green light to write about suburbia and its denizens. He showed us that even those lives that seem most unremarkable and pedestrian, most alien to poetry, have indeed their share of drama and humanity. This was of course fertile territory for the fiction writers, but poets were (and for the most part, still are) somewhat silent on the subject.
There was a time when I could rattle off any number of poems from memory; most have long since escaped me. But Simpson’s “American Poetry” remains. Here it is in its entirety:
A stomach that can digest
Rubber, coal, uranium, moons, poems.
Like the shark it contains a shoe.
It must swim for miles through the desert
Uttering cries that are almost human.
I love how he encapsulates, in just those three opening lines, the energy, optimism, and industry of postWar America. And that progression from “rubber” to “poems,” stepping through a hierarchy that becomes less palpable as it grows more powerful, is altogether gripping. I love how the shark of the second stanza is somehow presupposed by the first—we seem to expect it even before we encounter it. And then, to turn it all on its head, to leap from the tangible and present to the surreal and Kafkaesque, is a master stroke. Ultimately, Simpson connects the amazing leaps of civilization—the discovery and application of uranium (and thus plutonium) and manned excursions into space—with their unthinkable and inhumane underpinnings and ramifications. And in this bizarre landscape, what is poetry but the cry of a creature far out of its element, heard but never quite understood?
If he had written nothing else, this one poem would be enough to secure his place in the annals of American poetry. But of course, he did write much more—and it’s worth checking out.