Simic's My Shoes
Post-postmodern Trivial Nonsense
Charles Simic’s “My Shoes” is written in five unrimed quatrains. Taken without its ironic overlay, the piece sounds like a highly accomplished workshop exercise, perhaps an assignment with the following instructions:
Choose an ordinary object, something you possibly see everyday, and give it unique qualities that only the imagination can conjure. Be as outlandish as you wish, but remain focused on the object throughout. Choose either formal or free verse or any combination: for example, it may have rime but no regular meter or vise versa, and it may use traditional punctuation or innovative, postmodern style. Concentrate on creating a unified theme above a unifying metaphor.
First Quatrain: “Shoes, secret face of my inner life”
The workshop participant chooses to write about his shoes. He sits staring at them and then begins a conversation with them, addressing them directly, “Shoes, secret face of my inner life.” The speaker reveals that his inner life is like “[t]wo gaping toothless mouths.” By this revelation, he implies that he recognizes two aspects of his inner self, and they both look dumbstruck.
The speaker continues to describe his shoes, which by chosen metaphor, describe his inner secret life: the shoes are made of “partly decomposed animal skins / Smelling of mice-nests.” The leather shoes comport with the speaker’s inner self as a consumer of animal flesh, it might be inferred; and the unpleasantness asserted by the stench of “mice-nests” alerts the reader to unwholesomeness to come.
The workshoppers will find this a clever and fresh way of expressing the melancholy and dreary existence of residents of the war-torn 21st century; someone will even suggest that they are now post-postmodern and declare a new movement for their own verse attempts, but the movement’s name will have to remain undeclared for a year or two.
Second Quatrain “My brother and sister who died at birth”
In the second quatrain, the speaker reports that his siblings, a brother and a sister, both “died at birth.” But oddly, those siblings are “continuing their existence in you / Guiding my life / Toward their incomprehensible innocence.”
It is at this point that the workshop will break into pandemonium over the workability of the quatrain. How the devil can he liken his shoes to his dead brother and sister? How on earth can those dead siblings be guiding his life through his shoes, no less? And what is so “incomprehensible” about the “innocence” of infants who die at birth?
What a treat it would be to listen in on the discussion this quatrain would engender! This speaker is on a dangerous path, no doubt, but will he pull it off?
Third Quatrain: “What use are books to me”
The speaker poses a question in the third quatrain: why do I need to read books when my shoes will tell me everything I need to know about myself and about everything else that I will experience in the future, even “on earth / And still beyond”?
Defending this kind of question in a poem can be done only by defending the dexterity with which it is expressed. The lines sound fresh, although esoteric; they show a progression from the material to the spiritual, yet they remain stuck in the obtuseness of the content of the question.
The workshoppers will remain obsessed with their initial reactions.
Fourth Quatrain: “I want to proclaim the religion”
The postmodern workshop participants steeped in religion bashing will have no problem with the fourth quatrain. That the speaker will let his shoes be “the altar” in his self-proclaimed/created religion that will be housed in “the strange church [he] is building” will delight and tickle the fancy of all church and religion haters. Better to worship shoes than a phantom that would control your sense pleasures and lusts with commanding guidelines for behavior.
Only one or two of the workshoppers will shake their heads at this one and probably remain quiet after all the praise and gushing has subsided.
Fifth Quatrain: “Ascetic and maternal, you endure”
After the noted religious conversion of the fourth quatrain, the majority of the participants will hail the fifth quatrain an unparalleled success. Yes, the shoes have now taken on a god-like patina, permanent because "[a]scetic and maternal.” It is wise to note that if the shoes had been paternal, feminist cries of sexism would have ballooned to the classroom ceiling, despite the fact that this is a man and a man’s shoes.
But the true value of the playful and completely asinine final line is that it satisfies the postmodern nihilistic psyche, while at the same time capping the irony that has prevailed throughout the piece: it turns out that the man’s motherly shoes are “[t]he only true likeness of [him]self.”
The workshoppers have been had but will probably never know it.
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