After Auschwitz, writing poetry is barbaric.
– Theodor W. Adorno
T.W. Adorno’s words aptly express the nearly insurmountable problem of contemporary poetry. Can human suffering be expressed in art without becoming cliché? In tackling this obstacle, Charles Simic uses his style to transcend the social constructs of society, exposing the threads of barbarism and violence that exist beneath the surface of our lives. While Simic uses any number of motifs to explore acts of human violence in contemporary society, his most grotesque and searing portraits have to do with the social act of dining.
Fine Dining and Cannibalism
In his poem, “Fork” Simic’s surrealist eye transforms an unsuspecting piece of cutlery into a grotesque portrait of mankind:
“This strange thing just have crept
Right out of hell.
It resembles a bird’s foot
Worn around the cannibal’s neck.”
Simic takes the fork as an object of human society and strips it of its social significance. An instrument normally associated with etiquette and civility, the fork is twisted into a grotesque distortion of normalcy, a transformation represented by the fork’s timely regurgitation from hell.
With dark undertones, Simic describes the fork as a bird’s foot, “worn around the cannibal’s neck.” The image of the cannibal is the ultimate symbol of human cruelty and barbarism. The utensil becomes an extension and artifice of humanity’s violent nature. With this series of surrealist re-imaginings, Simic alienates the fork as a polite social tool. Under his poetic microscope, he reveals the insidious cycle of violence that humanity inflicts upon itself generation after generation.
Underlying Violence in Contemporary Society
In the second stanza, Simic’s transformation extends beyond the fork to the hand that holds it, completing the process begun in the first stanza:
“As you hold it in your hand,
As you stab with it into a piece of meat,
It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:
Its head which like your fist
Is large, bald, beakless, and blind.”
Again, Simic uses imagery peppered with barbarism. The image is no longer civil and polite, but forceful, violent, and at odds with the formality of dining. The fork is a murderer, the meat the victim of the hand’s cruelty. In imperialistic fashion, the hand dominates ignorantly, leading inevitably to violence.
With “large, bald, beakless, and blind” fists, humans too are blind to the violence of consumption, but through his surrealist pose, Simic exposes the reader to the tenuous connection that reaches beyond the confines of the dinner table to a far more important historical narrative involving violence inflicted by humans on other humans.
For Simic, poetry is an act of barbarism, a tearing away of the civilized veneer, so that readers may stare down into the darkness of humanity. By warping the ordinary, Simic destroys old, accepted meanings, and reshapes them. In the case of dining, Simic draws upon its the most primitive form of human consumption, portraying it as an act of unremitting violence, and uses this to criticize the cycle of violence that plagues humanity.
"Fork" by Charles Simic, Selected Poems. Faber and Faber, 2004.
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