The Partial Explanation

While the speaker of a poem is not the poet, per se, it’s hard to deny the influence of Charles Simic’s personal history and life story on his poetry. As a prolific American poet, Simic thus produced a large body of work characterized by a uniquely distinctive voice. Simic’s poems, including “The Partial Explanation,” are an alchemy of his experience and environments. As a child, he survived the violence of World War II, repeatedly evacuating his home with his family to avoid the bombings that flattened Europe. Simic jokes, “My travel agents were Hitler and Stalin.” The dark humor is a signature of Simic’s work. Even in what could be considered the bleakness of “The Partial Explanation,” there is a lightness of spirit to the lines “[a] glass of ice-water / keeps me company” (Lines 10-11).

Simic was a teenager when he immigrated to the United States. His family, reunited after his father left Belgrade to work in Italy, spent a year in New York before settling in Chicago. His father took him to jazz clubs, where he developed a love for both form and improvisation. Simic was off to a fast start, publishing his first poems when he was 21 and an undergraduate of the University of Chicago. He went to New York, where he kept company with poets Allen Ginsberg, John Berryman, and Frank O’Hara before he was drafted into military service. When he left the service, he went back to New York, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in Russian from New York University. Since 1967, he has published over 60 books of poems, essays, and translated works.

When Simic was chosen to be U.S. Poet Laureate in 2007, he said, "I am especially touched and honored to be selected because I am an immigrant boy who didn't speak English until I was fifteen." Simic writes his poems in English, but has translated the work of others from French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian. His poems contain both his geographic and linguistic origins, as well as his adopted home. This combination can be more discordant than perfectly harmonious. Simic grew up in a major city during wartime, and was witness to the atrocities and scarcities accompanying war. Though life was arguably better for him in both New York and Chicago, he reminded an outsider who had to learn the language and ways of a different country. The simplicity and accessibility of the language in “The Partial Explanation” demonstrates concision—a quality admired in poetry for its ability to distill and concentrate feeling, which can garner a large reading audience. Concision and deeply intentional word choice are also useful tools when learning to communicate in another language, when efficiency is essential to being understood.

The speaker in “The Partial Explanation” is uniquely Simic’s, inhabiting a landscape perpetually on the verge of darkness—neither completely of this world nor of any other, desirous of human interaction but ultimately bearing their alienation with a dollop of gallows’ humor.