Responsible viewing: Charles Simic's Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell

Papers on Language and Literature, Fall 1998 by Morris, Daniel

In Dime-Store Alchemy, Simic defines poetry as "three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley" (21). In his iconoclastic definition, the shoes mark the threshold between familiar and strange places. Like Cornell's art, the shoes mediate between the waking world-the city street when perceived in the daytime-and a dreamscape-the labyrinthine city within the city that might resemble urban imagery as depicted by Balthus and De Chirico. Simic's metaphor for poetry implies the image of the poet as a voyager who explores a dangerous environment, risks bodily deformation, and, like the owners of the "three mismatched shoes," courts disappearance. Reading Simic's metaphor for poetry, I pause to wonder: Who has discarded the three shoes near an alley? Is one person walking around the city with only one shoe? Is another person bare-footed altogether? Or did three people deposit the shoes? Is each of them hobbling around the city, one shoe on, one shoe off, in search of their lost shoes? Why three shoes and not four? Or, if there were three pairs of shoes, as the statement that they were "mismatched" implies, where are the other three shoes?

As with Simic's search in "Preface" for Cornell as his Double, and as with his description of Cornell's art as the detection of how "still-unknown objects that belong together" may form a company, the "mismatched" shoes in the metaphor for poetry await their companion, their pairing, their lost twin. And yet Simic states that the "mismatched" shoes are the poetic object, not a part of a poetic artifact that remains to be completed once the other shoe is located. The shoes in Simic's metaphor for poetry call to mind narrative reflections such as my own, but my projection of a story about missing persons has trespassed upon their beguiling quality. Defying narrative speculations, the companionship the "mismatched shoes" require is from the reader who resists interpreting the "mismatched" pair as possessing a narrative dimension.

The image of three mismatched shoes simultaneously suggests presence and absence, traces of human meaning and randomness. The image is the "thing itself" and a mysterious symbol at the gateway to a realm inhabited by dreams and darkness, order and disorder, symmetry and asymmetry. The image is like the Cornellian assemblages that Simic describes as "beautiful but not sayable" (54). As I have illustrated through my own narrative projection, and as we have seen throughout Dime-Store Alchemy, it is difficult for spectators to resist a verbal translation of the images. In "The Gaze We Knew as a Child," Simic addresses the paradoxical aspects of his verbal response to Cornell's "not sayable" art:

One [way of seeing] is to look and admire the elegance and other visual properties of the composition as a craft, and the other is to make up stories about what one sees. Neither one by itself is sufficient. It's that mingling of the two that makes up the third image. (60)

Working in the dialogic form of cross-genre fertilization known as ekphrasis, in which an iconic poem is written with a visual representation in mind as subject matter, Simic projects language onto what he sees in the boxes. He creates a "third image," a verbal and visual construct that illustrates Bakhtin's theory of reading as an act of "creative understanding" or "coauthoring" texts, an act that involves "live-entering" (identification) and the "moment of separation" (differentiation) . Simic admits his narratives are based as much on his inner visions-his desires, memories, and projections-as on his view of the material reality of Cornell's boxes. In Bakhtin's terms, Simic's admission about the sources of his narrative speculations affirm his identity in a "moment of separation" from Cornell.