Charles Simic’s “My Shoes”
Charles Simic’s “My Shoes” is a festering piece of doggerel, sounding like a postmodern poetry workshop assignment. We will look at the poem using the medium of that oh-so-serious poetry workshop where trivia and nonsense are certain to prevail.
Introduction and Text of “My Shoes”
Charles Simic’s piece “My Shoes” features five unriming stanzas. This nonsensical piece could be the response to a bizarre assignment in a poetry workshop such as the following:
Pick some ordinary object, perhaps one you see daily. Assign to it exclusive characteristics which only the imagination is capable of conjuring. Perform as outlandishly as you can, while staying 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.
It is with these instructions in mind that one might imagine the late poetaster Charles Simic concocted his piece of doggerel titled “My Shoes.” The postmodern mindset prevails in this piece. (For an overview of the central tenets of postmodernism, please see “Poetry and Politics under the Influence of Postmodernism.”)
My Shoes
Shoes, secret face of my inner life:
Two gaping toothless mouths,
Two partly decomposed animal skins
Smelling of mice nests.
My brother and sister who died at birth
Continuing their existence in you,
Guiding my life
Toward their incomprehensible innocence.
What use are books to me
When in you it is possible to read
The Gospel of my life on earth
And still beyond, of things to come?
I want to proclaim the religion
I have devised for your perfect humility
And the strange church I am building
With you as the altar.
Ascetic and maternal, you endure:
Kin to oxen, to Saints, to condemned men,
With your mute patience, forming
The only true likeness of myself.
Commentary on “My Shoes”
Because “My Shoes” by the late poetaster Charles Simic reads like the result of a poetry workshop assignment, I have offered up some likely quips from those workshoppers who are forced to endure the drivel as they study and practice the art of poetry.
First Stanza: Choose Your Blues
Shoes, secret face of my inner life:
Two gaping toothless mouths,
Two partly decomposed animal skins
Smelling of mice nests.
The speaker of the piece, a 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 literary era for their own verse attempts, but the era’s name will have to remain undeclared for a year or two.
Second Stanza: Dead Sibling Shoes
My brother and sister who died at birth
Continuing their existence in you,
Guiding my life
Toward their incomprehensible innocence.
In the second stanza, the speaker reports that his siblings, a brother and a sister, both “died at birth.” But oddly, those siblings are still living in the speakers/workshopper’s shoes. Absurdly, they are even directing the speaker’s life. And even more absurdly, they are leading his life to “their incomprehensible innocence.”
It is at this point that the workshop will break into pandemonium over the workability of this second stanza. 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?
However, others will marvel at the creative genius of having shoes likened to dead siblings: shoes are kind of like brother and sister to each other, so then they could be brother and sister to the wearer. Plus shoes are your feet when you go somewhere, and when you go somewhere, that place is “innocent” until you get there.
What a treat it would be to listen in on the discussion this stanza would engender! This speaker is on a dangerous path, no doubt, but will he pull it off? And we have not even considered what the workshop leader would attribute to the conversation. The workshop leader is likely a poetaster himself, who publishes drivel in fledging, unread poetry mags.
The workshop leader may even be an entrepreneur, having started his own little poetry publishing established to offset his own inability to make into the big po-biz mags. But wait, we are getting too far from our workshop—back to the discussion.
Third Stanza: Question
What use are books to me
When in you it is possible to read
The Gospel of my life on earth
And still beyond, of things to come?
The speaker poses a question in the third stanza: 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. Again, some will offer light-weight questions and suggestions, while others will fawn and slobber over the “amazing” creativity of the piece.
Fourth Stanza: The Shoe Religion
I want to proclaim the religion
I have devised for your perfect humility
And the strange church I am building
With you as the altar.
These postmodern workshop participants steeped in religion bashing will have no problem with the fourth stanza. 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 Stanza: The Shoe God
Ascetic and maternal, you endure:
Kin to oxen, to Saints, to condemned men,
With your mute patience, forming
The only true likeness of myself.
After the noted religious conversion of the fourth stanza, the majority of the participants will hail the fifth stanza 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 labeled “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 but completely asinine final line is that it satisfies the postmodern nihilistic psyche, while at the same time capping the mindlessness that has prevailed throughout the piece: it turns out that the man’s motherly shoes are “[t]he only true likeness of [him]self.” He is not made in the image of God; he is made in the image of his shoes.
The workshoppers have been had but will probably never know it. And they will go on to write equally dismal drivel, find it difficult to get published, and wonder why. The more adventurous of spirit will likely establish their own publishing platforms, from which they can preach to their choir.
