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| The B Poems by Simon Perchik |
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Interview with Simon Perchik by Susan Tepper on December 10, 2016
with Susan Tepper
Simon
Perchik was born in Paterson, New Jersey in 1923. His father was a
silk weaver until the mills dried up during the Great Depression,
when he turned to the grocery business, installing his family of
eight in living quarters behind the small stores where Perchik lived
until World War II. Following a stint in the Army Air Corps, where he
served as a pilot, Perchik enrolled in New York University under the
G.I. Bill. He began writing poetry in fits and starts. After
receiving a B.A. in English, he went straight to NYU Law School. From
1950 until 1980 Perchik practiced law while continuing to write
poetry. He served as Suffolk County Long Island’s first
Environmental Prosecutor from 1975 until 1980.
I
Counted Only April,
his first book, was published in 1964. Twenty three poetry books
have been published to date. Perchik has placed thousands of poems in
magazines and journals ranging from The
New Yorker, Poetry, Partisan Review
and The
Nation,
to the tiniest of online magazines.
The
B Poems,
his brand new collection, was published by Poets Wear Prada in
November 2016. Perchik divides his time between his home in East
Hampton, NY and his daughter’s home in Manhattan.
Library
Journal wrote: “…Perchik is the most widely published unknown
poet in America…”
Susan
Tepper:
You have a daily writing routine. How do you start the process
moving?
Simon
Perchik:
Every morning I take a fifteen minute walk to catch the bus to East
Hampton Village. I go to the Y where I do a little exercise and have
some coffee. I’ll start to work on my poetry there. Then I move
down the street to The Golden Pear café where I take a table all the
way in the rear. Nobody wants to sit back there because you can’t
see and be seen! (laughter)
ST:
That’s funny and so typical of the tony Hamptons, the see and be
seen.
SP:
Yeah! So I sit there with my headphones on listening to classical
music. Mahler and Beethoven for instance. I’ll be working with a
group of pictures from a well known photographer’s book such as The
Family of Man.
ST:
So you write from what you see in the photo? But your work is so
abstract.
SP:
Susan, I wish it were that simple. I begin by describing in prose
what I see in the photo (this is a so and so) for maybe six or seven
pages. Then keeping the photo in sight, I turn to a book of mythology
or science. I’ll think to myself now what does this have to do with
what’s in the photograph.
ST:
You’re looking for a link?
SP:
I’m like a detective. A poetry detective. Though the photo and the
book’s text are seemingly contradictory, I continue thinking about
it, then suddenly one has everything in the world to do with the
other. I have my hook. Similar to what a metaphor does.
ST:
That’s when the poem actually begins?
SP:
Correct. The photo is simply a catalyst to get the pen flowing.
Trying to connect the image with the idea. As the poem progresses,
new things come in and often the originating image and idea disappear
entirely at the poem’s conclusion.
ST:
Wow, that’s some process. I don’t think I’d have the strength.
(laughter)
SP:
I mark each page as I go along onto the next photograph. The entire
collection can take several years to finish.
ST:
You work in the café on a laptop?
SP:
No, on random sheets of paper. In long hand.
ST:
Seriously?
SP:
Yes. Listen. The poems don’t get written by themselves. The
Family of Man
took me eight years to finish.
ST:
When you first see the photograph, does the poem start to jell in
your mind?
SP:
No. I’ll be thinking where am I going with this, what am I doing.
Writing with nothing in my head but a sense of doom.
ST:
But your poems always come out perfect. At what point in your method
does the abstraction come into the poem?
SP:
That comes at the end. If I’m going to abstract a mountain, first I
have to have the mountain. After I get a sense of what’s going on
in the poem. It’s a poem not an essay. I try to approach the reader
through their subconscious.
ST:
There’s a lot of death in your poems. Are all poets obsessed with
death?
SP:
No matter how a poem starts out it ends in a cemetery (laughter).
Love and death. Loneliness, despair, fear. What else is there to
write about?
ST:
Of all the abstract painters, who would you compare yourself with?
SP:
Rothko. When the abstract artist paints, it is the artist’s
subconscious talking to the viewer’s subconscious. Likewise, when I
abstract a poem, it is my subconscious talking to the reader’s
subconscious. Another painter, Herman Cherry, who was an abstract
artist, is my favorite of the abstractionists and I feel an equal to
Rothko.
ST:
That’s interesting. I’m unfamiliar with Cherry’s work. Do you
own any of his pictures?
SP:
Yes, but not the one I want. The one I wish I owned is a
blue-purplish dark abstraction that’s really death-like.
ST:
It sounds amazing. Actually, I see you as the Jackson Pollock of
poets. And he lived in East Hampton, too, close to you in Springs.
Did you ever meet him?
SP:
No. I met de Kooning a few times.
ST:
What was he like?
SP:
His studio was jammed with paintings. He was not in good health at
that time. My wife, Mickie, was a nurse and she’d been sent there
to give him an injection. I accompanied her. He was very quiet.
ST:
So getting back to your brand new collection of 63 poems titled The
B Poems.
Which photography book helped to inspire this work?
SP:
Bruce Davidson was the photographer and I used all 63 photos from his
book titled Bruce
Davidson:Photofile published
by Thames & Hudson, London, 1990. I might add that I have pretty
much exhausted mythology at this point, mostly using Science News
Magazine to confront the photographs.
ST:
Having read nearly all your twenty three books, I must say I was
totally stunned all over again by the brilliance of The
B Poems.
SP:
Thank you.
