SOURCE: “The Poet on a Roll: Charles Simic's ‘The Tomb of Stéphane Mallarmé,’” in Centennial Review, Vol. XXXVI, No. 2, Spring 1992, pp. 413-28.

In the following essay, Orlich analyzes Simic's connection to the Surrealists, particularly their respective ideas about chance in their writings.

The poet of the future will overcome the depressing idea of an irreparable divorce of action and dream. He will hold the magnificent fruit of the tree whose roots intertwine, and he will be able to persuade all who taste it that there is nothing bitter about it. Carried by the wave of his time, he will assume for the first time without distress the task of reception and transmission of signals pressing towards him from the depths of the ages. He will maintain at all cost the common presence of the two terms of human rapport, by whose destruction the most precious conquest would...