Simic, Charles

born May 9, 1938, Belgrade, Yugos.

Yugoslavian-born U.S. poet.

When he was 15 years old, he and his mother moved to Paris; a year later they joined his father in the U.S. After graduating from New York University, he translated Yugoslavian poetry into English. His first volume of poetry, What the Grass Says (1967) was recognized for its lively, surrealistic imagery; the collection The World Doesn't End (1989) won a Pulitzer Prize. He held a MacArthur Fellowship 1984–89. Since 1973 he has taught at the University of New Hampshire.

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▪ 2008

born May 9, 1938, Belgrade, Yugos.

      Upon being named U.S. poet laureate in 2007, Charles Simic expressed his discomfort with a question asked of him about the place of poetry in American culture. Such a question, he told the New York Times, reminded him “so much of the way the young Communists in the days of Stalin at big party congresses would ask, ‘What is the role of the writer?'”

      Simic grew up in a Belgrade devastated by World War II. The hunger and poverty of the postwar period drove his family to leave Yugoslavia. His father went to work in Italy and then in the United States, while Simic and his mother moved to Paris, when he was 15, and then to the U.S. By the mid-1950s the family was living in the Chicago suburbs, where Simic attended high school. He went on to the University of Chicago and worked at the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper at night, but he received a B.A. from New York University in 1966, after a two-year stint (1961–63) in the U.S. Army. Simic worked at the photography magazine Aperture in the late 1960s, and in 1973 he began teaching at the University of New Hampshire, where, at the time of his being named poet laureate consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, he was an emeritus professor of English.

      Simic learned English when he moved to Paris. A few years later, in 1959, he published his first poems in English. (He later claimed that he started writing poetry to impress girls.) In the late 1950s he toyed with writing a novel, and he eventually published a number of prose works—primarily collections of essays—over the course of his career. In the 1960s, however, he made poetry the primary focus of his writing, and he also began to translate poems by Eastern European writers.

      What the Grass Says (1967) was the first of the nearly 20 collections of poetry Simic had published by 2007. Taken together, the works resisted formal and thematic categorization. Simic's poetry was labeled surrealist as often as it was called accessible. His preoccupation in his verse with mundane, everyday objects and situations was frequently interpreted as a reaction to his family's struggle to survive in Yugoslavia. The World Doesn't End (1989), among his best-known collections, won a Pulitzer Prize; it consisted of prose poems without titles, and its imagery was dark and disorienting. His Selected Poems: 1963–2003 (2005) won a Griffin Poetry Prize.

      In a 2007 television interview, Simic explained that his poetry was dependent on humans' not knowing themselves. He believed that “the best things that happen in poems are discoveries.”

J.E. Luebering

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▪ American poet

born May 9, 1938, Belgrade, Yugos. [now in Serbia]

      Yugoslavian-born American poet who evoked his eastern European heritage and his childhood experiences during World War II to comment on the dearth of spirituality in contemporary life.

      At age 15 Simic moved with his mother to Paris, where he attended French schools and studied English at night school. After a year they immigrated to the United States and were reunited with Simic's father. Simic attended college at night while working as a clerk at a newspaper office in Chicago. He later moved to New York City, and, after graduating from New York University, he translated the works of Yugoslav poets into English. From 1973 he taught English, creative writing, and criticism at the University of New Hampshire. Simic served as poet laureate consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress (Congress, Library of) (2007–08).

      Simic's first volume of poetry, What the Grass Says (1967), was well received; critics noted that his imagery drew on rural and European subjects rather than those of his adopted country. Among Simic's many subsequent poetry collections are Somewhere Among Us a Stone Is Taking Notes (1969), Dismantling the Silence (1971), School for Dark Thoughts (1978), Unending Blues (1986), The Book of Gods and Devils (1990), Hotel Insomnia (1993), A Wedding in Hell (1994), Walking the Black Cat (1995), Jackstraws (1999), and The Voice at 3:00 a.m.: Selected Late & New Poems (2003). In 2005 he published Aunt Lettuce, I Want to Peek Under Your Skirt, a collection of erotic poetry, as well as My Noiseless Entourage, a wide-ranging volume of poems on subjects from God to war and poverty. He received a Pulitzer Prize for poetry for The World Doesn't End (1989).

      Simic also published a number of works in prose. Dime-Store Alchemy (1992) is a collection of miscellaneous prose pieces written as a tribute to the artist Joseph Cornell (Cornell, Joseph). Another collection, The Unemployed Fortune Teller (1994), consists of 18 prose pieces. A Fly in the Soup (2000) is a memoir.

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