Charles Simic

Poet

• Born: May 9, 1938
• Birthplace: Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now in Serbia and Montenegro)

American poet

Biography

Charles Simic is a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet. Naturalized as an American citizen in 1971, Simic was born in Belgrade, then located in Yugoslavia. With black humor he recalls his childhood during World War II, marked by bombings and waves of advancing and retreating soldiers, as “a three-ring circus.” He describes how, from the summer of 1944 to mid-1945, he “ran around the streets of Belgrade with other half-abandoned kids.” Critics have speculated that the peculiar blend of horror and whimsy in Simic’s work can be traced to those days. Simic admits to still being “haunted by images” of the war.

In 1949 Simic and his mother moved to Chicago to join his father, an engineer who had found employment there with the telephone company for which he had worked in Yugoslavia. His father took him to hear jazz, which Simic credits with making him “both an American and a poet.”

Beginning in 1957, Simic attended the University of Chicago at night and worked during the day as a proofreader at the Chicago Sun Times. He eventually transferred to New York University, from which he received a BA in 1967. From 1966 to 1969 Simic, who initially studied to be an artist, worked as an editorial assistant for Aperture, a photography magazine. He began teaching at California State College, Hayward, in 1970. He left that position in 1973, when he was hired as an associate professor of English at the University of New Hampshire.

While a student at the University of Chicago, Simic had audited a poetry workshop taught by John Logan. Logan’s workshops and seminars were associated with surrealist experimentation, and many of Simic’s early poems appeared in the magazine kayak, an organ for American surrealist verse. The impulse of surrealism, which appealed to poets coming of age during and after the unleashing of tribalism’s dark side in World War II, was to draw on an archetypal voice inside oneself that transcended national borders. The influence of surrealism has been noted by critics in the visionary and dreamlike structure of Simic’s poems.

The concentrated effort of attention on an object in Simic’s early verse more specifically links him to a group of American poets known as the deep imagists, which included Robert Bly and W. S. Merwin. From Simic’s first published collection, What the Grass Says, to his second, Somewhere Among Us a Stone Is Taking Notes, critic Victor Contoski finds the poet receding in the poems, becoming “more absorbed in objects.” Silence becomes a means of communication, as in it the poet hears the “tiny voices of things.” In Simic’s next collection, Dismantling the Silence, Simic offers instruction for deconstructing silence in order to discover its nature. In the three-part White the narrative voice perceptively shifts to that of the object, here, the color white. White has been read by critics as a deliberate dispossession, freeing the poet to re-create himself. Subsequent poetry finds Simic exploring the self, though less as a subject than as a verb—that is, the self in action and in flux.

Critic Peter Schmidt, noting references to Walt Whitman’s poetry throughout White, sees in it Simic confronting his American poetic origins. Simic claims that, because all his serious reading had been in English and American literature when he started writing poetry in high school, he has never been capable of writing a poem in Serbian, his native language. Nevertheless, critics invariably characterize his work as European in its mordant playfulness and primitive, folkloric elements. Simic has been a prolific English-language translator of Serbian poets, including Vasko Popa, Ivan Lalic, and Aleksandar Ristovic. In both 1970 and 1980 Simic received the translation award given by the International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists (PEN).

The Third Balkan War echoes in much of Simic’s work starting in the 1990s. In an essay first published in New Republic, the father of two unflinchingly condemned his fellow Serbs for their aggression. “Lyric poets,” he has said, “assert the individual’s experience against that of the tribe.”

In 1990 Simic won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his collection of prose poems, The World Doesn’t End. He has received prestigious fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (1972), the National Endowment for the Arts (1975, 1979), the MacArthur Foundation (1984–89), and the American Academy of Poets (1998). In addition to the PEN Translation Prize, his honors include the Griffin Prize, the Edgar Allen Poe Award, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the 2011 Frost Medal. He was elected chancellor of the American Academy of Poets, serving from 2000 to 2002. In 2007 he was appointed as the fifteenth poet laureate of the United States.

Bibliography

“Charles Simic.” Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 2015. Web. 24 Mar. 2016.

Hart, Kevin. “Writing Things: Literary Property in Heidegger and Simic.” New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 21 (1989): 199–214. Print.

Nash, Susan Smith. Rev. of Walking the Black Cat, by Charles Simic. World Literature Today 71.4 (1997): 793–94.

Orlich, Ileana. “The Poet on a Roll: Charles Simic’s ‘The Tomb of Stéphane Mallarmé.’” Centennial Review 36.2 (1992): 413–28.

Simic, Charles. Interview by Molly McQuade. Publishers Weekly 2 Nov. 1990: 56–57.

Simic, Charles. The Uncertain Certainty: Interviews, Essays, and Notes on Poetry. 1985. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. Print.

Stitt, Peter. “Charles Simic: Poetry in a Time of Madness.” Uncertainty and Plenitude: Five Contemporary Poets. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1997. Print.

Vendler, Helen. “A World of Foreboding: Charles Simic.” Soul Says: On Recent Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Print.

“More about Charles Simic.” Library of Congress. Loc.gov, 2008. Web. 24 Mar. 2016.

Weigl, Bruce. Charles Simic: Essays on the Poetry. 1996. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2008. Print.