Charles simic object poems
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Charles Simic
Poet of the dead leaves driven like ghosts,
Driven like pestilence-stricken multitudes,
I read you first
One rainy evening in New York City,
In my atrocious Slavic accent,
Saying the mellifluous verses
From a battered, much-stained volume
I had bought earlier that day
In a second-hand bookstore on Fourth Avenue
Run by an initiate of the occult masters.
The little money I had being almost spent,
I walked the streets my nose in the book.
I sat in a dingy coffee shop
With last summer’s dead flies on the table.
The owner was an ex-sailor
Who had grown a huge hump on his back
While watching the rain, the empty street.
He was glad to have me sit and read.
He’d refill my cup with a liquid dark as river Styx.
Shelley spoke of a mad, blind, dying king;
Of rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know;
Of graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst to illumine our tempestuous day.
I too felt like a glorious phantom
Going to have my dinner
In a Chinese restaurant I knew so well.
It had a three-fingered waiter
Who’d bring my soup and rice each night
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Charles Simic is a Serbian-born, Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet and university lecturer. He has taught at the University of New Hampshire since 1973 and is currently professor emeritus of American literature and creative writing. He was nominated three times for the Pulitzer award, winning it once in 1990 for The World Doesn’t End, but his greatest achievement came in 2007 when he was appointed 15th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.
He was born Dušan Simic on the 9th May 1938 in Belgrade which, at that time, was in Yugoslavia. This was a dangerous time to be in Europe and he found himself evacuated several times from his home when the bombs started falling. The Second World War had a profound effect on his life but he accepted with some stoicism the privations and the constant upheaval. Much later he said of this time that
He also, tellingly, said that his
They all somehow survived and, in 1954 at the age of 16, Simic emigrated to America and the family were reunited in Chicago. This process was not without difficulties o
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Charles Simic
Charles Simic (b. 1938 – d. 2023) grew up in Belgrade in former Yugoslavia, a childhood in which “Hitler and Stalin taught us the basics”. A new life began in 1954 when he and his mother were allowed to join his father in the United States. Simic attended school in Chicago and then began working at the Chicago Sun Times. During this period he started to write and publish poetry and was a passionate self-educator, attending many night-classes. After two years national service in the US army, Simic settled in New York, got married and continued to write, his first collection appearing in 1967. In the intervening period he has published over sixty books, amongst them Charon’s Cosmology, nominated for a National Book Award, The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and Jackstraws which was included on the New York Times’ shortlist of Notable Books of the Year. He taught English and creative writing for more than thirty years at the University of New Hampshire. In 2007, Charles Simic was appointed to b
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