Simic’s early life:
Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1938 and lived his childhood in the midst of the European battleground of World War II. As he told JM Spalding of The Cortland Review in 1998, “Germans and the Allies took turns dropping bombs on my head while I played with my collection of lead soldiers on the floor. I would go boom, boom, and then they would go boom, boom. Even after the war was over, I went on playing war. My imitation of a heavy machine gun was famous in my neighborhood in Belgrade.” At 15, he moved to Paris with his mother; the next year they joined his father in the U.S.
Becoming a poet in Chicago and New York:
Simic’s family settled in Oak Park, a Chicago suburb, and he graduated from high school there. He has said that he began to write poems to impress girls: “I still tremble at the memory of a certain Linda listening breathlessly to my doggerel on her front steps.” He began his college education at the University of Chicago, was drafted and served in the U.S. Army from 1961 to 1963, and earned his B.A. from New York University in 1966. He worked at the Chicago Sun-Times and Aperture, but those were jobs — his vocation was always poetry. He published his first book of poems, What the Grass Says, in 1967.
Acclaimed poet, essayist, translator and teacher:
From the beginning, Charles Simic’s poetry earned recognition, and he has won many awards and accolades, among them the Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems and the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize for Selected Poems: 1963-2003. He has also published respected essays on American poetry and translations of poetry from the French and the various sections of the former Yugoslavia, his homeland — Slovenian, Serbian, Croatian and Macedonian. He has been a professor of English and creative writing at the University of New Hampshire since 1973, and he lives in New Hampshire.
Simic’s poems:
English is not Simic’s first language, but he is very definitely an American poet. His work has been called “shockingly stark,” “grimly realistic portraits,” “brooding lyrics...eloquently spare,” “surreal, metaphysical,” “gallows humor with ironic self-awareness...” Such terms identify the most important strains of imagery and idea in his poems: memories of the violence and horror he experienced in his own life and sees in the contemporary world around him, black humor in the face of despair, and a fantastical, surrealistic imagination of the relations between animate life and the inanimate objects that surround us.
Simic as Poet Laureate:
The same day that he was named as U.S. Poet Laureate, it was also announced that Simic was the 2007 recipient of the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. He fulfilled the duties of the Laureate by giving & hosting a number of readings at the Library of Congress, and choosing the 2008 Witter Byner Fellows, but he did not use the office to initiate any further public poetry projects, like Robert Pinsky’s Favorite Poem Project or Ted Kooser’s weekly newspaper column.
