Charles Simic

Photo credit:Beowulf Sheehan as posted on https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/01/books/review-charles-simic-displays-a-poets-voice-and-his-passions.html

"Charles Simic is widely recognized as one of the most visceral and unique poets writing today. His work has won numerous awards, among them the 1990 Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the appointment as US poet laureate. He taught English and creative writing for over 30 years at the University of New Hampshire. Although he emigrated to the US from Yugoslavia as a teenager, Simic writes in English, drawing upon his own experiences of war-torn Belgrade to compose poems about the physical and spiritual poverty of modern life."

Source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/charles-simic

Live Readings

Poems

Empire of Dreams

On the first page of my dreambookIt’s always eveningIn an occupied country.Hour before the curfew.A small provincial city.The houses all dark.The storefronts gutted.
I am on a street cornerWhere I shouldn’t be.Alone and coatlessI have gone out to lookFor a black dog who answers to my whistle.I have a kind of Halloween maskWhich I am afraid to put on.

-from Selected Early Poems (1999)

The Escapee

The name of a girl I once loved

Flew off the tip of my tongue

In the street today,

Like a pet fly

Kept in a matchbox by a madman –

Gone!

Making my mouth fall open

And stay open,

So everyone walking past me could see.

As I Was Saying