Charles D. Simic

Charles D. Simic has been hailed as one of the America's finest poets.

Born May 9, 1938, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, he arrived in America when he was 16 to rejoin his father in New York City. They moved to Oak Park shortly after that. Simic lived here 1955 to 1962. While a student at Oak Park River Forest High School, a suburban school with caring teachers and motivated students, Simic began to take new interest in his courses, especially literature. After graduation from OPRFHS in 1956, he worked a full-time job as an office boy with the Chicago Sun Times while attending college at night.

When did you first feel "the impulse" to write?

"When I noticed in high school that one of my friends was attracting the best looking girls by writing them sappy love poems." (from the Cortland Review interview.)

Simic is the author of more than 60 books, and his work has won numerous prestigious awards, including: the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1990 for his book of prose-poems The World Doesn't End, the coveted MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in 1984-89; finalist for the National Book Award in poetry, 1996, for Walking the Black Cat . In 1995, Simic was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the highest formal recognition of artistic merit in the United States.

Simic was honored by OPRF High School with a Tradition of Excellence Award in 1991. Today he is Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire.

Writings by Charles D. Simic provides an extensive list of Simic's prolific writings in books, magazines, reviews and translations up through the year 1999. Here is a picture of Simic in front of audience.

• Interview with Simic by J.M. Spalding
• "An Unknown City" read by Simic (RealAudio©)

The Academy of American Poets

• Charles Simic (features many other web links)

Contemporary Authors: Charles SIMIC from the GaleNet (Link appears dead.)

Simic's first poems were published in 1959, when he was twenty-one. Between that year and 1961, when he entered the service, he churned out a number of poems, most of which he has since destroyed. Simic finally earned his Bachelor's degree in 1966. His first full-length collection of poems, What the Grass Says, was published the following year. In a very short time, Simic's work--original poetry in English and translations of important Yugoslavian poets--began to attract critical attention. In The American Moment: American Poetry in the Mid-Century, Geoffrey Thurley notes that the substance of Simic's earliest versa its material referents-- "are European and rural rather than American and urban.... The world his poetry creates--or rather with its brilliant semantic evacuation decreates-- is that of central Europe--woods, ponds, peasant furniture." Voice Literary Supplement reviewer Matthew Flamm also contends that Simic was writing "about bewilderment, about being part of history's comedy act, in which he grew up half-abandoned in Belgrade and then became, with his Slavic accent, an American poet."

Simic's work defies easy categorization. Some poems reflect a surreal, metaphysical bent and others offer grimly realistic portraits of violence and despair. Hudson Review contributor Vernon Young maintains that memory--a taproot deep into European folklore--is the common source of all of Simic's poetry. "Simic, a graduate of NYU, married and a father in pragmatic America, turns, when he composes poems, to his unconscious and to earlier pools of memory," the critic writes. "Within microcosmic verses which may be impish, sardonic, quasi-realistic or utterly outrageous, he succinctly implies an historical montage." Young elaborates: "His Yugoslavia is a peninsula of the mind.... He speaks by the fable; his method is to transpose historical actuality into a surreal key.... [Simic] feels the European yesterday on his pulses."

• Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 4, Gale, 1986.
• Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 6,1976; Volume 9, 1978; Volume 22, 1982; Volume 49, 1988; Volume 68, 1991.
• Thurley, Geoffrey, The American Moment: American Poetry in the Mid- Century, St. Martin's, 1978.
• Weigl, Bruce, editor, Charles Simic: Essays on the Poetry, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor), 1996.
• Wonderful Words, Silent Truth, by Charles Simic, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbour,1990, In the Beginning . . . p. 3-53.

• Charles D. Simic
  Department of English
  University of New Hampshire
  Room 229 Hamlin-Smith
  P.O.Box 192
  Stratford, NH 03884

• Brian Ferguson-Avery, bcf@canes.gsw.edu
  Dept. of English & Foreign Languages,
  Georgia Southwestern State University
  Americus, GA 31709