New U.S. poet laureate
"Driving Home," a new poem by Charles Simic in the current issue of The New Yorker, reminds us of how important a poet Simic is: how much pathos and dissonant imagery he can evoke in just a dozen lines of simple syntax.
On Aug. 2, Simic was appointed to succeed Donald Hall as the 15th Poet Laureate of the United States by the Librarian of Congress James Billington.
In a remarkable coincidence, he was also selected that same day to receive the Academy of American Poets' highest honor, the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award for "outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry."
For those who have followed Simic's work -- his early collections Charon's Cosmology (1977) and Classic Ballroom Dances (1980) were considered essential reading among younger poets of that era -- this recognition seems a validation not only of his minimalist poetics and absurdist view of history, but also a victory of sorts for "foreignness" in American poetry.
"I am especially touched and honored to be selected because I am an immigrant boy who didn’t speak English until I was 15," Simic observed in a brief statement following his appointment.
Readers familiar with only his essays on poetry and literature in The New York Review of Books or his selections as coeditor of poetry for The Paris Review, may not appreciate the extent to which Simic's penchant for dark humor and surreal images was shaped by his childhood in eastern Europe.
Born in Belgrade, Serbia (formerly Yugoslavia) in 1938, he witnessed the destruction and multiple dislocations of World War II before emigrating to the United States with his family and settling in the Chicago area in 1953.
"My family, like millions of others, had to pack up and go," he explained in a recent interview in The Guardian, "so that has always interested me tremendously: human tragedy and human vileness and stupidity."
If you'd like to sample some of Simic's work, a good place to begin is with his collection of prose poems The World Doesn't End (which received Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1990), or better yet his Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (winner of the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize) where you can find assorted gems like this one:
Millions were dead; everybody was innocent.
I stayed in my room. The President
Spoke of war as of a magic love potion.
My eyes were opened in astonishment.
In a mirror my face appeared to me
Like a twice-canceled postage stamp.
I lived well, but life was awful.
there were so many soldiers that day,
So many refugees crowding the roads.
Naturally, they all vanished
With a touch of the hand.
History licked the corners of its bloody mouth.
On the pay channel, a man and a woman
Were trading hungry kisses and tearing off
Each other's clothes while I looked on
With the sound off and the room dark
Except for the screen where the color
Had too much red in it, too much pink.
If any poet deserved to be poet laureate, it's Charles Simic. He's the kind of writer whose stuff ends up ripped out of The New Yorker (etc.), turning to ash in my wallet. Come to think of it, my wallet is mostly ash ...
Posted by: Gay Baines | August 22, 2007 at 12:42 PM