Charles Simic (originally Dušan Simić) was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, on May 9, 1938. In April 1941, when Hitler invaded Yugoslavia and bombarded Belgrade, 3-year-old Dušan was thrown from his bed by the force of a bomb exploding nearby. In his early childhood, during World War II, he and his family were forced to evacuate their home several times to escape the indiscriminate bombing of Belgrade by the Allies. Simic’s father, George Simic, was arrested a number of times. Eventually he fled Yugoslavia in 1944 for Italy, where he was jailed. On his release at the war’s end, he spent five years in Trieste and then moved to America. Simic’s mother, Helen, made various attempts to escape postwar Yugoslavia and was herself briefly incarcerated, along with her sons, by the communist authorities. At age 15 Charles Simic moved with his mother and his brother to Paris, where he attended French schools and studied English at night school. Eventually the family were granted passports in 1953 and, after being granted American visas, they set sail for New York in August 1954.
Reunited, the family lived in New York for a year and then settled in Chicago where Simic attended high school there. In a bid to blend in among his peers at school, Dusan Simic took on the American sounding name ‘Charles’. He started writing poems in high school, in part, he said, to impress girls. He wrote in English instead of his native tongue since no American girl was likely to fall for a guy who reads love poems to her in Serbian as she sips a Coca-Cola. He published his first poems in The Chicago Review when he was 21. I finished high school in Oak Park, then my parents broke up. I left home and was on my own, and got a job in the city on the Near North Side. Then I picked up and went to New York City… After that, I came back to Chicago, but the family had fallen apart, and there was no money, so first I worked during the day at the Chicago Sun-Times. As his family could not afford to send him to college, he worked as an office boy on the Chicago Sun-Times and attended night classes. In 1958 he moved back to New York, where he worked at a variety of jobs – parcel-packer, salesman, housepainter, payroll clerk – and studied and wrote poetry at night. His first poems were published in 1959 when he was 21. In 1961 Simic was drafted into the army and spent two years as a military policeman in Germany and France. On his return to New York, he enrolled at New York University, where he studied linguistics. He originally wanted to be a painter, he said, until I realized that I had no talent. In 1964 he married Helen Dubin, a dress designer and daughter of a Russian and Serbian couple. He received a bachelor’s degree in Russian in 1967 from New York University and published his first full-length collection, What the Grass Says, that same year.
Simic has been incredibly prolific as a poet, translator, editor and essayist. He has translated the work of French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian and Slovenian poets, including Tomaz Salamun and Vasko Popa. He translated and edited the anthology The Horse Has Six Legs: An Anthology of Serbian Poetry (1992). In addition to poetry and prose poems, Simic has also written several works of prose nonfiction, including 1992’s Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell. His book of prose poems, The World Doesn’t End, won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1990; Walking the Black Cat (1996) was a finalist for the National Book Award; Jackstraws (1999) was a New York Times Notable Book of the year; his Selected Poems 1963-2003 (2004) won the prestigious Griffin International Poetry Award. Other collections from this period include Hotel Insomnia (1992), Night Picnic: Poems (2001), and My Noiseless Entourage (2005). His work has won numerous awards, among them the 1990 Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” the Griffin International Poetry Prize and the Wallace Stevens Award. He was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2007. Simic was the recipient, in 2011, of the Frost Medal, presented annually for “lifetime achievement in poetry”. Recent collections include The Lunatic (2015), Scribbled in the Dark (2017), Come Closer and Listen (2019) and No Land in Sight (2022).
In 1973 the University of New Hampshire offered him an associate professorship, and he has remained there ever since, living in the town of Strafford in Coos County. He has described himself as a “city poet” because he has lived in cities all of my life, except for the last 35 years. He has lived in New Hampshire where he was Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire.
BLACK BUTTERFLIES – THE SHORTER POEMS OF CHARLES SIMIC
It is difficult to describe or to pin down the style of Simic’s poetry even though it has changed little throughout his lengthy career. Although distinctly American, it is influenced by Eastern European models. I like Ian Sampson’s comment in a Guardian review of Selected Poems 1963-2003, Simic’s work reads like one big poem or project, a vast Simic-scape of ‘eternal November’. He has a wonderful ability to take ordinary objects, like the two pairs of underpants in the poem Windy Day (below), and put them in an entirely fresh context. His childhood experiences of war, displacement and privation also animate many of his poems as can be seen in such poems as Fear, January and War (below).
While I admire many of his poems I have a special fondness for those of a briefer length. A poem like Evening Chess (below) can convey anger, strategy, pain and family tension in just two brief lines. A one-line poem (a monostich) such as Fate can use rhyme, social interaction and humour in less than half a dozen words. A quatrain such as Black Butterflies can be ghostly and earthy, heavy and light, landed and at sea – all at the same time. This does not come easily. He has compared his poetry to playing chess, often being beaten but enjoying how he tends towards short poems that require endless tinkering…they depend for their success on the placement of words and image in proper order, and their progression duplicates the inevitability and surprise of an elegantly executed checkmate. Or, as he put it in an interview in Granta Magazine, these poems are assembled over a long period of time from words and images floating in my head. A brief poem intended to capture the imagination of the reader requires endless tinkering to get all its parts right.
I have taken numerous poems from numerous collections written over fifty years in a prolific and consistent career. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do. I leave the last words to Charles Simic: I revise endlessly and yes, in the process, my poems get shorter and shorter. At some point, I realize that whatever I had there is all the poem needs. The challenge of saying “everything” in a few words continues to tempt me.
Brief Poems by Charles Simic
Fear
Fear passes from man to man
Unknowing,
As one leaf passes its shudder
To another.
All at once the whole tree is trembling,
And there is no sign of the wind.
***
Couple at Coney Island
It was early one Sunday morning,
So we put on our best rags
And went for a stroll along the boardwalk
Till we came to a kind of palace
With turrets and pennants flying.
It made me think of a wedding cake
In the window of a fancy bakery shop.
***
Watermelons
Green Buddhas
On the fruit stand.
We eat the smile
And spit out the teeth.
***
November
The crosses all men and women
Must carry through life
Even more visible
On this dark and rainy night.
***
Once December Comes
There’s another kind of sky,
another kind of light
over the wintery fields,
some other kind of darkness
following in its footsteps,
eager to seek our company
in these frost-bitten little homes,
standing bravely
with no dog in sight.
***
January
Children’s fingerprints
On a frozen window
Of a small schoolhouse
An empire, I read somewhere,
Maintains itself through
The cruelty of its prisons
***
Evening Chess
The Black Queen raised high
In my father’s angry hand.
***
My Mother Hoped
To take her sewing machine
Down into her grave,
And I believe she did that,
’Cause every now and then
It keeps me awake at night.
***
For Rent
A large clean room
With plenty of sunlight
And one cockroach
To tell your troubles to.
Elegy
No one has seen me today
as I too have seen
no one
not even myself
here
bent as I was
intently
over the particular.
***
First Thing in the Morning
You eavesdrop on birds
Gossiping in your yard,
Eager to find out what
They are saying about you.
***
My Darling Clementine
You lifted our low-down mood
This dark autumn evening,
Playing that sweet old song
With a comb and toilet paper.
***
Could That Be Me?
An alarm clock
With no hands
Ticking loudly
On the town dump.
***
FATE
Everyone’s blind date.
***
Left Out of the Bible
What Adam said to Eve
As they lay in the dark:
Honey, go and take a look.
What’s making that dog bark?
***
Gospel
Half-way to nowhere –
I thought I heard
Church bells ringing,
The blind man on the corner
Call out my name.
***
Astronomy Lesson
The silent laughter
Of the stars
In the night sky
Tells us all
We need to know.
Object Matrimony
World-famous fire-eater
Seeking a tantric dancer
To join him on the sea bottom
And blow bubbles with him.
***
My Secret Identity Is
The room is empty
And the window is open
***
The Last Lesson
It will be about nothing.
Not above love or God,
But about nothing.
You’ll be like the new kid in school
Afraid to look at the teacher
While struggling to understand
What they are saying
About this here nothing.
***
War
The trembling finger of a woman
Goes down the list of casualties
On the evening of the first snow.
The house is cold and the list is long.
All our names are included.
***
Poem
Every morning I forget how it is.
I watch the smoke mount
In great strides above the city.
I belong to no one.
Then, I remember my shoes,
How I have to put them on,
How bending over to tie them up
I will look into the earth.
***
The Lunatic
The same snowflake
kept falling out of the gray sky
all afternoon,
falling and falling
and picking itself up
off the ground,
to fall again,
but now more surreptitiously,
more carefully
as night strolled over
to see what’s up.
Black Butterfly
Ghost ship of my life,
Weighted down by coffins
Sailing out
On the evening tide
***
Mystery Theater
Bald man smoking in bed,
Naked lightbulb over his head,
The shadow of his cigar
Next to him on the wall,
Its long ash about to fall
Into a pitch-dark fishbowl.
***
New York
No one sees me in your streets
Though I’m still there
Loitering and stopping
To peek into empty stores
And talk to a lone pigeon.
***
At Tender Mercy
O lone streetlight,
Trying to shed
What light you cande
On a spider repairing his web
This autumn night,
Stay with me
As I push further and further
Into the dark.
Astronomy Lesson
The silent laughter
Of the stars
In the night sky
Tells us all
We need to know
***
Windy Day
Two pairs of underwear,
One white and the other pink,
Flew up and down
On the laundry line,
Telling the whole world
They are madly in love.
***
The Hand that Rocks the Cradle
Time – that murderer
No one has caught yet
***
Haystack
Can you find in there
The straw that broke
Your mother’s back?
***
Dark Window
Of a crying woman
With her tears lit
By the headlights
Of a passing car.
***
Where Do My Gallows Stand?
Outside the window
I looked out as a child
In an occupied city
Quiet as a graveyard.
***
The Wind Has Died
My little boat,
Take care,
There is no
Land in sight.
***
Night Thoughts
Light frightens them. Darkness too.
They crawl into our beds,
Not to talk, but to whisper
The way one does in the morgue.
LINKS
Poems
A large selection of poems are available on the Poetry Foundation Site
Another large selection is available on the Best Poets site
More than 60 poems are available on the Poem Hunter site
Almost 40 poems are available on the Voetica site
18 poems are avaiable on the Poets.org site
Interviews
Interviewed by Mark Ford for The Paris Review
Interviewed by Bianca Stone for her podcast
Interviewed by Judith Roney for The Florida Review
Interviewed by Grace Cavalieri at the Library of Congress
Interviewed by Peter Mishler for the Literary Hub
Interviewed by Rachael Allen for Granta
Interviewed by the Serbian magazine CorD
Interviewed by Michael J. Vaughn for Terrain.org
Interviewed by SJ Fowler for 3:AM Magazine
Brief Poems 