Charles Simic
Charles Simic
Charles Simicis a Serbian-American poet and was co-poetry editor of the Paris Review. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 for The World Doesn't End, and was a finalist of the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for Selected Poems, 1963-1983 and in 1987 for Unending Blues. He was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2007...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth9 May 1938
CityBelgrade, Serbia
CountryUnited States of America
There are knives that glitter like altars In a dark church Where they bring the cripple and the imbecile To be healed. There's a woden block where bones are broken, Scraped clean--a river dried to its bed
Here is something we can all count on. Sooner or later our tribe always comes to ask us to agree to murder.
Only poetry can measure the distance between ourselves and the Other.
Poems are other people's snapshots in which we see our own lives.
A poem is an instant of lucidity in which the entire organism participates.
Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all others were making ships.
Roberto Calasso's survey of the renewed interest in myth demonstrates how decisive the gods' influence was on modern literature. Calasso is not only immensely learned; he is one of the most original thinkers and writers we have today.
I'm not a stickler for truth. To me, lying in poetry is much more fun. I'm against lying in life, in principle, in any other activity except poetry.
Only brooms Know the devil Still exists, That the snow grows whiter After a crow has flown over it
A 'truth' detached and purified of pleasures of ordinary life is not worth a damn in my view. Every grand theory and noble sentiment ought to be first tested in the kitchen-and then in bed, of course.
I left parts of myself everywhere, The way absent-minded people leave Gloves and umbrellas Whose colors are sad from dispensing so much bad luck
Here in the United States, we speak with reverence of authentic experience. We write poems about our daddies taking us fishing and breaking our hearts by making us throw the little fish back into the river. We even tell the reader the kind of car we were driving, the year and the model, to give the impression that it’s all true. It’s because we think of ourselves as journalists of a kind. Like them, we’ll go anywhere for a story. Don’t believe a word of it. As any poet can tell you, one often sees better with eyes closed than with eyes wide open.
Words make love on the page like flies in the summer heat and the poet is only the bemused spectator.
To submit to chance is to reveal the self and its obsessions.