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.
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.
When people ask me how to find happiness in life I tell them, First learn how to cook.
If the sky falls they shall have clouds for supper.
The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.
I was already dozing off in the shade, dreaming that the rustling trees were my many selves explaining themselves all at the same time so that I could not make out a single word. My life was a beautiful mystery on the verge of understanding, always on the verge! Think of it!
The religion of the short poem, in every age and in every literature, has a single commandment: Less is always more. The short poem rejects preamble and summary. It's about all and everything, the metaphysics of a few words surrounded by much silence. …The short poem is a match flaring up in a dark universe.
For Emily Dickinson every philosophical idea was a potential lover. Metaphysics is the realm of eternal seduction of the spirit by ideas.
The truth is dark under your eyelids.
I slept little, read a lot, and fell in love frequently.
Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all others were making ships.
Found objects, chance creations, ready-mades (mass-produced items promoted into art objects, such as Duchamp's "Fountain"-urinal as sculpture) abolish the separation between art and life. The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen.