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
Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
The secret wish of poetry is to stop time.
A poem is an instant of lucidity in which the entire organism participates.
Poems are other people's snapshots in which we see our own lives.
The poem I want to write is impossible. A stone that floats.
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
When you play chess alone it's always your move.
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.
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
There are people who live inside their heads and their intellects. It's something one is born with and stuck with. It's not something you make a decision about.
The stars know everything, So we try to read their minds. As distant as they are, We choose to whisper in their presence.
We name one thing and then another. That’s how time enters poetry. Space, on the other hand, comes into being through the attention we pay to each word. The more intense our attention, the more space, and there’s a lot of space inside words.
In their effort to divorce language and experience, deconstructionist critics remind me of middle-class parents who do not allow their children to play in the street.