US Poet Laureate Charles Simic Immigrated as Teen

By Jeffrey Thomas
USINFO Staff Writer

New U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Simic Immigrated as Teen

Charles Simic, the new poet laureate of the United States, did not begin learning English until he was 15 and moved to New York City, then Chicago, after a traumatic childhood in the former Yugoslavia.

"The big, big influence on my life was being born in Yugoslavia in 1938. And then, in 1941, the war started and I was there during the war, and then in the years after the war under communism. The war years in Yugoslavia were pure hell," Simic told USINFO in an interview August 9.

In 1953, Simic, his mother and brother were able to travel to Paris, where they stayed for a year. Then they moved on to the United States to join Simic's father. "If you came to New York in 1954, it was incredible. Europe was still gray; there were still ruins. New York was just dazzling. When I was a little kid in Yugoslavia I loved jazz, I loved movies, so this was paradise," Simic said.

Later, as a youth in Chicago, he wanted to be a painter. "I started writing in high school and then I met people who were writers and poets. We would talk about poetry, read poetry. I started publishing my first poems in 1959 in the Chicago Review - a pretty good magazine. So five years after I entered the United States, I published my first poem."

An immigrant learning English in his teens "doesn't take it for granted," Simic said. "One notices things about language, one notices things about American culture and other things that I imagine a native-born would not see."

Although he published his first book of poems in 1967, Simic did not really take himself seriously as a writer until a few years later. "The first time I realized my poetry meant something was in 1970. I was living in New York City, working. I worked at a photography magazine. I started getting letters out of the blue from colleges and universities asking me whether I would come and teach creative writing and literature. I had planned to spend the rest of my life in New York City working at different jobs, but to my surprise these offers kept coming."

In 1971, Simic took a teaching job at California State College at Hayward. In 1973, he moved to the University of New Hampshire, where he taught until his recent retirement.

His appointment as the 15th poet laureate was announced by the Library of Congress August 2. On the same day, the Academy of American Poets awarded him the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award for "outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry."

"The range of Charles Simic's imagination is evident in his stunning and unusual imagery. He handles language with the skill of a master craftsman, yet his poems are easily accessible, often meditative and surprising. He has given us a rich body of highly organized poetry with shades of darkness and flashes of ironic humor," said Librarian of Congress James H. Billington in making the appointment.

The position of "poet laureate consultant in poetry" at the Library of Congress, modeled on its British equivalent, was created in 1986. It was held in the past by such notable poets as Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur, W.S. Merwin, Mark Strand, Rita Dove and the Russian-born Nobel Prize laureate, Joseph Brodsky. From 1937 to 1986, the position existed under two separate titles.

According to the Library of Congress, the poet laureate "seeks to raise the national consciousness to the greater appreciation of the reading and writing of poetry." But in Simic's words, the position "is pretty much what you make of it." He will give a speech at the library's National Book Festival September 29 and a poetry reading October 17.

Simic rejects the notion that the poet has any role other than "to write good poems." Every time he is asked about the role of the poet, he thinks of the communists and their "cultural policy."

"They always had duties and roles for writers and poets. Poetry presents poetry. Any poet is an individual voice. If he is a good poet or she is a good poet, the whole question is of trying to do what you do well -- the integrity that comes with the work that you do," he said.

The audience for poetry in the United States today is "terrific," Simic said, and has been so since the so-called "Beat" poets of the 1950s and early 1960s. "Poetry readings became really, really popular everywhere, so that there isn't a college, university or community center in this country that doesn't have a poetry series. People are used to going to poetry readings. The audiences are huge."

Simic sees himself as writing in the New England tradition of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, and feels "at home philosophically with New England writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne or Ralph Waldo Emerson or Thoreau - all the grumpy ones."

He has won many awards, including a Pulitzer Prize and the "genius award" from the MacArthur Foundation.

He also has won major awards for his numerous translations of French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian and Slovenian poetry, and is currently revising and expanding an anthology of Serbian poetry, for which he won an award from the Academy of American Poets in 1993.

For someone unfamiliar with his work, Simic suggested a selection of his later poems, The Voice at 3 AM (2003), as the best place to start.

He recommends "Prodigy," a poem set in Belgrade, Serbia, during World War II. He remains especially fond of this poem, he told USINFO.

(USINFO is produced by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

ENDS

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