Poetry:
What the Grass Says, 1967
Somewhere Among Us a Stone Is Taking Notes, 1969
Dismantling the Silence, 1971
White, 1972, revised 1980
Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk, 1974
Biography and a Lament: Poems, 1961-1967, 1976
Charon’s Cosmology, 1977
Brooms: Selected Poems, 1978
Classic Ballroom Dances, 1980
Austerities, 1982
Shaving at Night, 1982
The Chicken Without a Head, 1983
Weather Forecast for Utopia and Vicinity: Poems, 1967-1982, 1983
Selected Poems, 1963-1983, 1985, revised 1990, expanded as Selected Early Poems, 1999
Unending Blues, 1986
The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems, 1989
The Book of Gods and Devils, 1990
In the Room We Share, 1990
Hotel Insomnia, 1992
A Wedding in Hell, 1994
Frightening Toys, 1995
Walking the Black Cat, 1996
Looking for Trouble, 1997
Jackstraws, 1999
Night Picnic, 2001.
Translations:
Four Yugoslav Poets: Ivan V. Lalic, Brank Miljkovic, Milorad Pavic, Ljubomir Simovic, 1970
The Little Box: Poems, 1970 (of Vasko Popa)
Homage to the Lame Wolf: Selected Poems, 1956-1975, 1979, enlarged 1987 (of Popa)
Roll Call of Mirrors: Selected Poems, 1988 (of IvanV. Lalic)
Some Other Wine and Light, 1989 (of Aleksandar Ristovic)
The Bandit Wind, 1991 (of Slavko Janevski)
The Horse Has Six Legs: An Anthology of Serbian Poetry, 1992
Night Mail: Selected Poems, 1992 (of Novica Tadic)
Devil’s Lunch: Selected Poems, 2000 (of Ristovic).
Nonfiction:
The Uncertain Certainty: Interviews, Essays, and Notes on Poetry, 1985
Wonderful Words, Silent Truth: Essays on Poetry and a Memoir, 1990
Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell, 1992
The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs, 1994
Orphan Factory: Essays and Memoirs, 1997
A Fly in the Soup: Memoirs, 2000
Edited Texts:
Another Republic, 1976 (with Mark Strand)
The Essential Campion, 1988 (Thomas Campion)
The Best American Poetry, 1992, 1992
Mermaids Explained: Poems, 2001
Charles Simic (SEEM-ihch) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. Naturalized as an American citizen in 1971, Simic was born in Belgrade, then located in Yugoslavia. With black humor he recalls his childhood during World War II, marked by bombings and waves of advancing and retreating soldiers, as “a three-ring circus.” He describes how, from the summer of 1944 to mid-1945, he “ran around the streets of Belgrade with other half-abandoned kids.” Critics have speculated that the peculiar blend of horror and whimsy in Simic’s work can be traced to those days. Simic admits to still being “haunted by images” of the war.
Charles Simic
In 1949 Simic and his mother moved to Chicago to join his father, an engineer who had found employment there with the telephone company for which he had worked in Yugoslavia. His father took him to hear jazz, which Simic credits with making him “both an American and a poet.”
Beginning in 1957, Simic attended the University of Chicago at night and worked during the day as a proofreader at the Chicago Sun Times. He eventually transferred to New York University, from which he received a B.A. in 1967. From 1966 to 1969 Simic, who initially studied to be an artist, worked as an editorial assistant for Aperture, a photography magazine. He began teaching at California State College, Hayward, in 1970. He left that position in 1973, when he was hired as an associate professor of English at the University of New Hampshire.
While a student at the University of Chicago, Simic had audited a poetry workshop taught by John Logan. Logan’s workshops and seminars were associated with Surrealist experimentation, and many of Simic’s early poems appeared in the magazine kayak, an organ for American Surrealist verse. The impulse of Surrealism, which appealed to poets coming of age during and after the unleashing of tribalism’s dark side in World War II, was to draw on an archetypal voice inside oneself that transcended national borders. The influence of Surrealism has been noted by critics in the visionary and dreamlike structure of Simic’s poems.
The concentrated effort of attention on an object in Simic’s early verse more specifically links him to a group of American poets known as the Deep Imagists, which included Robert Bly and W. S. Merwin. From Simic’s first published collection, What the Grass Says, to his second, Somewhere Among Us a Stone Is Taking Notes, critic Victor Contoski finds the poet receding in the poems, becoming “more absorbed in objects.” Silence becomes a means of communication, as in it the poet hears the “tiny voices of things.” In Simic’s next collection, Dismantling the Silence, Simic offers instruction for deconstructing silence in order to discover its nature. In the three-part White the narrative voice perceptively shifts to that of the object, here, the color white. White has been read by critics as a deliberate dispossession, freeing the poet to re-create himself. Subsequent poetry finds Simic exploring the self, though less as a subject than as a verb–that is, the self in action and in flux.
Critic Peter Schmidt, noting references to Walt Whitman’s poetry throughout White, sees in it Simic confronting his American poetic origins. Simic claims that, because all his serious reading had been in English and American literature when he started writing poetry in high school, he has never been capable of writing a poem in Serbian, his native language. Nevertheless, critics invariably characterize his work as European in its mordant playfulness and primitive, folkloric elements. Simic has been a prolific English-language translator of Serbian poets, including Vasko Popa, Ivan Lalic, and Aleksandar Ristovic. In both 1970 and 1980 Simic received the translation award given by the International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists (PEN).
The Third Balkan War echoes in much of Simic’s work starting in the 1990’s. In an essay first published in The New Republic, the father of two unflinchingly condemned his fellow Serbs for their aggression. “Lyric poets,” he has said, “assert the individual’s experience against that of the tribe.”