NEW YORK — Charles Simic, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who awed critics and readers together with his singular artwork of lyricism and financial system, tragic perception and disruptive humor, has died at age 84.
The dying of Simic, the nation’s poet laureate from 2007-2008, was confirmed Monday by government editor Dan Halpern at Alfred A. Knopf. He didn’t instantly present extra particulars.
Author of dozens of books, Simic was ranked by many as among the many biggest and most authentic poets of his time, one who didn’t write in English till effectively into his 20s. His bleak, however comedian perspective was formed partly by his years rising up in wartime Yugoslavia, main him to watch that “The world is old, it was always old.” His poems have been normally brief and pointed, with shocking and typically jarring shifts in temper and imagery, as if to reflect the cruelty and randomness he had discovered early on.
In “Two Dogs,” Simic writes of how one canine in “some Southern town” and one other within the New Hampshire woods reminded him of a “little white dog” who turned “entangled” within the ft of marching German troopers. “Reading History” is a sketch of the “vast, dark and impenetrable” skies for these “led to their death.” In “Help Wanted,” life is a cosmic joke, and the narrator a prepared dupe:
They requested for a knife
I come operating
They want a lamb
I introduce myself because the lamb
But Simic additionally cherished wordplay (“The insomniac’s brain is a choo-choo train”), catcalls (“America, I shouted at the radio/Even at 2 a.m. you are a loony bin!”) and the interaction of nice ideas and on a regular basis follies: “What was that fragment of Heraclitus/You were trying to remember/As you stepped on the butcher’s cat?” he wrote in “The Friends of Heraclitus.” In “Transport,” intercourse turns into a near-literal feast of the senses:
In the frying pan
On the range
I discovered my love
And me bare
Chopped onions
Fell on our heads
And made us cry
It’s like a parade,
I informed her, confetti
When some man
Reaches the moon
His notable books included “The World Doesn’t End,” winner of the Pulitzer in 1990; “Walking the Black Cat,” a National Book Award finalist in 1996; “Unending Blues” and such latest collections as “The Lunatic” and “Scribbled in the Dark.” In 2005, he obtained the Griffin Poetry Prize and was praised by judges as “a magician, a conjuror,” grasp of “a disarming, deadpan precision, which should never be mistaken for simplicity.” He was fluent in a number of languages and translated the works of different poets from French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian.
His 2022 assortment “No Land in Sight” offered a darkish imaginative and prescient of up to date life, such because the poem “Come Spring” and its warning: “Don’t let that birdie in the tree/Fool you with its pretty song/The wicked are back from hell.”
In 1964, Simic married clothier Helene Dubin, with whom he had two youngsters. He turned an American citizen in 1971 and two years later joined the school of the University of New Hampshire, the place he remained for many years.
Born Dusan Simic in Belgrade in 1938, the 12 months earlier than World War II started, he would describe his youth as “a small, nonspeaking part/In a bloody epic.” His father fled to Italy in 1942 and was other than the household for years. Home was so oppressive that Simic got here to see the battle as a wanted escape.
“The war ended the day before May 9, 1945, which happened to be my birthday,” he informed the Paris Review in 2005. “I was playing in the street. I went up to the apartment to get a drink of water where my mother and our neighbors were listening to the radio. They said, ‘War is over,’ and apparently I looked at them puzzled and said, ‘Now there won’t be any more fun!’ In wartime, there’s no parental supervision; the grown-ups are so busy with their lives, the kids can run free.”
Simic would seek advice from Hitler and Stalin as his “travel agents.” Nazi rule gave solution to Soviet-backed oppression and Simic emigrated to France together with his mom and brother within the mid-Nineteen Fifties, then quickly to the U.S. His household settled in Chicago, the place his highschool was as soon as attended by Ernest Hemingway, and he turned fascinated about poetry — for the artwork and for the ladies. His dad and mom unable to pay for school, he spent a decade working at jobs starting from a payroll clerk to deal with painter whereas taking night time courses on the University of Chicago and ultimately New York University, from which he graduated in 1966 with a level in Russian research.
His first e book, “What the Grass Says,” got here out in 1967. He adopted with “Somewhere Among Us a Stone is Taking Notes” and “Dismantling the Silence,” and was quickly averaging a e book a 12 months. A New York Times assessment from 1978 would observe his present for conveying “a complex of perceptions and feelings” in only a few traces.
“Of all the things ever said about poetry, the axiom that less is more has made the biggest and the most lasting impression on me,” Simic informed Granta in 2013. “I have written many short poems in my life, except ‘written’ is not the right word to describe how they came into existence. Since it’s not possible to sit down and write an eight-line poem that’ll be vast for its size, these poems are assembled over a long period of time from words and images floating in my head.”
Source: www.bostonherald.com”