Happy Birthday Charles Simic

It's the birthday of poet and essayist Charles Simic (books by this author), born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (1938). His mother's family and his father's family didn't get on well. He remembered: "My mother's family was fearful, paranoid, and secretive. They had lost their wealth and were worried about keeping up appearances. They had no sense of humor. Nothing was ever funny to them. My father's family, when they got going at a dinner table, they were like a dadaist cabaret, so you can imagine how my poor mother felt in their company." His family survived the bombing of Belgrade during World War II and fled Eastern Europe after the war was over. At first they lived in New York, which Simic said "looked like painted sets at a sideshow in a carnival," and then moved to Chicago: "like a coffee-table edition of the Communist Manifesto, with glossy pictures of lakefront mansions and inner-city slums." Eventually, the family wound up in Oak Park, Illinois, and Simic went to the same high school Ernest Hemingway had gone to. His first ambition was to be a painter; he didn't start writing poetry until his last year of high school, and even then, he wasn't too serious about it.

He published his first poems in 1959, when he was 21, and since that time he has published nearly three dozen books of poetry, many translations and works of prose, and served as the poet laureate of the United States.