Charles Simic, Pulitzer-Winning Poet and U.S. Laureate, Dies at 84
A
Serbian-born American, he left the impression in his verse that he had
“poked a hole into everyday life to reveal a glimpse of something
endless.”
The
poet Charles Simic in an undated photo. Named poet laureate of the
United States in 2007, he said “I am especially touched and honored to
be selected, because I am an immigrant boy who didn’t speak English
until I was 15.”Credit...Alexandra Daley-Clark for The New York Times
Charles
Simic, the renowned Serbian-American poet whose work combined a
melancholy old-world sensibility with a sensual and witty sense of
modern life, died on Monday at an assisted living facility in Dover,
N.H. He was 84.
The cause was complications of dementia, his longtime friend and editor Daniel Halpern said.
Mr.
Simic was a prolific writer who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for “The
World Doesn’t End,” a book of prose poems. He served as poet laureate of
the United States from 2007 to 2008. “I am especially touched and
honored to be selected,” he said at the time, “because I am an immigrant
boy who didn’t speak English until I was 15.”
His
poems defied simple classification. Some were minimalist and surreal,
others determinedly realistic and violent. Nearly all were replete with
ironic humor and startling metaphors.
“Only a very foolhardy critic would say what any Simic poem is about,” D.J.R. Bruckner wrote in a 1990 profile
of Mr. Simic in The New York Times. “In rich detail they are all filled
with ordinary objects, but they tend to leave the impression that the
poet has poked a hole into everyday life to reveal a glimpse of
something endless.”
Mr.
Simic’s subject was frequently his World War II-era childhood in
Belgrade. In a poem titled “Two Dogs,” for example, he recalled German
soldiers marching past his family’s house in 1944, “the earth trembling,
death going by.” In the poem “Cameo Appearance,” he wrote:
I had a small, nonspeaking part
In a bloody epic. I was one of the
Bombed and fleeing humanity.
In the distance our great leader
Crowed like a rooster from a balcony,
Or was it a great actor
Impersonating our great leader?
That’s me there, I said to the kiddies.
I’m squeezed between the man
With two bandaged hands raised
And the old woman with her mouth open
As if she were showing us a tooth.
Mr.
Simic moved to the United States while in his teens. For the rest of
his life he would look back on not merely his wartime childhood but on
the circus of everyday life in Belgrade. His poems were full of folk
tales and pickpockets and old grudges. In “The World Doesn’t End,” he
wrote: “I was stolen by the gypsies. My parents stole me right back. /
Then the gypsies stole me again. This went on for some time.”
But
he embraced American life. He wrote verse like a man who had escaped a
cruel fate and was determined not to waste a moment. His urbane and
sardonic poems were increasingly filled with sex and philosophy and
blues songs and late-night conversation and time spent at the dinner
table.
He
was almost certainly America’s most devoted and ecstatic food poet. One
of his poems was titled “Crazy About Her Shrimp.” Another, “Café
Paradiso,” reads in its entirety:
My chicken soup thickened with pounded young almonds
My blend of winter greens.
Dearest tagliatelle with mushrooms, fennel, anchovies,
Tomatoes and vermouth sauce.
Beloved monkfish braised with onions, capers
And green olives.
Give me your tongue tasting of white beans and garlic,
Sexy little assortment of formaggi and frutta!
I want to drown with you in red wine like a pear,
Then sleep in a macedoine of wild berries with cream.
A
poet of dichotomies, his work arrived from many angles at once. Writing
in The New York Sun, the critic Adam Kirsch unpacked Mr. Simic’s
influences: “He draws on the dark satire of Central Europe, the sensual
rhapsody of Latin America, and the fraught juxtapositions of French
Surrealism, to create a style like nothing else in American literature.
Yet Mr. Simic’s verse remains recognizably American — not just in its
grainy, hard-boiled textures, straight out of 1940s film noir, but in
the very confidence of its eclecticism.”
He
was born Dusan Simic in Belgrade, then the capital of Yugoslavia, on
May 9, 1938. With the onset of war and the Axis powers’ occupation of
his country, his father, an electrical engineer, fled for Italy in 1944
after being arrested several times. The father eventually went on to the
United States, but his family was not able to join him there until
1954. The poet would later remark, “My travel agents were Hitler and
Stalin.”
The family settled in
Chicago, where Charles — he changed his name after arriving — learned
English and became a committed reader. Recalling the faculty at Oak Park
and River Forest High School in suburban Chicago, where he spent his
senior year, he told Mr. Bruckner of The Times: “They did remind you all
the time this was the high school of Ernest Hemingway, and that made
you wonder who you were. But if they found you were interested in
reading they just kept handing books to you.”
His
parents could not afford to send him to college, but he attended night
classes at the University of Chicago while working as a proofreader and
office boy for The Chicago Sun-Times. He moved to New York in 1958,
where he worked odd jobs while composing poetry at night. “I always
wrote in English,” he said, “since I wanted my friends and the girls I
was in love with to understand my poems.”
His
first two poems to appear in print were in The Chicago Review in the
winter 1959 issue, when he was 21. He was drafted into the Army in 1961
and spent two years as a military policeman in Germany and France. He
found his voice, he said, upon his return.
“Before
the Army I had become too literary, buttoned down, in tweeds,
pipe-smoking, all that,” he said. “After the Army I had a much humbler
view of myself. I started thinking about a remark of the painter Paul
Klee, that if a young man is to accomplish something he has to find
something truly his own. Well, I had a kind of minimalist urge, and so I
started writing poems about the simplest things. Household objects: a
knife, a fork, a spoon, my shoes.”
In
1964 he married Helen Dubin, a fashion designer. She survives him, along
with their daughter, Anna Simic; their son, Philip; a brother, Milan
Simich; and two grandchildren.
Mr.
Simic attended New York University, working at night to pay his tuition.
He received his bachelor’s degree in 1966. His first book of poems,
“What the Grass Says,” was published the next year.
The
University of New Hampshire offered Mr. Simic an associate
professorship in 1973, and he ended up teaching at the school for more
than three decades. He won a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in
1984.
In Mr. Simic’s book of poems “The Lunatic” (2015), the idea of old age and death seemed not to faze him.Credit...Patricia Wall/The New York Times
Mr.
Simic published more than 30 books of poems. The most comprehensive
recent career-spanning edition of his verse is “New and Selected Poems:
1962-2012.” He also published many books as an editor, an essayist and a
translator of the work of French, Serbian, Croatian and other poets.
He
was a regular contributor of criticism and essays to The New York
Review of Books. His nonfiction books include “Dime-Store Alchemy: The
Art of Joseph Cornell” (1992).
Mr.
Simic frequently returned, in all of his work, to political lessons
learned young. He had a lifelong loathing of strident nationalists and
ethnic divides, of what he called, in one essay, “so-called great
leaders and the collective euphorias they excite.”
He
lived for many years in rural New Hampshire, yet he refused to
romanticize farm life. “What about the farmer beyond that gorgeous
meadow who works seven days a week from morning to night and is still
starving?” he wrote in another essay. “What about his sickly wife and
their boy, who tortures cats?”
He had
his own notions of earthiness. “Nature as experience — making a tomato
salad, say, with young mozzarella, fresh basil leaves, and olive oil —
is better than any idea about Nature.”
Mr.
Simic was a serious poet and thinker who disliked pretension in any
form. He told a Paris Review interviewer: “Every grand theory and noble
sentiment ought to be first tested in the kitchen — and then in bed, of
course.”
In a late book of poems “The
Lunatic” (2015), the idea of old age and death seemed to faze him not at
all. A spring day made him so happy, he wrote, that even if he had to
face a firing squad he would “Smile like a hairdresser / Giving Cameron
Diaz a shampoo.”
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment