How Did Charles Simic Die?
At age 84, Charles Simic, a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet known for his unique brand of lyricism and economy, tragic insight, and disruptive comedy, went yesterday. Simic’s passing was confirmed on Monday by executive editor Dan Halpern of Alfred A., who served as the nation’s poet laureate from 2007 to 2008. Knopf. He did not immediately give more information.
Simic was one of the best and most original poets of his day, a prolific writer of several volumes who didn’t start writing in English until well into his 20s. He once said that “The world is ancient, it was always old,” which was a reflection of his background in a war-torn Yugoslavia. He wrote poetry that were often short and to the point, with sudden and occasionally stunning changes in mood and imagery that seemed to represent the harshness and randomness he had learnt early on.
Simic describes how two dogs, one in “some Southern town” and the other in the woods of New Hampshire, made him think of a “little white dog” that got “entangled” in the feet of marching German soldiers in his essay “Two Dogs.”. A description of the “vast, dark, and impenetrable” skies for those “led to their death” can be found in “Reading History.”. In “Help Wanted,” the narrator is a willing participant in a cosmic joke.
What happened To Charles Simic?
But Simic also loved puns ( “”America, I screamed at the radio/Even at 2 a.m. m. The insomniac’s head is a choo-choo train,” and “Even at 2 a.m. In “The Friends of Heraclitus,” he questioned, “What was that piece of Heraclitus/You were attempting to remember/As you stomped on the butcher’s cat? You are a lunatic bin!” (You are a loony bin!) “. In “Transport,” sexual encounters almost literally become a sensory feast.
His major works include the 1990 Pulitzer Prize-winning “The World Doesn’t End,” the 1996 National Book Award nominee “Walking the Black Cat,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Unending Blues,” and more recent collections like “The Lunatic” and “Scribbled in the Dark.” The Griffin Poetry Prize was given to him in 2005, and the judges complimented him for being “a magician, a conjuror,” and a master of “a disarming, deadpan clarity, which should never be confused for simplicity.” He translated poetry into his home tongue from French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian.
Poems like “Come Spring,” which featured the caution: “Don’t allow that birdie in the tree/Fool you with its charming song/The wicked are returned from hell,” were included in his 2022 book “No Land in Sight.”
Simic wed fashion designer Helene Dubin in 1964; the union produced two children. He obtained US citizenship in 1971, and two years later he joined the University of New Hampshire’s faculty, where he stayed for a considerable amount of time.
Dusan Simic was born in Belgrade in 1938, the year before World War II started, and would later refer to his youth as “a small, nonspeaking part/In a bloody epic.”. His father ran away from the family in 1942 and spent years living in Italy. Simic eventually began to see the war as a necessary escape from the oppressive home life.
He admitted to the Paris Review in 2005 that “the war ended the day before May 9, 1945, which just so happened to be my birthday.”. “I was having fun in the street. My mother and our neighbors were listening to the radio when I went up to the apartment to get a drink of water. There is no parental supervision during a war because the adults are too preoccupied with their own lives to notice when the children are running amok. When they said the war was over, I apparently looked at them bewildered and said, “Now there won’t be any more fun!”. “.
Hitler and Stalin were referred to as Simic’s “travel agents.” Simic fled with his mother and brother to France in the middle of the 1950s, eventually making their way to the U. S., as Nazi tyranny gave place to Soviet-backed dictatorship. After his family relocated to Chicago, where Ernest Hemingway had previously attended high school, he became interested in poetry for artistic and romantic reasons. Due to his parents’ inability to pay for college, he spent 10 years working at jobs ranging from a payroll clerk to a house painter while taking night classes at the University of Chicago and subsequently New York University, where he eventually got a degree in Russian studies in 1966.
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