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Charles Simic

Charles Simic (born May 9, 1938) is a Serbian-American poet.

Having emigrated in his youth from Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Simic represents an interesting counterpoint to many North American contemporaries, so many of whom have evolved from the traditions of American 19th century writers such as Dickinson, and Whitman both of whom wrote about the details of the world surrounding them.

Simic emigrated to the United States with his family in 1953 where he graduated from Ernest Hemingway's alma mater, Oak Park High School in Chicago. He began to make a name for himself in the early to mid 1970s as a literary minimalist, writing terse imagistic poems which like William Blake had their roots in observed objects, seeing the universe in them.

Over the years, Charles Simic has honed his poetic style to such a degree that, today, a Charles Simic poem is considered immediately recognizable, perhaps more so than any other poet writing today. Critics have often referred to Simic poems as "tightly constructed Chinese puzzle boxes." Simic himself has stated: "Words make love on the page like flies in the summer heat and the poet is only the bemused spectator." The quote intimates Simic's philosophy that true art must be greater than the person who created it.

Over the past decades Simic has been awarded the Macarthur "Genius" Grant, a Pulitzer Prize, and innumerable other awards. He writes thoughtfully on such diverse topics as jazz, art, and philosophy. He exerts considerable influence not only as poet, but as translator, essayist and philosopher opining on the current state of contemporary American poetry. He and Meghan O'Rourke are currently Poetry Editors for The Paris Review.

Simic is one of the judges for the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize.

• What the Grass Says - 1967
• Unending Blues - 1986
• The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems - 1990 (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry)
• Hotel Insomnia - 1992
• Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell - 1993
• A Wedding in Hell - 1994
• Walking the Black Cat - 1996 (National Book Award in Poetry finalist)
• Jackstraws - 1999 (New York Times Notable Book of the Year)
• The Book of Gods and Devils - 2000
• Night Picnic: Poems - 2001
• The Voice at 3:00 A.M.: Selected Late and New Poems - 2003
• Selected Poems: 1963-2003 - 2004 (winner of the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize)
• My Noiseless Entourage : Poems - 2005

• poets.org biography
• The Courtland Review interview
• Biography by Diva Desai
• Griffin Poetry Prize biography, including audio and video clips