Surreal Reality: Charles Simic’s Path from Serbia to US Poet Laureate (A Tribute on the Occasion of His 80th Birthday)

Charles Simic’s literary work stretches over fifty years. He taught writing, English, and creative writing at the University of New Hampshire for over thirty years, and composed poetry, essays, memoirs, criticism, and translations of poetry by Yugoslavian and other poets; in addition, he edited for The Paris Review and contributed to The New York Review of Books. As a teenager, he immigrated to the United States from Belgrade, Yugoslavia, barely speaking English, and later became the 15th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a winner of the PEN Translation Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the Frost Medal. Still, his poetry is unique, “an enigma,” and hard to categorize, says Bruce Weigl in the collection of essays Charles Simic: Essays on the Poetry.¹

Just as the Serbian American genius and scientist Nikola Tesla—who has had a profound impact on science and society at large, and has not been properly recognized—another Serbian American, Charles Simic, has also made a huge impact, only this time on literature. Simic is unclassifiable in the landscape of American poetry. The paradox of Simic is that he is Serbian and not Serbian, an American, yet not American—he is transnational. It is an amazing gift for a poet to write in a language other than his own. Nikola Tesla, who also immigrated to the US, was “supernaturally gifted,” and “perhaps the greatest inventor the world has ever known,” says Margaret Cheney in her book Tesla: Man Out of Time.² Simic, as Richard Howard says, “is just so utterly different from most anything else being written today.”³ Simic, like Tesla, will definitely have a following and leave a lasting impression on poetry in the world. Everyone using electricity, phones, or computers should be thankful to Tesla. Tesla, not Marconi, deserved the Nobel Prize—didn’t get it. Simic does as well, and should get it.

Simic is interested in writing poetry accessible to everyone in its simplicity (Tesla believed electricity and internet should be free to all), which is so Whitmanesque, yet he has his surrealist tendencies, which are so western European. Still, he loves earthiness, the pastoral, “peasants in ourselves,”⁴ and has been influenced by folklore, nursery rhymes, and riddles, which is so Serbian; but he has also been influenced by jazz and blues music, which is very American, and by many European, South American, and American poets. We can see that more in his early work, as in the poem “Two Riddles,” in which he says:

Hangs by a thread—Whatever it is. Stripped naked.Shivering. Human. Mortal.On a thread finer than starlight.⁵

It’s possible that Simic remembers riddles (or rebus, as it is called in Serbian) from his time growing up in Yugoslavia. One does not see anything like the Serbian rebus in American culture. Simic defines himself, saying that many “think of [him] as a Surrealist, a comic poet, a philosophical poet and even a mystic without realizing that [his] poems are obsessed with the misery and horrors of the world [he has] a tragic view, but it hasn’t been noticed much,”⁶ the last of which seems very Serbian these days, yet also so American. Perhaps Simic is a visionary poet. He certainly is an avant-garde poet.

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Simic served as the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2006 to 2007. He follows in the footsteps of other American greats, from Joseph Auslander, the first appointed poet laureate from 1937 to 1941, to such poets as Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Stanley Kunitz, and Ted Kooser, to name a few. Only several of his predecessors were not born in the US: Stephen Spender, born in London (1965–66); Josephine Jacobsen, born in Lake Ontario, Canada (1971–73); and Mark Strand, born in Prince Edward Island, Canada (1990–91). Yet, for all these individuals, English was the first language...