Charles Simic
Charles Simic
Charles Simicis a Serbian-American poet and was co-poetry editor of the Paris Review. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 for The World Doesn't End, and was a finalist of the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for Selected Poems, 1963-1983 and in 1987 for Unending Blues. He was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2007...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth9 May 1938
CityBelgrade, Serbia
CountryUnited States of America
The religion of the short poem, in every age and in every literature, has a single commandment: Less is always more. The short poem rejects preamble and summary. It's about all and everything, the metaphysics of a few words surrounded by much silence. …The short poem is a match flaring up in a dark universe.
For Emily Dickinson every philosophical idea was a potential lover. Metaphysics is the realm of eternal seduction of the spirit by ideas.
The truth is dark under your eyelids.
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
Insomnia is an all-night travel agency with posters advertising faraway places.
I slept little, read a lot, and fell in love frequently.
Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all others were making ships.
I do believe that a poem needs to remind the reader of his or her own humanity, of what they are, of what they're capable of. Awaken them, in a sense, to the fact that there's a world in front of their eyes, that they have a body, they're going to die, the sky is beautiful, it's fun to be in a grassy field when the sun is shining—those kinds of things.
Found objects, chance creations, ready-mades (mass-produced items promoted into art objects, such as Duchamp's "Fountain"-urinal as sculpture) abolish the separation between art and life. The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen.
The secret wish of poetry is to stop time.
Making art in America is about saving one's soul.
One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.
Silence is the only language god speaks.
He who cannot howl will not find his pack.