Remembering Charles Simic (1938-2023)

The Serbian-American poet Charles Simic passed away on January 9, 2023. Simic is pictured here in an undated photo (photographer unknown) held by The New York Public Library’s Berg Collection. 

A former Poet Laureate of the United States and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Simic was a towering figure in American poetry for over half a century. His celebrated books include the collections of poetry The World Doesn’t End (1989), Hotel Insomnia (1992), and The Lunatic (2015), a memoir A Fly in the Soup (2000), and essays Orphan Factory (1997). In addition to his own work, Simic was a poetry editor of the Paris Review and a translator of Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, Slovenian, and French poetry. 

Born in Belgrade (then Yugoslavia, now Serbia), Simic’s childhood was marked by the violence and displacement of World War II, and he immigrated to the United States as a teenager. 

Simic was known for his minimalist prose poetry, with frank reflections on the real and surreal condensed into small, dense fragments of text. The World Doesn’t End begins with the enigmatic lines, “My mother was a braid of black smoke./She bore me swaddled over the burning cities.” Much of his work is characterized by this dreamlike nature, while some of his writing plainly faces the darkness of his early years in Central Europe and his criticisms of the insidiousness of war in his adopted American home. “Millions were dead; everybody was innocent,” he writes in his poem “Paradise Motel,” “I stayed in my room. The President/Spoke of war as a magic love potion…History licked the corners of its bloody mouth.” 

At the heart of Charles Simic’s work is the dark humor of bringing the absurdity of evil to light in the face of fear. He often called himself a “cheerful pessimist.” In his essay “Cut the Comedy,” Simic writes, “If you seek true seriousness, you must make room for both comic and tragic vision…The whole notion of hierarchy and its various supporting institutions depends on the absence of humor. The ridiculousness of authority must not be mentioned…Like poetry, humor is subversive.” 

NYPL’s Berg Collection of English and American Literature contains works by Simic, along with correspondence, manuscripts, drawings, and notebooks.