Selected Early Poems

by Charles Simic

When this selection of Charles Simic's work first appeared, it was hailed as "easily the best volume of poetry published in 1985....[Simic] is one of the wisest poets of his generation, and one of the best." ( The Georgia Review ) For this new edition of his selected poems, Simic has added twenty-eight poems and extensively revised others, making this the most complete collection available of his early work. In the spare, haunting vision of these poems, the familiar takes on a disturbing, often sinister, presence. A fork "resembles a bird's foot / Worn around the cannibal's neck" and a bird's chirp is "Like a match flickering / In a new grave." Life's horrors--violence, hunger, poverty, illness--lurk unnervingly in the background. And yet, despite the horror, a sense of wonder pervades these poems, transforming the ordinary world into a mysterious place of unknowable forces. Classic displays of the economy and grace of Simic's work, these poems occupy an established place in American poetry.

Genres: Poetry

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

U.S. Poet Laureate, 2007-2008

Dušan Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, former Yugoslavia, on May 9, 1938. Simic’s childhood was complicated by the events of World War II. He moved to Paris with his mother when he was 15; a year later, they joined his father in New York and then moved to Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, where he graduated from the same high school as Ernest Hemingway. Simic attended the University of Chicago, working nights in an office at the Chicago Sun Times, but was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1961 and served until 1963.

Simic is the author of more than 30 poetry collections, including The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems (1989), which received the Pulitzer Prize; Jackstraws (1999); Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (2004), which received the International Griffin Poetry Prize; and Scribbled in the Dark (2017). He is also an essayist, translator, editor, and professor emeritus of creative writing and literature at the University of New Hampshire, where he taught for over 30 years.

Simic has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His other honors and awards include the Frost Medal, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the PEN Translation Prize. He served as the 15th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, and was elected as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2001. Simic has also been elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘My life is at the mercy of my poetry.’

I am always weary of collections calling attention to ‘Early Poems’ however, as Charles Simic is my poet idol, I found it necessary to delve into the early worlds of the great master. My weariness of this sort of collection stems from the awkwards ‘Juvenalia’ sections found hiding by the back cover of great Collected Works like a shy child clutching their parents leg when meeting a stranger. While it is fascinating to see the poems written by Dylan Thomas ‘before his 16th birthday,’ as found in his collected works, or the poems submitted for class by Sylvia Plath found in her own, these poems were never intended for publication and I wonder if they would approve of their inclusion had they been alive to protest. To aid in building the mystique of a great master of art, it helps to never let your practice be seen or heard; on the other hand it is encouraging to budding or would-be artists to see that even their idols had to start somewhere. Luckily, this is not the case with Simic’s Selected Early Poems, as he approved and provided an insightful, humorous and modest introduction. While the poems contained within don’t sparkle like a brilliant star on a cold clear night as his later works do, the poems found here are enough to cause awe and wonderment and help trace the artistic growth of a fresh and striking voice in modern poetry.

Charles Simic has an ability to take an ordinary observation and put it through a barrel-roll of glorious metaphoric power, coming out on the other side of the maneuver as something extraordinary. The poems here are no different and allows readers to see the world in exciting new ways, as in the series of poems about different silverware:

Fork
This strange thing must have crept
Right out of hell.
It resembles a bird’s foot
Worn around the cannibal’s neck.

As you hold it in your hand,
As you stab with it into a piece of meat,
It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:
Its head which like your fist
Is large, bald, beakless, and blind.

It is interesting to see Simic toy with form in this collection, playing with line breaks and structure in ways unseen in his later works when he had a clear sense of his own style. What is most assuring about this collection is to see that even from his humble beginnings (in his introduction, Simic points out that the poems Butcher Shop and Cockroach were the first two poems he felt proud enough of to show to others) Simic had a voice all of his own. I have recently read Bukowski’s collection Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame which contains much of his earliest work as well. As a contrast to this, Burning only shows sparks of an original voice in the earlier poems (not that the poems are bad, but mostly generic and without a unique voice letting them ring out beyond a quagmire of influences), and shows Bukowski attempting to be poetic instead of just merely letting the poetry flow. Here too, however, Simic seems to be trying to control his poetry as if it were a dog on a leash that he keeps tugging in the direction he desires instead of letting the poem run free and trusting it to make it home safely at the end of the day like he does in his later work.

Perhaps the most enjoyable portion of this collection is the introduction itself, Simic opening up his heart and poking fun at his own poetic efforts (‘I have known a number of young poets...who gave up poetry even after being told they were geniuses. No one ever made that mistake with me, and yet I kept going.’ He compares his poetry to playing chess, often being beaten but enjoying how he tends towards short poems that require

endless tinkering...they depend for their success on the placement of words and image in proper order, and their progression duplicates the inevitability and surprise of an elegantly executed checkmate.

Particularly humorous is his confession that he wrote poetry as a young schoolboy primarily as an art of seduction, and wrote in English instead of his native tongue since ‘no American girl was likely to fall for a guy who reads love poems to her in Serbian as she sips a Coca-Cola.’

This early collection is a great addition to any library, particularly for those already enamoured by the words of Simic. This is not a great introduction to him and I would advise starting with a selected works or either Walking the Black Cat or Master of Disguises. The surrealism and humor and wit is all present, but there is much unpolished experimentation and the noir vibe that permeates his greatest collections is all but absent. Fun, funny and always fascinating, Charles Simic holds the poetic key to my heart.

Eyes Fastened with Pins
How much death works,
No one knows what a long
Day he puts in. The little
Wife always alone
Ironing death’s laundry.
The beautiful daughters
Setting death’s supper table.
The neighbors playing
Pinochle in the backyard
Or just sitting on the steps
Drinking beer. Death,
Meanwhile, in a strange
Part of town looking for
Someone with a bad cough,
But the address somehow wrong,
Even death can’t figure it out
Among all the locked doors...
And the rain beginning to fall.
Long windy night ahead.
Death with not even a newspaper
To cover his head, not even
A dime to call the one pining away,
Undressing slowly, sleepily,
And stretching naked
On death’s side of the bed.

Cockroach
When I see a cockroach
I don't grow violent like you.
I stop as if a friendly greeting
Had passed between us.
*
This roach is familiar to me.
We met here and there,
In the kitchen at midnight,
and now on my pillow.
*
I can see it has a couple
Of my black hairs
Sticking out of it's head,
And who knows what else?
*
It carries false papers—
Don't ask me how I know.
False papers, yes,
With my greasy thumbprint.

[Ryo Yamaguchi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Covers “What the Grass Says” (1967) to “Pyramids and Sphinxes” (1979). Simic comes across as pretty consistent, with his hallmark tight poems, easy, not too pushy surrealism, with some notable and equally consistent departures with poems like “The Tomb of Stephane Mallarme” or “Furniture Mover,” which toy with more disruptive enjambment and a more incantatory rhythm–poems like these, in fact, feel like the anti-Simic, and yet his sensibility is still there, so the collection as a whole is still Simic all the way. Also of note is the more direct images of warfare and aftermath in the early works, as example, the poem “The Lesson” or the really startling "A Landscape with Crutches"–this feeling, the kind of silence-immediately-following, is much stronger in the earlier works, I think, as represented here.

[Jay · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars rounded up because of a strong finish.

It took me a while to get into this collection, and I actually put it down midway to read a novel. I do not appreciate the style of starting each line with a capital letter...I think it is better to let the grammar of the sentence decide on capitalization. To be honest, it made it even harder to read than the poetry in all lower case - looking at you, Rupi Kaur.

I was able to enjoy the latter half more once I became comfortable with the style. There are a few gems in here. I can understand someone giving this a 5-star rating and loving Simic's style, but it wasn't for me; it just did not hook me.

I picked this book up because I heard that Simic was similar to Billy Collins, a poet I've always found easy to understand. I do find the poets similar, so if you're looking for a like-mind, there you go. Jack Gilbert would be another.

[Abigail Price · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was 2/4 poetry books recommended to me by my dad, the first being Elizabeth Bishop. Overall would recommend Simic. Can't say I particularly understood what he was talking about most of the time but he was obviously skilled. I definitely preferred Bishop's nature poems, but I think that's mostly a matter of taste. The poems I enjoyed most from this collection were about nature. However, most of Simic's poems just give the vibe of bare, empty, silent apartments in the dead of winter. Not exactly the kind of poetry to send me into raptures.

[Keri Stewart · Rating 3 out of 5]

I greatly appreciated his surreal imagery combined with the psychological basis and notions of consciousness depicted in a great deal of his poems. He does a great job at conveying man's destructive nature and I loved how he challenges the concepts of reality, such as by checking if a "table is still a table" and exploring who/what the self is.

[Paul Mehnert · Rating 4 out of 5]

get rid of the one about titties

[Brian Beatty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Simic's short poems are the gold standard. I've stolen more from him than I'm willing to admit.

[A L]

Beautiful, dark, funny.

[H]

the closing stanza of “my beloved” was my favorite moment in this, though overall i found more to enjoy than i expected. some of the images throughout—!

[Greg11 · Rating 5 out of 5]

👑

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Selected Early Poems showcases Charles Simic’s Clothoic power to locate and spin the essential thread that weaves through the experienced world. From the humorous anthropomorphization of the inanimate, to cryptic horror Simic’s voice doesn’t so much observe life as much as he pulls on the threads extending through all things to animate them- to give life where it can easily be overlooked. In Simic’s world, stones are sentient, ditches anticipate the dead, and even though a darkness hangs near his imagery Simic voice never loses sight of life’s miraculous value.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel a little bit cheezy bringing this one up, since I only read half of it.

But I connected, gosh darn it, and I connected Hard.

I keep forgetting to get a copy whenever I'm in a bookstore (who remembers what they're going to get in a bookstore, anyway? It's like food shopping) and it was a friend's copy and I stayed up half the night digging in....so, hate if you want. I'm keepin' my bay-be......

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

unexpectedly appropriate souls for forgotten moments. Surreal visions that make too much sense

[Jerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fork was my favorite poem in this book. Simic is slowly crawling up the list as one of my favorite poets.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Breathless and utterly genius. The only poet I know who can genuinely pull of surrealism. And the best poem about a Fork you've ever read.

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars for "Fork" alone...brilliant poet and collection, I carried this book around with me for months

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely and clever.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

My friend says this book is like seeing the world after a deep huff of VapoRub. Hear, hear. Read this book and clear up your sinuses.

[Catherine Corman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Does he kneel and pray for eternal life?
No, he's busy drawing a valentine with a crayon.

-Charles Simic, "Further Adventures of Charles Simic"