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Nine Poems: A Childhood Story
Poetry.
23 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
8 people want to read
About the author
Charles Simic
257 books471 followersU.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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 14, 2015
Reconstructing gentle days (four years of leaves burning, a face at a window, idleness). Memory is hollow (transience). Playful poems, solemn poems, hymns. Half of what's here is kept in dreams. Joy clustered with death. A new logic (something plastic, unalterable). It's fitting to end a year with this. Grow into it.
January 21, 2008
Charles Simic, Nine Poems (Exact Change Press, 1989)
Despite the great disparity in the look of any given book by Exact Change, you can usually tell it's an Exact Change book. Few other micropresses are as consistent in the quality of their output, both from the standpoint of the work inside and the construction outside, as is Exact Change. Nine Poems is no exception, published as a huge orange chapbook, one poem to a page. And this is good Simic, right here; the nine poems involved are all reflections on childhood done in the inimitable Simic style that mixes traces of surrealism, dada, sentimentalism, wry humor, and various other things in small quantities to produce the gems that flow regularly from Mr. Simic's pen.
Long out of print now, I am sure. But well worth the search. ****
Despite the great disparity in the look of any given book by Exact Change, you can usually tell it's an Exact Change book. Few other micropresses are as consistent in the quality of their output, both from the standpoint of the work inside and the construction outside, as is Exact Change. Nine Poems is no exception, published as a huge orange chapbook, one poem to a page. And this is good Simic, right here; the nine poems involved are all reflections on childhood done in the inimitable Simic style that mixes traces of surrealism, dada, sentimentalism, wry humor, and various other things in small quantities to produce the gems that flow regularly from Mr. Simic's pen.
Long out of print now, I am sure. But well worth the search. ****
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews