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Unending Blues
Whether he draws for inspiration on American blues, Serbian folktales, or Greek myths, Simic's words have a way of their own. Each of these forty-four poems is a powerful mixture of concrete images. Each records the reality and myth of the world around us-and in us. "Short, perfectly shaped, Simic's poems float past like feathers, turning one way, then another" (Village Voice).
- GenresPoetry
67 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
2 people are currently reading
77 people want to read
About the author
Charles Simic
256 books472 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 - 18 of 18 reviews
January 17, 2023
Everyone has that one poet who speaks to them and speaks for them. Simic is my guy!
May 7, 2025
Simic's poems are like dreams—constantly in motion, shifting without any clear intention, and probably meaningless to anyone but the dreamer. I didn't really connect with any of these.
Additionally, his insistence that someone be naked in each of his poems proved a continuing distraction; once I noticed the pattern, I could focus on little else.
Additionally, his insistence that someone be naked in each of his poems proved a continuing distraction; once I noticed the pattern, I could focus on little else.
January 23, 2008
Charles Simic, Unending Blues (Harcourt Brace, 1986)
To call Charles Simic a poor man's Clayton Eshleman would probably not be giving Simic his full due. After all, Simic is a Pulitzer Prize winner (1990, for The World Doesn't End), a recipient of a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (Jackstraws), a finalist for the National Book Award (Walking the Black Cat), a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. I mean, the guy's good. Only a purist would find fault with Simic, right?
Probably. And faults to be found with Simic are minor at best, for the most part (the odd "what was he thinking?" line break, etc.). But sometimes, while reading Unending Blues, one of Simic's over-sixty books, it occurred to me that the fundamental premise of what Simic has been trying to do since his first poems were published over forty years ago is one that invites failure. That he succeeds with it as much as he does is astounding.
Simic is a surrealist in many ways (thus my comparing him to Eshleman, by far the foremost American surrealist of the latter half of the twentieth century), but at the same time he has a desire to write accessible, commercially viable work. This is not a bad thing in itself; the quest for commercial viability in poetry, the quest for accessibility, is one of the things that drives many of us. But to combine it with surrealism, one of whose main tropes throughout its existence has been the deliberately obscure? Flirting with disaster, one thinks. The hallmark of the search for accessibility in poetry over the past fifty years has been to provide easy answers to those whose first question upon completing a poem is "but what does it mean?" (and damn the eyes of all English teachers across the world who have led us to believe that what a poem means is the most important thing about it.) It would seem that surrealism, which forces the reader to think, would be anathema. And yet somehow Simic has been pulling it off for decades. And once again, in Unending Blues, he for the most part succeeds. He loses his way every once in a while, but far less than most poets treading such a dangerous path would; the majority of the work here resembles an odd, surrealist T. S. Eliot (in the early years, before Eliot got so wordy) more than it does Billy Collins (or Eshleman).
Unending Blues is not a landmark book. It isn't as mind-numbingly brilliant as Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk, it isn't as commercial as Jackstraws, it doesn't ring with the bell of importance as does White or Walking the Black Cat. But as an intro to Simic, or as a lighter read between two more weighty works, Unending Blues can't be beat. Still in print, which is a tad surprising for a book that in the poetry world was printed in the ice age, and worth picking up. ****
To call Charles Simic a poor man's Clayton Eshleman would probably not be giving Simic his full due. After all, Simic is a Pulitzer Prize winner (1990, for The World Doesn't End), a recipient of a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (Jackstraws), a finalist for the National Book Award (Walking the Black Cat), a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. I mean, the guy's good. Only a purist would find fault with Simic, right?
Probably. And faults to be found with Simic are minor at best, for the most part (the odd "what was he thinking?" line break, etc.). But sometimes, while reading Unending Blues, one of Simic's over-sixty books, it occurred to me that the fundamental premise of what Simic has been trying to do since his first poems were published over forty years ago is one that invites failure. That he succeeds with it as much as he does is astounding.
Simic is a surrealist in many ways (thus my comparing him to Eshleman, by far the foremost American surrealist of the latter half of the twentieth century), but at the same time he has a desire to write accessible, commercially viable work. This is not a bad thing in itself; the quest for commercial viability in poetry, the quest for accessibility, is one of the things that drives many of us. But to combine it with surrealism, one of whose main tropes throughout its existence has been the deliberately obscure? Flirting with disaster, one thinks. The hallmark of the search for accessibility in poetry over the past fifty years has been to provide easy answers to those whose first question upon completing a poem is "but what does it mean?" (and damn the eyes of all English teachers across the world who have led us to believe that what a poem means is the most important thing about it.) It would seem that surrealism, which forces the reader to think, would be anathema. And yet somehow Simic has been pulling it off for decades. And once again, in Unending Blues, he for the most part succeeds. He loses his way every once in a while, but far less than most poets treading such a dangerous path would; the majority of the work here resembles an odd, surrealist T. S. Eliot (in the early years, before Eliot got so wordy) more than it does Billy Collins (or Eshleman).
Unending Blues is not a landmark book. It isn't as mind-numbingly brilliant as Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk, it isn't as commercial as Jackstraws, it doesn't ring with the bell of importance as does White or Walking the Black Cat. But as an intro to Simic, or as a lighter read between two more weighty works, Unending Blues can't be beat. Still in print, which is a tad surprising for a book that in the poetry world was printed in the ice age, and worth picking up. ****
March 3, 2021
For the Lovers of the Absolute
A skinny arm thrown under
Her short-cropped head;
Then the penciled eyebrows,
Lips of a very serious child.
Naked and stretchng herself
As if still convulsed
By passionate embraces—
Knees raised, thighs open
For a peek at the luxurious
Growth of black curls,
Glistening. The man by her side
With eyes shut. Broad chest,
Adam's apple rising evenlt.
Already asleep—mouth open.
One long finely tapered hand
Cupping his sex as if in pain.
Still, instead of snores she hears
The distant artillery fire
That makes the blinds rattle
Ever so slightly; her breasts
Turn that ugly gooseflesh color—
And then she's fast asleep herself.
October 21, 2007
Brian has found a new favorite. For years I have been hearing about the talents of Simic, but havent seen it - with the most recently published works, the ones wildly available, I mean.
Wow, this is it though. This is what I look for in poetry.
Images abound. Images abound.
Wow, this is it though. This is what I look for in poetry.
Images abound. Images abound.
January 9, 2017
I would say most dreams are good, some are bad, but they are all dreams.
Read
August 31, 2024I sense Transtromer, Sachs, Celan, Eliot (one poem discussed both the Cloud of Unknowing and Julian of Norwich), Stevens...
First of all I like the way Simic uses ellipses...
It's graceful and not strained, just like the Eastern Europeans do.
But I see also the way he takes Stevens's metaphysics and gets somewhere more human, more lived, and to me, more beautiful and hopeful. "First Frost" does this I think by combining Eliot (esp. "Little Gidding" and making it interact directly with Stevensian thinking). But also "Caravan" -- the living in imagination so reminiscent of Gluck's "Song," "all things ambiguous and lovely in their ambiguity" (from "Birthday Star Atlas") and "Promises of Leniency and Forgiveness"
for which I will try to articulate a reading
To me, the rain itself seems to be a promise of leniency and forgiveness
because it is a kind of blurring of the world and indicates a ceasing of activity:
"Empty opera house with its lights dimmed,
Thieves' market closed for the day,
O evening sky with your cloudy tableaus!"
And then we have, as such promises of leniency and forgiveness, little glimpses caught in the world itself: "Some hairline fracture of the soul/ Because of these razor-backed hills, bare trees and bushes"
You hear "Burnt Norton"'s sense of the conditional here, but the conditional other life is always peeking through; it does not exist in the more philosophical and abstract and quantum way as in Eliot:
"Life haunted by its more beautiful sister-life"
"The kind of rain that must have whispered in some other life
Of which we know nothing anymore except
That someone kept watching it come down softly,
Already soot-colored to make them think of
Serious children at play, and of balls of lint in a dark dark corner
Like wigs, fright wigs for the infinite"
The sense of illusion, but it is not empty and nihilistic the way Stevens sees illusion. Rather he brings us back, as Eliot does in Little Gidding -- to the beginning, to this sense of play, childhood -- this is the illusion, but it is one of joy
The sense that the "long day's / Woes and forebodings" ("Without a Sough of Wind") may somehow be redeemed by the rain and such hairline fractures of the soul. Things peeking through
First of all I like the way Simic uses ellipses...
It's graceful and not strained, just like the Eastern Europeans do.
But I see also the way he takes Stevens's metaphysics and gets somewhere more human, more lived, and to me, more beautiful and hopeful. "First Frost" does this I think by combining Eliot (esp. "Little Gidding" and making it interact directly with Stevensian thinking). But also "Caravan" -- the living in imagination so reminiscent of Gluck's "Song," "all things ambiguous and lovely in their ambiguity" (from "Birthday Star Atlas") and "Promises of Leniency and Forgiveness"
for which I will try to articulate a reading
To me, the rain itself seems to be a promise of leniency and forgiveness
because it is a kind of blurring of the world and indicates a ceasing of activity:
"Empty opera house with its lights dimmed,
Thieves' market closed for the day,
O evening sky with your cloudy tableaus!"
And then we have, as such promises of leniency and forgiveness, little glimpses caught in the world itself: "Some hairline fracture of the soul/ Because of these razor-backed hills, bare trees and bushes"
You hear "Burnt Norton"'s sense of the conditional here, but the conditional other life is always peeking through; it does not exist in the more philosophical and abstract and quantum way as in Eliot:
"Life haunted by its more beautiful sister-life"
"The kind of rain that must have whispered in some other life
Of which we know nothing anymore except
That someone kept watching it come down softly,
Already soot-colored to make them think of
Serious children at play, and of balls of lint in a dark dark corner
Like wigs, fright wigs for the infinite"
The sense of illusion, but it is not empty and nihilistic the way Stevens sees illusion. Rather he brings us back, as Eliot does in Little Gidding -- to the beginning, to this sense of play, childhood -- this is the illusion, but it is one of joy
The sense that the "long day's / Woes and forebodings" ("Without a Sough of Wind") may somehow be redeemed by the rain and such hairline fractures of the soul. Things peeking through
Read
July 11, 2024I sense Transtromer, Sachs, Celan, Eliot (one poem discussed both the Cloud of Unknowing and Julian of Norwich), Stevens...
First of all I like the way Simic uses ellipses...
It's graceful and not strained, just like the Eastern Europeans do.
But I see also the way he takes Stevens's metaphysics and gets somewhere more human, more lived, and to me, more beautiful and hopeful. "First Frost" does this I think by combining Eliot (esp. "Little Gidding" and making it interact directly with Stevensian thinking). But also "Caravan" -- the living in imagination so reminiscent of Gluck's "Song," "all things ambiguous and lovely in their ambiguity" (from "Birthday Star Atlas") and "Promises of Leniency and Forgiveness"
for which I will try to articulate a reading
To me, the rain itself seems to be a promise of leniency and forgiveness
because it is a kind of blurring of the world and indicates a ceasing of activity:
"Empty opera house with its lights dimmed,
Thieves' market closed for the day,
O evening sky with your cloudy tableaus!"
And then we have, as such promises of leniency and forgiveness, little glimpses caught in the world itself: "Some hairline fracture of the soul/ Because of these razor-backed hills, bare trees and bushes"
You hear "Burnt Norton"'s sense of the conditional here, but the conditional other life is always peeking through; it does not exist in the more philosophical and abstract and quantum way as in Eliot:
"Life haunted by its more beautiful sister-life"
"The kind of rain that must have whispered in some other life
Of which we know nothing anymore except
That someone kept watching it come down softly,
Already soot-colored to make them think of
Serious children at play, and of balls of lint in a dark dark corner
Like wigs, fright wigs for the infinite"
The sense of illusion, but it is not empty and nihilistic the way Stevens sees illusion. Rather he brings us back, as Eliot does in Little Gidding -- to the beginning, to this sense of play, childhood -- this is the illusion, but it is one of joy
The sense that the "long day's / Woes and forebodings" ("Without a Sough of Wind") may somehow be redeemed by the rain and such hairline fractures of the soul. Things peeking through
First of all I like the way Simic uses ellipses...
It's graceful and not strained, just like the Eastern Europeans do.
But I see also the way he takes Stevens's metaphysics and gets somewhere more human, more lived, and to me, more beautiful and hopeful. "First Frost" does this I think by combining Eliot (esp. "Little Gidding" and making it interact directly with Stevensian thinking). But also "Caravan" -- the living in imagination so reminiscent of Gluck's "Song," "all things ambiguous and lovely in their ambiguity" (from "Birthday Star Atlas") and "Promises of Leniency and Forgiveness"
for which I will try to articulate a reading
To me, the rain itself seems to be a promise of leniency and forgiveness
because it is a kind of blurring of the world and indicates a ceasing of activity:
"Empty opera house with its lights dimmed,
Thieves' market closed for the day,
O evening sky with your cloudy tableaus!"
And then we have, as such promises of leniency and forgiveness, little glimpses caught in the world itself: "Some hairline fracture of the soul/ Because of these razor-backed hills, bare trees and bushes"
You hear "Burnt Norton"'s sense of the conditional here, but the conditional other life is always peeking through; it does not exist in the more philosophical and abstract and quantum way as in Eliot:
"Life haunted by its more beautiful sister-life"
"The kind of rain that must have whispered in some other life
Of which we know nothing anymore except
That someone kept watching it come down softly,
Already soot-colored to make them think of
Serious children at play, and of balls of lint in a dark dark corner
Like wigs, fright wigs for the infinite"
The sense of illusion, but it is not empty and nihilistic the way Stevens sees illusion. Rather he brings us back, as Eliot does in Little Gidding -- to the beginning, to this sense of play, childhood -- this is the illusion, but it is one of joy
The sense that the "long day's / Woes and forebodings" ("Without a Sough of Wind") may somehow be redeemed by the rain and such hairline fractures of the soul. Things peeking through
March 14, 2023
Simic's poems take place in an imagined space. Images both strange and familiar inhabit this space, which might be a kitchen, a field, a city street, a bar. He is fond of drawing on generalizable figures (in particular the Fat Woman, for some reason) and letting them inhabit these imagined spaces. There is a comforting strangeness running through every line. The poems are short, enjambment is there but not in-your-face, the stanzas are usually four lines. The language is musical but straight-faced. There is a real sense of humor to many poems. For example: "The enormous engineering problems / you'll encounter by attempting to crucify yourself / Without helpers, pulleys, cogwheels, / And other clever contrivances—[. . .]" Or: "There's a thing in the world / Called a sea cucumber. / I know nothing about it." His favorite objects are trees, breasts, and insects. I did not expect to enjoy this collection as much as I did—Simic will be a name I look for in every bookstore going forward.
June 5, 2019
Begun and finished on my front door step. Very good phrases and lines occasionally but ultimately not my favorite kind of poetry- too many descriptions of material details in visualized tableaus and the amount of times he describes a naked woman for basically no justifiable reason kept bumming me out.
May 27, 2025
Disappointing
I've found, after having read several volumes of Charles Simic’s poetry, that I either really like the poems in each book (and sometimes even love them) or very much not. In this case, I came away disappointed.
I've found, after having read several volumes of Charles Simic’s poetry, that I either really like the poems in each book (and sometimes even love them) or very much not. In this case, I came away disappointed.
June 17, 2019
Disappointing considering how much I loved his other collection
May 13, 2016
4.5
My third Simic.
It was far more accessible than The World Doesn't End, but Simic's flair for jazzy changes of scale with sudden, wildly imaginative, and cryptic imagery is present through and through. He will make you work, but the results are astounding.
My third Simic.
It was far more accessible than The World Doesn't End, but Simic's flair for jazzy changes of scale with sudden, wildly imaginative, and cryptic imagery is present through and through. He will make you work, but the results are astounding.
August 14, 2007
has great moments, but not one of my favorites by simic.
October 2, 2010
Earlier work that didn't capture my attention well.
Read
March 22, 2013811.54 S5896u 1986
January 21, 2014
Mr. Simic has a great appreciation for regular people and things. He seems like one of us, rather than a celebrity.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews