It’s the birthday of another important poet, Louis Simpson (1923-2012, #nicelonglife), whose collection At the End of the Open Road (1963) won the Pulitzer and who was also a respected scholar and critic.

Simpson was born in Kingston, Jamaica. He did not know for most of his childhood that his Russian-born mother was Jewish, nor did he know for even longer that his (mostly) Scottish father had a black mother. Simpson went to a Jamaican boarding school that attempted to be English but elicited in students the feeling that “we were pale carbon copies,” without a real identity. Simpson’s father died when he was 16, and he moved to New York and eventually studied at Columbia University.

Simpson’s studies were interrupted by WWII. He served as an infantryman and afterward suffered from post traumatic stress syndrome (fair enough) but finally returned to Columbia to finish his degree in 1948, followed by a master’s in 1950 and a PhD in 1959. Meanwhile, his first book of poetry, The Arrivistes, had come out in 1949. He worked as an editor for several years but then began teaching at Columbia, then UC Berkeley, and finally at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, where he remained for many years.

At the same time that he was writing and publishing his poetry, Simpson was becoming a critically-acclaimed critic. (How meta is that?) His best known work of criticism was Three on the Tower (1973) about the poets Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams. Simpson’s style as both a poet and a critic was lean and concise. In addition to his poetry and criticism, Simpson wrote two autobiographies, North of Jamaica (1972) and The King My Father’s Wreck (1994).

Simpson’s poem “American Poetry” reads, in its entirety:

Whatever it is, it must have

A stomach that can digest

Rubber, coal, uranium, moons, poems.

 

Like the shark it contains a shoe.

It must swim for miles through the desert

Uttering cries that are almost human.

 

Have a cozy day at home with whichever of your children has a fever and stay scrupulously honest to the data.