It’s the birthday of Charles Simic (b. 1938), one of today’s Great Living Poets of surrealist ilk (though he does grim realism as well), whose poetry “removes the safety nets from the everyday.”

Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) and spent his childhood fleeing the violence of WWII; he has said that “My travel agents were Hitler and Stalin.” His father emigrated to Italy, and Simic and his mother eventually made it to Paris and reunited with Dad in the U.S. They settled in Chicago, where Simic started studying at the University of Chicago and began publishing poetry at 21. Simic was drafted in 1961 and finally graduated from New York University in 1966.

Simic’s first collection, What the Grass Says, was published in 1967, and if anyone out there can scare up a more poet-y sounding title for a book, I’ll eat my hat. His work was critically praised from the start, and though written in English draws heavily on his childhood in central Europe.

Simic taught for many years at the University of New Hampshire, has published seven inches of poetry collections and two inches of prose (eyeballing his biblio. in Wikipedia), and has won a list of major awards as long as my husband’s arm, which I’ll wager is longer than yours. (Truly. Two bucks says my husband’s arm is longer.) These awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer for Poetry (1990), and the Frost Medal (2011). He was U.S. Poet Laureate in 2007-08.

Simic’s most recent prose collection is The Life of Images: Selected Prose (2015) and his most recent poetry collection is Scribbled in the Dark (2017) because, in fact, he sometimes scribbles poetry in bed in the dark so he doesn’t wake his wife and also so he can more easily get back to sleep. (Which could explain some of the surrealism. Just saying.) Read a recent interview here: https://lithub.com/charles-simic-literally-writes-in-the-dark/. He sounds like someone you’d want to have dinner with.

Speaking of wakeful nights, Simic’s poem “Hotel Insomnia” (of the eponymous collection published in 1993) begins:

I liked my little hole,
Its window facing a brick wall.
Next door there was a piano.
A few evenings a month
a crippled old man came to play
“My Blue Heaven.”…

Read the rest here: https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/hotel-insomnia/.

Have a cozy, snowy-in-May sort of Saturday, dispense cups of cocoa judiciously as needed, and stay scrupulously honest to the data, which means, seriously, looking at actual data from sound reliable sources please before ripping off that mask in the grocery store.