The saddest moments in my life as an editor occur when word reaches me that a guest editor in The Best American Poetry series has passed away. Charlie died some five months shy of what would have been his 85th birthday. Born in Belgrade in 1938, he had dreams and memories that he could draw upon from his early boyhood in battle-rorn, Nazi-occupied Yugloslavia. In A Fly in the Soup, his absorbing memoir, Simic tells of growing up in war-torn Yugoslavia: “My family, like so many others, got to see the world for free, thanks to Hitler’s wars and Stalin’s takeover of East Europe.” Simic and his little friends played soldiers as the war went on: “A boy a little older than I had disappeared. It turned out that he had slipped out to watch the bombs fall. When the men brought him back, his mother started slapping him hard and yelling she’s going to kill him if he ever does that again. I was more frightened of her slaps than of the sound of the bombs.” When the Americans arrived in Belgrade, they took the Simic family to the barracks and gave them chewing gum, chocolate, bacon and eggay.
Maybe the happiest moment in Charlie’s life came when he and his family arived in America in 1954. Charlie and his brother watched a Dodgers-Giants game on television, ate burgers and fries, and ended in a jazz club (the Metropole): “I was all absorbed in the music. This was definitely better than any radio. It was heaven.” He has also written, “Awe is my religion, and mystery is its church.”
Charlie lovd jazz and jazz clubs and barroom philosophy. He wrote poems that critics characterized as surreal and did highly innovative work with the prose poem as a form. When he won the Pulitzer Prize, for a book of his prose poems, it marked a signal event in the history of that genre that Baudelaire invented and that the French (Rimbaud, Jacob, Michaux, Ponge, Char) established into a tradition.
When I worked with Charlie on The Best American Poetry, I remember the poems that knocked us out — we were crazy about “Nostalgia” by Billy Collins, then a new voice, and we had poems by Lawrence Raab, Carolyn Kizer, Elizabeth Spires, Alice Fultoin, Galway Kinnell, Charles Bernstein. After that year of close reading, when we got together for lunch or dinner, we talked as much about jazz and popular songs as about poetry. Charlie loved the girl singers of the 1920s and he made me tapes of Lillian Roth (“Tell Me, Why Am I So Rromantic?”) and Bee Palmer (“Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone”) and of great piano music that he recorded in bars. In the background you could hear someone shouting “hey Paulie” — people at the bar holding their conversations, music or no; Charlie got a kick out of that. Wine, he knew his wines, and one of his favorite New York restraurants was Provence on MacDougal Street near where I lived. — DLAt the launch reading of Best American Poetry 1992, organized by William Wadsworth for the Academy of American Poets. As I recall Jonathan Aaron, Agha Shahid Ali, Lynda Hull, and Rosanna Warren read their poems from the anthology after I ininitated the evening and Charlie introduced the book.
Above, left to right: Charles Simic, David Lehman, Rosanna Warren, Lloyd Schwartz (Boston, April 2013)
See also:
BAP 1992 launch reading
https://poets.org/text/archive-charles-simic-and-david-lehman
Photo Gallery, Lannan Foundation, March 14 2007
https://www.flickr.com/photos/lannan/albums/72157621824004165/
Podcast March 14, 2007
https://podcast.lannan.org/2007/03/19/charles-simic-with-david-lehman/
Go to Source
Author: The Best American Poetry
