Charles Simic
Another beautiful sunny morning here in Middleburgh, as we note the birth date of Charles Simic (May 9, 1938 – January 9, 2023), Serbian-American poet and co-poetry editor of the Paris Review.
He received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 for "The World Doesn't End" and was a finalist of the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for "Selected Poems, 1963–1983" and in 1987 for "Unending Blues". Simic was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2007.
Simic became known in the early to mid-1970s as a literary minimalist, writing terse, imagistic poems. Critics have referred to Simic's poems as "tightly constructed Chinese puzzle boxes". He wrote on such diverse topics as jazz, art, and philosophy and was influenced by Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda, and Fats Waller.
Click on the following link to see Charles Simic read his poem “Summer Morning”
https://youtu.be/gjE1nDxJ0ys
Summer Morning
I love to stay in bed
All morning,
Covers thrown off, naked,
Eyes closed, listening.
Outside they are opening
Their primers
In the little school
Of the cornfield.
There’s a smell of damp hay,
Of horses, laziness,
Summer sky and eternal life.
I know all the dark places
Where the sun hasn’t reached yet,
Where the last cricket
Has just hushed; anthills
Where it sounds like it’s raining,
Slumbering spiders spinning wedding dresses.
I pass over the farmhouses
Where the little mouths open to suck,
Barnyards where a man, naked to the waist,
Washes his face and shoulders with a hose,
Where the dishes begin to rattle in the kitchen.
The good tree with its voice
Of a mountain stream
Knows my steps.
It, too, hushes.
I stop and listen:
Somewhere close by
A stone cracks a knuckle,
Another rolls over in its sleep.
I hear a butterfly stirring
Inside a caterpillar.
I hear the dust talking
Of last night’s storm.
Farther ahead, someone
Even more silent
Passes over the grass
Without bending it.
And all of a sudden
In the midst of that quiet
It seems possible
To live simply on the earth.
--Charles Simic
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