Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Charles Simic at the Chicago Library

One of my favorite books is The World Doesn't End by Charles Simic. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1990, the book continues to inspire me as a place where humanity and poetry intersect. I'm sure humanity and poetry intersect in other poetry as well, but in Simic's work it's like an analysis that includes inspiration. If there is such a thing as a map of intuition, this is it. The word surreal or surrealism is often applied to it. It seems to me a type of wit. Wit in the sense that the so-called Metaphysical poets used the term.

Mr. Simic is now U.S. Poet Laureate, and he will be reading in Chicago this Saturday, the 26th of April, 2008. I so want to go, but with gas prices the way they are it isn't reasonable for me to go, especially since I'm without a job and looking for work. It's a five-plus hour drive for me (one way).

Announcement:

Poetry Off the Shelf: Charles Simic
SATURDAY, APRIL 26, 12:00 PM
Cindy Pritzker Auditorium
Harold Washington Library Center
400 South State Street
Noon. Free Admission.
Charles Simic, current Poet Laureate of the United States, was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1938, and immigrated to the United States in 1953, at the age of 15. He has lived in New York, Chicago, the San Francisco area, and for many years in New England, where he was a professor of English at the University of New Hampshire until his retirement. A poet, essayist, and translator, he has been honored with the Wallace Stevens Award, a Pulitzer Prize, two PEN Awards for his work as a translator, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Simic has published numerous collections of poems, among them, My Noiseless Entourage (2005); Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (2004), for which he received the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize; The Voice at 3:00 A.M.: Selected Late and New Poems (2003); The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems (1990), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Selected Poems: 1963-1983 (1990); Classic Ballroom Dances (1980), which won the University of Chicago's Harriet Monroe Award and the Poetry Society of America's di Castagnola Award. His new book of poems, That Little Something, will be out in Spring of 2008. Simic has also published several prose books and translations.

Co-sponsored with the Chicago Public Library

This announcement and a selection of Mr. Simic's poems posted online are available at The Poetry Foundation, http://poetryfoundation.org/programs/events.html accessed 4/23/08.



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