Charles Simic and the Storm

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Charles Simic is a Serbian-American poet born on May 9, 1938 in Belgrade which was then a part of Yugoslavia. Simic’s early days passed under the effects of the Second World War and he witnessed the effects of Nazism on people. At a very young age, Simic’s father had been captured by the Nazi officials but he managed to escape in the year 1944. Many of his poems such Death List are strongly influenced by the time he spent under the Nazi regime and on the horrors of the holocaust survivors. One of the first poem that Simic published was “What the Grass Says”, this was when he was in high school in USA. Later in 1990 he received the Pulitzer Prize for his collection of prose poetry. If you read any one of the Simic’s poems you won’t be able to understand the clear meaning that he is trying to convey but as you read three or four of them, you will start to realize there is a strange sense of juxtapositions of objects in his works. The poems written by Charles Simic always have the sense of conflict within the poem itself. Simic is not afraid of exploring violence in his poems and this can be justified by his early days. His imagination has the scenes of what he witnessed during the Nazi regime and he seems to be scared of it. However Simic himself justifies his use of violence in the poems, he once said in the interviews, ““Violence is a kind of pathetic, perverted attempt to feel. The poems try to understand its origins, to see its consequences, to exorcise its demons”. (The Michigan Press, 1985) He adds to this, “My subject is really poetry in times of madness. There are people out there who have the means to murder me and everyone I love without giving us advance notice. We are all on death row” The above dialogue of his, clearly explains the influence of the capturing of his dad by the Nazis on him. If we try to see the depth of his words, then we would
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