A Creative Writer Presentation on the Life and Writings of Charles Simic

For my Creative Writer Presentation, I chose to write about Slavic-American, multi- award-winning writer, Charles Simic. Simic was born May 9th, 1938 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. He moved with his mother and brother to Paris when he was 15 before going to the United States, where his father was, a year later. Simic attended the University of Chicago by working nights at the Chicago Sun Times. He was then drafted into the army from 1961-1963. After serving in the army, he earned his Bachelor's from New York University in 1966. He had his first poems published by the time he was twenty-one. What the Grass Says, his first full-length collection was published the following year in 1960.

With more than twenty books of poetry in his repertoire, Simic is also an essayist, translator, editor, and professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire. He has won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1990) and the Griffin Prize (2005). He was also appointed a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2000 and the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry in 2007. His most recent book is The Lunatic (2015).

Initially, when tasked with finding a creative writer to do my assignment on, I had no idea who I wanted to have as my creative writer, so I just did a search of poems. Eventually, after going through a lot of different pieces, I came across "Charon's Cosmology" by Simic. However, it was not an instant decision to choose Simic and his poem. After finding Simic's poem I did a search on any poems about Charon, because I have always been interested in the primordial deity.

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My honors research project is even a set of short stories about the ferryman and finding poems about him was excited because there is not a lot of writing out there that is strictly about Charon. He is always a background character, despite the huge role he plays in the relm of Greek mythology. After finding only a handful of poems about Charon, as expected, I read them all multiple times and then decided that Simic's poem was the one that I like the most and so, I chose Simic as my creative writer to present.

Interesting and compelling are two words that many in the writing world would use to describe Simic; this is something that is evident from all of the awards and honors that he has received in his career. He is recognized as one of the most visceral and unique poets of today and I would have to agree, even as someone who isn't the biggest fan of the poetry genre. What I find the most interesting about Simic's work is that it isn't very easy to categorize. Some of his poems are realistic and address themes of violence and anguish while others are surreal and offer images of an abstract world. He often blurs the line between reality and fantasy.

Simic also makes ordinary things extraordinary, and vice versa. Numerous articles and review pieces describe Simic and his work as "surreal" and "nightmarish." A great deal of Simic's works, feature clear evidence of him digging deep into his Slavic background as he references European Folklore quite often. As someone is deeply interested in folklore of all origins, those pieces in particular are the ones that really gained my interest. As someone who isn't very interested in poetry as a genre, I found myself able to enjoy Simic's pieces because he uses very clear and accessible language.

"Charon's Cosmology," my choice for the presentation, is a poem about the deity from Greek mythology, Charon, who ferries the souls of the dead across the River Styx as long as they have two coins to offer in exchange. If they don't have money to pay Charon's fee, he leaves them on the banks of the river to roam around, lost, for one-hundred years. Simic's poem, which is one of his earlier works, has a very mythical tone. However, at its simplest form, the piece is about the ferryman being confused about which side of Styx is which because the piles of dead bodies are so similar on each side. For me, the most effective aspect of the poem is Simic's usage of imagery and description. He opens the poem with the line "With only his dim lantern / To tell him where he is."

Here, I can really picture a dim lantern clutched in the decrepit hand of Charon, barely shedding light onto an already dark realm. I'm not sure if this is due to my prior knowledge and understanding of the being and setting, but even if that is the case, Simic's words help cement that image into my mind. The poem's final stanza and closing lines are also very immersive to me: “Once in a long while a mirror / Or a book which he throws / Overboard into the dark river / Swift and cold and deep".

I feel like I may just be hyper-associating, but with these last four lines, not only can I picture the mirror and book being thrown into the river, sinking into its cold, dark depths, but I can also hear it. I can hear how the objects splash into the water and then I can hear the muddled sound that comes with being under water. With this poem in particular, I can really get a sense for why so many reviews describe Simic as a surreal and nightmarish writer. Even though the poem's main premise is based in a bit of ironic humor, it feels very dark and gloomy because of his word choice and use of imagery.

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