With a distinctive blend of humor and gravity, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Charles Simic delighted his audience with a poetry reading delivered before a full audience in the Wren Room of Sanborn Library yesterday.
While speaking to a group of creative writing students before the public reading, Simic discussed the difficulty of making writing into a career, the poets and writers that have influenced his own work and the constantly difficult task of expressing the simplest ideas in clear, direct language.
He includes Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, the Surrealists, and modernist authors of the 1950s and 1960s as his influences.
When asked to offer advice to a young student interested in making writing into a vocation, Simic said, "You really can't make writing a career ... The chances of anyone succeeding in any art are pretty small."
He said, "You spend a lot of time practicing and then find out you're not very good."
He urged young writers to work steadily, to read literature voraciously, and to "do something else in life so you can eat ... There's no short-cut."
While many of his poems seem like they were breathlessly written -- that Simic jotted the lines down on a scrap of paper while waiting for his morning coffee to brew -- he stressed that he constantly reworks and analyzes pieces.
He said he rarely suffers from "writer's block" since his numerous folders of old poems and ideas always give him material with which to work.
Simic began his reading with six unpublished works.
"Mummy's Curse" evoked the style of a "horror movie made in the 1950s," Simic said. The audience responded to his reading with appreciative laughter at his subtle parody of B-grade entertainment.
"To the One Upstairs" took the voice of smart-mouthed human who lectures God, the "know-it-all" up above sitting at his desk under the pretense of being busy.
His quiet humor is also evident in a piece like "In the Street," that opens with the line, "He was leaning down to tie his shoes which she mistook for a proposal of marriage."
Simic read five selections from his most recent volume of poetry "Walking the Black Cat."
"Cameo Appearance" relates a child's white lie that he is one of the characters in a movie.
His final selections came from "A Wedding in Hell." He read a group of "mid-summer poems" that focus on the small, unnoticed creatures of the earth who are given anthropomorphic qualities in Simic's descriptions.
These poems assume a quieter tone that captures the intimate feeling of sitting with an old friend at twilight in front of an expansive meadow, and the rustle of leaves under two lovers entwined below their branches.
Before Simic entered the academic world as a professor of creative writing, he held office jobs in New York and Chicago, enjoyed the excitement of city living, and wrote late at night.
Simic currently teaches creative writing at the University of New Hampshire.
In the 25 years since his first book "What the Grass Says" rolled of the presses in 1967, Simic has produced 11 volumes of poetry.
He is recognized as a Pulitzer winner, and a frequent contributor to variety publications like The New Yorker, The Nation and Harper's Bazaar.
Simic's presentation of his work is the first in the series of Ralph Samual Poetry Readings.
