The poetry of Charles Simic specializes in illustrating the profound of the banal. Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1938 (Ford). He is of Serbian origin. Naturally, his youth was dominated by the Nazi period. Although much of Simic's work derives from this era (Ford), he often explores the legacy of such a totalizing war against Western society and culture. Simic's father fled Yugoslavia in 1944 and was not reunited with his family until a decade later, in 1954, in the United States (Ford). In the United States, Simic worked a series of odd jobs until he joined the army in 1961, then returned to Europe as a military policeman in Germany and France (Ford). After some time in New York, in 1973 he accepted a professorship at the University of New Hampshire, where he has remained ever since (Ford).Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Simic's poetry is an exegesis of his times. His work encompasses both the tragedy of war and the monotony of modern life. There are underlying currents of conflict in Simic's work. Tensions arise between Europe and America, between the profound and the mundane, and between the profound, but perhaps ephemeral, legacy of Europe at war over Western life. Simic's work should be understood as balancing these apparent contradictions in a frank and illuminating way. Simic's poems are not long and do not get carried away with verbosity. For Simic, reflections on everyday interactions and objects evoke the important motives and conflicts that colored his life. Simic juxtaposes these tensions and interpolates his poems with a touch of enriching simplicity. His work is best understood as an ode to the post-war mentality of relief and unease, and perhaps as a slight loss of words in modern life following the horrors and atrocities of the Nazi regime. Simic discusses the importance of the brevity of his work in his interview with Michael Milburn. Although Simic's poems could be criticized as being very uniform in structure and perhaps too short, he refuses to equate excellence with length. He describes to Milburn: “When I was 21, I wrote an 80-page poem about the cruelties of the Spanish Inquisition, in the style of Pound's Cantos. For a few months I thought it was a work of true greatness, and then one day my eyes were opened” (Milburn 157). Simic, throughout his life, was a voracious reader and consumer of historical and philosophical knowledge. However, he rarely inserts specific references, or even proper names, in his brief poems. Although Simic has the ability to go into a detailed account of the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, he sees the feeling of such pain as best described rather than related. He goes on to say: “I can now fit all my notions of heaven and earth on the cover of a matchstick. By temperament, I am a miniaturist. I paint angels on pinheads. I do tricks with breadcrumbs” (157). Simic's minimalism reflects a tendency in postwar literature to avoid explicit statements and focus on emotion. Simic is devoid of the stereotypical pretensions of the modern poet. Like his poetry, which depicts everyday life, Simic appreciates less educated and inexperienced readers and values ​​their engagement in his work. In his interview with Milburn, Simic explains: “Years ago in New York, while teaching poetry in schools, I realized that even a semi-literate juvenile delinquent could be gifted in poetry. Mypoems invited readers to use their imagination, and they had no difficulty in this area” (156). Simic's appreciation for the imagination and the young reader demonstrates his almost humanistic faith in the value of a wide range of people engaging with his work. This illustrates Simic's conscious accessibility and recognition of mass culture and the value of the individual in modern life. Simic's appreciation for the poor and the working class is explored in an interview with JM Spalding. Simic exclaims to Spalding: “Our cities are full of homeless people and crazy people who talk to themselves. Few people seem to notice them. I watch them and I listen to them’” (Spalding). While this admission may seem out of place, it helps characterize Simic's creative process. He states, “'I would rather live in Harlem than in Westchester County'” (Spalding). Simic strives to be a poet whose work inspires almost everyone and can speak to almost everyone. Simic's experience with brevity is fundamentally rooted in his postwar worldview. For Simic, in contemporary Western life, there is no unifying national narrative that gives credence to the epic. In a post-Holocaust world that has rejected many forms of extreme patriotism, Simic is skeptical of supposedly common cultures. In his interview with Milburn, Simic says: "Our poets have a lot to say, but for this kind of long poem you need a common culture, a religion you believe in, a mythology and a history - and, like everyone knows it, it is no longer available to us’” (Milburn 158). Simic appreciates humanists such as Whitman who explore shared cultures through connections to nature and everyday life. However, Simic seems less convinced by Ginsberg's sometimes mechanical and referential depictions of postwar American life (158). Simic sees his own work as a more simplistic beauty emerging from the maelstrom identified by Ginsberg. Simic writes: “My poems are a kind of found poetry. I discover what little we see on the page over long periods of writing” (158). Simic's poems are both explanatory and applicable. His work is not anchored in a particular cultural narrative, but nevertheless explores daily post-war Western life. Simic's minimalism extends to a humorous critique of modern malaise and the contemporary human condition. At the conclusion of his book The World Doesn't End, Simic writes: "'My secret identity is / The room is empty, / And the window is open'" (159). Here, Simic's minimalism achieves a concrete connection with modern life. As his character longs to recognize his "secret identity", he cannot help but be overwhelmed by the loneliness of his surroundings in the empty room and the countless possibilities conjured up by the open window. This reflects a position that is, in its essence, particularly postmodern. Of his poetry, Simic says: "'I have always subscribed to the old symbolist idea that the poet performs only part of the creative act, the reader does the rest'" (159). Simic views the reader as an active participant in the poem, perhaps playing a more important role than the poet himself. Like the character who may take such a solitary opportunity to try to express his secret identity, the reader is able to attribute a multitude of meanings to Simic's work in the solitary act of reading the poem. On this passage, Simic explains that "'The poem must have come from an inspired and drastic act of butchery'" (159). For Simic, there is no take-home message at the end of his Pulitzer Prize-winning book. It is up to the reader toattribute meaning to oneself. Simic's poetry also reflects the ephemeral nature of the legacy of war and human tragedy in general. He states that “'Even history, which I take much more seriously than the history of my loves and my sorrows, is ultimately not a subject'” (161). Simic does not consider history complete or exhaustive enough to be considered a subject in its own right in his work. A poem about a war experience can be extrapolated to make another point. He explains, “I often begin by talking about great horrors and injustices, but the words on the page take me to a totally unrelated subject” (161). In much of his war work, Simic moves from an observation of the Nazis or their crimes to a more universal interaction or object that could be interpreted by the reader from multiple perspectives. In “Two Dogs,” Simic recalls “The earth was shaking, death was passing / A little white dog ran into the street / And got caught in the feet of the soldiers.” A kick made him fly as if he had wings. This is what I keep seeing! / Night falls. A dog with wings. (Ford). In his episode, Simic begins the passage likening the Nazi procession to “death passing”. However, he moves away from the image of the Nazi soldiers and towards the dog flying in the night sky. Its simple but evocative images point the reader in several different directions and allow them to draw their own conclusions about the passage. Simic's interview with Mark Ford for The Paris Review addresses the tension and juxtaposition of Europe and the United States in Simic's book. life and poetry. Arriving in the United States for the first time, Simic felt very far from Europe. He says: “It was an astonishing sight in 1954. Europe was so gray and New York so bright. European cities look like opera sets. New York looked like painted sets in a carnival spectacle where the bearded woman, the sword swallowers, the snake charmers and the magicians made their appearances” (Ford). For Simic, New York represented a land of opportunity and joy, while Europe was still reeling from the deep wounds of the catastrophic Nazi regime. However, the contrast between Nazi-era Europe and contemporary times is not so stark for Simic. He believes that “the same type of crazy people who made the world what it was when I was a kid are still here. » They want more wars, more prisons, more massacres. It's all horribly familiar, very boring and frightening, of course” (Ford). Simic argues that the world is this way despite the fact that his mother felt that her family's life had lost all meaning because of history (Ford). Despite the glamor of modern American culture, the threats of Europe at war persist for Simic. Simic explores the legacy of post-war Europe in the United States and in his personal life in "Butcher Shop." In the poem, Simic delights in the butcher shops in his Manhattan neighborhood that remind him of the staples of Belgrade. However, Simic cannot shake off the darker connotations of these stores linked to the tragedy and destruction of World War II. Simic acknowledges that “at that time, there were still Polish and Italian butchers in this part of the city. Of course, it reminded me of Europe, my childhood. » This familiar sight must have taken Simic away from the comfort of the land in which he grew up. , “There is a block of wood where the bones are broken, / Scraped - a river dried up to its bed / Where I am nourished, / Where deep in the night I hear a voice” (Ford). Simic uses the imagery of “broken” and “scraped” “bones” to evoke very familiar images of carnage.