Poet laureate

On August 2, 2007, Charles Simic, 69, who was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and immigrated to the country at 16, was named the country’s 15th poet laureate by the Librarian of Congress. He succeeded Donald Hall, a fellow New Englander, who has been poet laureate for the past year. Here are some quotes from newspaper reports and a handful of his poems. (Others can be found on the Internet.)

Simic said his chief poetic preoccupation has been history. "I'm sort of the product of history; Hitler and Stalin were my travel agents," he said. "If they weren't around, I probably would have stayed on the same street where I was born. My family, like millions of others, had to pack up and go, so that has always interested me tremendously: human tragedy and human vileness and stupidity."

Yet he balks at questions about the role of poetry in culture. "That reminds me so much of the way the young Communists in the days of Stalin at big party congresses would ask, 'What is the role of the writer?' " he said.

Simic is known for short, clear poems. His poem "Stone" often appears in anthologies. It begins:

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger's tooth.
I am happy to be a stone..."

Fear -

Fear passes from man to man
Unknowing,
As one leaf passes its shudder
To another.

All at once the whole tree is trembling.
And there is no sign of the wind.

My Turn to Confess

A dog trying to write a poem on why he barks,
That's me, dear reader!
They were about to kick me out of the library
But I warned them,
My master is invisible and all-powerful.
Still, they kept dragging me out by my tail.

In the meantime, in San Francisco (quote from the metropolitan newspaper):

"Sorry I was late," Lawrence Ferlinghetti apologized to the overflowing crowd at Caffe Trieste. "I was putting more Impeach signs on the upper windows at City Lights."

The crowd cheered.

No, that was not a report from an Agitprop event, but from the San Francisco Poetry Festival (what followed was more angry political rants recited by the 88 year old Mr Ferlinghetti.) Poetry anyone?