Charles Simic: Very Cool.

The poem I chose for this assignment was "Fork" by Charles Simic. Born in Yugoslavia in 1938, Simic grew up in Europe and has many childhood memories of WWII. "Hitler and Stalin taught us the basics," said Simic.When he was sixteen his family immigrated to Chicago. Simic later received his BA from New York University. Nothing about his writing is distinctively American, in fact Simic is known for writing many translations of French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian poetry. It was not until he was fifteen, did he even learn to speak English.

I enjoy Simics writing very much, it is bizarre and he gives a thrilling sense of imagery. In "Fork" http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=171686 a simple everyday object is transformmed into a haunting "thing" that has "crept right out of hell". He brings us into his world of ultra surrealism.

Another poem i read by Simic was "Eyes Fastened With Pins":http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/eyes-fastened-with-pins/. In this poem he discusses what a long day "Death" (a grim reaper type character I suppose) puts in. It has such a dark ironic humor. Deaths friends and family are at home, drinking beer and chillin and poor Death is out in a "strange part of town looking for someone with a bad cough". I found that line quite ammusing. For this poem, Simic put similar ideas behind his writing as he did in "Fork" but used a different approach, (allow me to explain). In "Fork" a simple object is made into a twisted creature found only in places like nightmares or the Fifth Circle of Hell. In "Eyes Fastened With Pins", the concept of Death (faceing and accepting it) and the portrayl of Death as a person is drawn out as if Death is a regular working class kinda guy. Either way things are not as they seem, which is possibly the theme Simic is trying to get across in his writing.