A NEW YORK REVIEW E-BOOK ORIGINAL As former U.S. poet laureate Charles Simic has said, the secret to our identities lies not in grand events, but in the parentheses between events--and in these brief essays, we get a taste of this great poet's parenthetical observations and recollections. He takes us from his rattling house on a stormy New Hampshire night, to a park bench in Washington Square where two old men sit discussing the women they've known, to a business convention in Topeka where he reads a poem, to the vanished subterranean jazz clubs of old New York, and beyond. Part autobiographical fragment, part waking dream, these pieces are marked by Simic's characteristic wit, audacity, and awe before life's strangeness.
Contents include: --Reminiscing about the Night Before --Strangers on a Train --Confessions of a Poet Laureate --The Blustering Blast --The Buster Keaton Cure --On Losing --On the Couch with Philip Roth, at the Morgue with Pol Pot
Charles Simic (1938-2023) was a poet, essayist and translator. He has received many literary awards for his poems and his translations, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize and the MacArthur Fellowship. Simic was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry in 2007, and was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2000. He was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1995, and was the recipient of the 2007 Wallace Stevens Award by the Academy of American Poets.
A NEW YORK REVIEW E-BOOK ORIGINAL As former U.S. poet laureate Charles Simic has said, the secret to our identities lies not in grand events, but in the parentheses between events--and in these brief essays, we get a taste of this great poet's parenthetical observations and recollections. He takes us from his rattling house on a stormy New Hampshire night, to a park bench in Washington Square where two old men sit discussing the women they've known, to a business convention in Topeka where he reads a poem, to the vanished subterranean jazz clubs of old New York, and beyond. Part autobiographical fragment, part waking dream, these pieces are marked by Simic's characteristic wit, audacity, and awe before life's strangeness.
Contents include: --Reminiscing about the Night Before --Strangers on a Train --Confessions of a Poet Laureate --The Blustering Blast --The Buster Keaton Cure --On Losing --On the Couch with Philip Roth, at the Morgue with Pol Pot
Author
Charles Simic (1938-2023) was a poet, essayist and translator. He has received many literary awards for his poems and his translations, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize and the MacArthur Fellowship. Simic was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry in 2007, and was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2000. He was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1995, and was the recipient of the 2007 Wallace Stevens Award by the Academy of American Poets.
