Glad you all are here.
Thanks for coming.
My name is Tyler.
I work here as the director at the Poetry Center.
Really happy to have a great giant crowd here tonight.
Really happy to have Charles Simic in town to be with us,
and to visit, and to read again at the Poetry Center
after some years away.
I want to introduce Charles, but before I
do that, I want to just do some quick housekeeping
about some upcoming events that are happening at the Poetry
Center, and also remind you that after the reading is over,
we'll have a short Q and A that Patri will help us with.
And then we have books for sale over here.
Am I right, at a discount?
And so I think that the bookstore gives us
a 20% discount.
So tonight's your night if you're
interested in some books.
And we'll have Charles signing them after the readings.
It's a pleasure to introduce Charles Simic.
As well as any poet that I know, Charles Simic's poems skirt
the razor-thin line between the knowledge of the complete
wretchedness of the world that it's always capable
of and destined somehow--to somehow perpetuate in cascading
public and private ways, but also impossibly the marvelous
wonder that we exist at all in the beautiful, and wild,
and hilarious, and pleasurable things.
These are also likewise available to us
in every waking moment as it ever was.
What does it mean to write poetry between this tension?
What do we imagine we might learn or enjoy
from poems that flutter past us with that backdrop that's
always behind?
I'm reminded of the idea that poetry teaches us
that we can live twice.
In the lived experience and in the recollected
that reminds us that we have lived,
or that helps us to remember that we're
living in the first place.
Simic has made a life out of all of this extra living.
Much of his poetry is in wonder of the things of the world.
What might seem like smaller domesticity sometimes,
a temptation might be to imagine only the smallness, and what
a poverty that would be.
Far be it from me to suggest that everything always
means something else.
But Simic's work reminds us constantly
that poems are made of language, and language doesn't mean
in fixed and reliable ways.
In his essay, "Notes on Poetry and Philosophy," he says this,
this is a quote, "The literal leads to the figurative.
And inside every figure of value there's
a theater where a play is in progress.
The play is about the gods and demons and the world
and its baffling presence and variety."
End quote.
That play is always an ever underneath everything
with language.
A tiny biography, Simic grew up in the former Yugoslavia
during the height of Nazism and the fallout and poverty
in the years after the war.
You can read about this in Simic's prose.
His family immigrated to the United States when he was 15.
He's had a distinguished career teaching writing
and American literature at the University of New Hampshire
and also at NYU.
In an incredibly deep body of work that spans five decades
and more than 40 books of his poetry, his prose,
his translations from the French,
Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and the Slovenian,
Simic has been recognized with the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin
International Prize, the MacArthur Fellowship, the Frost
Medal, the Wallace Stevens Award, a PEN Translation Prize,
the Vilcek Prize In Literature, and the Zbigniew Herbert
International Literary Award.
In 2007, he was named the 15th Poet
Laureate of the United States.
Not bad.
[LAUGHTER] Pretty good run.
It's a good run.
I'm jealous, I'm not going to lie.
It's beautiful.
When I wrote Charles about coming to visit this year,
he wrote me back and he said, I have fond memories of my time
in Tucson, staying in the cottage 48 years ago.
I've been back once or twice but not in this century,
so I would like to come.
So this century is already getting better.
And tonight it's going to improve even more.
I'm so excited about this.
Please help me welcome Charles Simic back to Tucson.
[APPLAUSE]