Charles Simic named Poet Laureate

And not a moment too soon. Shake out the pillows and quilts, beat the rugs clean and delouse the upholstery. Charles Simic not only has a tentacle-like intelligence, he is also a crack-up. Funniest, cutest, most likely to succeed, you name it. I love him. May I be so bold as to say I probably possibly very likely love him more than you do? In 58 shades of maroon? In ten years aboard the Titanic? At impossible temperatures?

(NYT) Charles Simic, a writer who juxtaposes dark imagery with ironic humor, is to be named the country's 15th poet laureate by the Librarian of Congress today.
Mr. Simic, 69, was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and immigrated to the United States at 16. He started writing poetry in English only a few years after learning the language and has published more than 20 volumes of poetry, as well as essay collections, translations and a memoir.
A retired professor of American literature and creative writing at the University of New Hampshire, he won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1990 and held a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant from 1984 to 1989.
He succeeds Donald Hall, a fellow New Englander, who has been poet laureate for the past year.
James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, will announce Mr. Simic's appointment. Mr. Billington said he chose Mr. Simic from a short list of 15 poets because of "the rather stunning and original quality of his poetry," adding: "He's very hard to describe, and that's a great tribute to him. His poems have a sequence that you encounter in dreams, and therefore they have a reality that does not correspond to the reality that we perceive with our eyes and ears."
Mr. Simic, speaking by telephone from his home in Strafford, N.H., described himself as a "city poet" because he has "lived in cities all of my life, except for the last 35 years." Before settling into academia, he held a number of jobs in New York, including bookkeeping, bookselling and shirt sales. He originally wanted to be a painter, he said, until "I realized that I had no talent."
He started writing poems while in high school in Chicago, in part, he said, to impress girls. He published his first poems in The Chicago Review when he was 21.
Mr. 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."