Charles Simic is nation's new poet laureate!

Banner day for outstanding poet Charles Simic. He was named the 15th poet laureate of the United States and then won the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.

"Now I just have to break a leg. It's just too much luck,'' the 69-year-old Simic said in a telephone interview with Bloomberg. "I'm just overwhelmed by the amount of good luck, being a superstitious person.''

Luck might account for 0.999999% of the recognition he's received over the years. The Belgrade-born bard won the Pulitzer Prize (1990 for The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems) and most every other major poetry prize. Simic, who emigrated to the United States with his family in 1954, also received a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation "genius'' grant for 1984-1989.

You can read some of his work at PoemHunter. Here's what one reviewer has to say about his collection Jackstraws.

The Washington Post and New York Times have filed profiles of the poet the Times calls a "surrealist with a dark view." He succeeds Donald Hall.

~Michael Winter, USA Today



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In addition to Jackstraws, mentioned above, I'd also recommend Aunt Lettuce, I Want to Peek Under Your Skirt.

Here are some audios of Simic reading.

I'm rather excited about Simic being poet laureate - the past few choices haven't been ones I read much (I know, I know - how could I not like Billy Collins, lol). He can be surreal, dark, humorous and above all, writes beyond the ordinary. And how great to choose an immigrant poet who didn't speak English until he was 15!

Errata
~Charles Simic

Where it says snow
read teeth-marks of a virgin
Where it says knife read
you passed through my bones
like a police-whistle
Where it says table read horse
Where it says horse read my migrant's bundle
Apples are to remain apples
Each time a hat appears
think of Isaac Newton
reading the Old Testament
Remove all periods
They are scars made by words
I couldn't bring myself to say
Put a finger over each sunrise
it will blind you otherwise
That damn ant is still stirring
Will there be time left to list
all errors to replace
all hands guns owls plates
all cigars ponds woods and reach
that beer-bottle my greatest mistake
the word I allowed to be written
when I should have shouted
her name