Charles Simic's Memories: Real and Unreal Elizabeth Tess Thompson College

In an interview, Charles Simic said, “My early life seems like a dream…There’s an element of unreality about it.”[i] Simic’s early life was spent attempting to flee World War Two bombs in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, where he “could easily have been a casualty of war.”[ii] The “unreality” of his circumstances tainted Simic’s innocent experiences of childhood, which were affected by violence and fear at the hands of unyielding political forces. In his poetry, Simic translates his early life into a subtle blurring of the realities of war and of common life, and in doing so, seeks to subvert the power structures at the root of suffering. In “Cameo Appearance” Simic writes, “In the distance our great leader/ Crowed like a rooster from a balcony,/ Or was it a great actor/ Impersonating our great leader?” A politician is compared to an animal and a fraud. This gives a harshly critical political commentary in a simple manner. Simic conveys complicated feelings in an accessible, visceral language that urges the questioning of the true nature of a person, object, or action. In his poetry, a grandmother is a killer, toys are senseless soldiers, and an infant cries for the tragedies of the world. Drawing upon his childhood, Charles Simic uses...