He was almost certainly America’s most devoted and ecstatic food poet. One of his poems was titled “Crazy About Her Shrimp.” Another, “Café Paradiso,” reads in its entirety:
My chicken soup thickened with pounded young almonds
My blend of winter greens.
Dearest tagliatelle with mushrooms, fennel, anchovies,
Tomatoes and vermouth sauce.
Beloved monkfish braised with onions, capers
And green olives.
Give me your tongue tasting of white beans and garlic,
Sexy little assortment of formaggi and frutta!
I want to drown with you in red wine like a pear,
Then sleep in a macedoine of wild berries with cream.
A poet of dichotomies, his work arrived from many angles at once. Writing in The New York Sun, the critic Adam Kirsch unpacked Mr. Simic’s influences: “He draws on the dark satire of Central Europe, the sensual rhapsody of Latin America, and the fraught juxtapositions of French Surrealism, to create a style like nothing else in American literature. Yet Mr. Simic’s verse remains recognizably American — not just in its grainy, hard-boiled textures, straight out of 1940s film noir, but in the very confidence of its eclecticism.”
He was born Dusan Simic in Belgrade, then the capital of Yugoslavia, on May 9, 1938. With the onset of war and the Axis powers’ occupation of his country, his father, an electrical engineer, fled for Italy in 1944 after being arrested several times. The father eventually went on to the United States, but his family was not able to join him there until 1954. The poet would later remark, “My travel agents were Hitler and Stalin.”
The family settled in Chicago, where Charles — he changed his name after arriving — learned English and became a committed reader. Recalling the faculty at Oak Park High School in suburban Chicago, where he spent his senior year, he told Mr. Bruckner of The Times: “They did remind you all the time this was the high school of Ernest Hemingway, and that made you wonder who you were. But if they found you were interested in reading they just kept handing books to you.”
His parents could not afford to send him to college, but he attended night classes at the University of Chicago while working as a proofreader and office boy for The Chicago Sun-Times. He moved to New York in 1958, where he worked odd jobs while composing poetry at night. “I always wrote in English,” he said, “since I wanted my friends and the girls I was in love with to understand my poems.”
