Thread by @justinhendrix

Here are two #CharlesSimic poems from his 1990 collection, The Book of Gods and Devils.

Simic has passed away.

https://twitter.com/AAKnopf/status/1612561578653614080?t=ksO2FwnZbkGMfW7A6h4qJg&s=19

https://twitter.com/nybooks/status/1612570332912652290?t=RNc4qstfSOtWfjygbQwVKg&s=19

Here's my signed copy of a program from a reading he gave in New York in 1998, with Charles Wright.

"Charles Simic, the renowned Serbian-American poet whose work combined a melancholy old-world sensibility with a sensual and witty sense of modern life, died on Monday at an assisted living facility in Dover, N.H. He was 84." Obit by @DwightGarner:
nytimes.com/2023/01/09/boo…

In college I had the honor of driving Simic back to the airport after he gave a reading at William & Mary. He was very uncomfortable in my ragged Mitsubishi, and fiddled with the air conditioning the entire way to Richmond.

I told him I might move to New York after college but that I had no money, and he said that was okay, I should do it anyway, that I would find myself in some small, hot apartment, sweating with no air conditioning, and yet I would be happy.

My first trip to New York had, strangely, been to see his reading with Virginia poet Charles Wright at the Pierpont Morgan library. I was not quite of age but with a friend availed myself of the open bar, finding the wait staff to be friendly and unconcerned.