In an interview, Charles Simic said, "My early life feels like a dream... There's an element of unreality to it."[i] Simic's early life was spent trying to escape the bombed world of World War II to Belgrade, Yugoslavia, where he "could easily have been a casualty of war". political forces. In his poetry, Simic translates his early life into a subtle blurring of the realities of war and ordinary life and, in doing so, seeks to subvert the power structures at the root of suffering. In “Cameo Appearance” Simic writes, “In the distance was our great leader / crowing like a rooster from a balcony, / or was it a great actor / impersonating our great leader?” A politician is compared to an animal and an impostor. This provides harshly critical political commentary in a simple way. Simic conveys complicated feelings in accessible, visceral language that pushes you to question the true nature of a person, object, or action. In his poem, a grandmother is a murderer, toys are senseless soldiers, and a child cries for the tragedies of the world. Drawing from his childhood, Charles Simic uses surreal and realistic memory images to convey the paradoxical unreality and reality of war. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Charles Simic's wartime childhood had a great influence on the composition of the language in his poems. The experience of scarcity led to a fascination with the few objects available to entertain an imaginative child. He describes his life like this: “When you're bombed and you live in a place where there's not much to eat, you live in a kind of isolation… In your room, there's not much. You keep seeing the same things: the same walls, the same chair. It is a kind of minimalist art.”[iii] During war, the scope of reality narrows. The “minimalism” of his life in Belgrade transformed simple objects into the realm of the extraordinary as they took on new importance. Simic said that he “[had] to reimagine the object every day to make life bearable. As for childhood, a child plays with these objects. "[iv] This experience directly influenced his poetry, as it trained him to see small sections of reality as closely and unflinchingly as possible. Furthermore, his concise and direct use of language could be called “minimalist” in his construction. The constant reconfiguration of objects in relation to himself led to a fascination with the possibilities that such objects contain. In “The Big War”, the cheap toy soldiers become surreal personifications of the real war taking place on the outskirts of Simic. “I used to lie on the floor/for hours staring into their eyes./I remember them staring at me in wonder.” The clay figurines experience emotions as they contemplate the power their “leader,” the boy Simic, holds over their lives. Simic continues to break the figurines, symbolizing their uselessness and the total lack of power they have over their lives, just like real soldiers at war. The surreally depicted figurines are ultimately rooted in reality. Faced with reality, Simic is wary of it. Simic has witnessed the horrors of World War II and other atrocities of the twentieth century, and has been given the sense that true reality is unbearable. Speaking about the intersection between poetry and history, Simic writes: “I'm starting to worry that history isn't the right word here, that I'm describing the pressure of reality on the contemporary poet... On the one hand, the multiplication ofimages of suffering and atrocities, and on the other hand the unreality they bring into our lives with the suspicion that all life is meaningless... It is the irrationality of history that we experience."[v] Even as I write about it to the true events, he knows that they lack a sense of reality, and this discomfort translates into his writing. The "irrational" is most evident in the surreal dream world of "Nineteen Thirty-eight". year take place alongside the surreal self-awareness of a baby as he pees, cries, and breastfeeds crudely The arrangement of images and references borders on comedy, as Stalin's killing capacity and Dairy Queen's ubiquity are mentioned in the. same breath, blending politics and popular culture. The involuntary actions of Simic's child self mirror the helplessness of an adult unable to act as an individual while irrational events, both terrible and miraculous, occurred across the world. Most telling is the sudden phrase, "People feared the world was coming to an end," inserted about halfway through the list of events and conveying the sense of unfathomability the people were facing. Child Simic's experience ends when he writes, "I thought I would hear myself cry for a long, long time." Since a child would have no concrete memories, this realization is yet another surreal image. It is the image of a child mourning a world he has yet to discover or participate in, underscoring the absurdity of both the story and the poem's images themselves. In reference to the surreal index of images in his poems, Simic compares himself to Northern Renaissance artist Peter Brueghel: “We hear of Brueghel turning his eyes inside out looking at the landscape through his legs. He didn't do it the first time. He did it when he understood that the only way to see what is there is to be in the world upside down.”[vi] The act of seeing upside down, paradoxically, makes the world clearer. In Simic's poems, surrealism and strangeness are the only logical images that make sense when referencing war as war itself is so surreal. “Slaughterhouse Flies” offers surreal imagery in the two-stanza poem reminiscent of his home. “In the evening, they ran their bloody feet / across the pages of my schoolbooks.” Although it refers to insects, the immediate association is that of soldiers in the street, trampling on a children's book with their violence. The trees talk and the cows become suspicious of their sudden death. Simic's assignment of human thoughts and feelings to other organisms lends a surprising sense of urgency to the scene, and the associations of blood and violence are tangible connections to war. Although Simic's earliest memories have a sense of the unreal, much of his language and imagery are rooted in stark reality. He states that reality itself is often the basis of his poems: “It all begins with the deepest reality, which is the reality in front of my nose… It is always some kind of experience, an experience tied to a physical place. , some object, some image: they are what make the poem begin to be written.”[vii]An actual memory usually inspires a poem, and is often object-oriented. As much as Simic's poems operate in the fantastic, there is a chilling streak of reality in all of them. “Prodigy” appears to be a mythical tale of wisdom learned from the “heavens” as “A retired astronomy professor / taught me to play [chess].” Simple details about the objects and setting establish the reality of the poem and highlight one of Simic's distinctive styles. What appears to be a simple rerun that leads to more information about the game itself.