SOURCE: “Real America: An Interview with Charles Simic,” in Chicago Review, Vol. 41, Nos. 2-3, 1995, pp. 13-18.

In the following interview, Simic discusses his high school and college years in Chicago.

Charles Simic was born in Yugoslavia and came to the U.S. in 1954, when he was sixteen. He went to high school in Oak Park, Illinois, and attended the University of Chicago at night while working by day at the Chicago Sun-Times.

His poetry has been collected in Selected Poems 1963-1983 (Braziller, 1985), The Book of Gods and Devils (Harcourt, 1990), and many other books. His translations include Homage to the Lame Wolf: Selected Poems by Vasko Popa (Field, 1979), Roll Call of Mirrors by Ivan Lalić; (Wesleyan University Press, 1987), and Selected Poems of Tomaz Salamun (Ecco Press, 1987). Simic's essays have been published in The Uncertain Certainty (University of Michigan Press, 1985) and Wonderful Words, Silent Truth (Michigan, 1990). He won the Pulitzer...