Charles Simic
An interpretation of Charles Simic's poem 'Cabbage' is as a parody of Andrew Marvell's 'To My Coy Mistress' and John Donne's 'The Flea.' These are two well-known seventeenth-century carpe diem love poems (The Explicator). I choose this poem because it is one of his most famous. Some of Simic's best known works challenge the dividing line between ordinary and extraordinary. He gives substance and even life to inanimate objects to such ordinary objects like a knife or spoon ( CAO ). Or in this case a head of cabbage. I wanted to know what he was trying to say in this poem and what the cabbage symbolized. To understand the poem it is important to first know the poet.
For some back ground information Charles Simic's first volume of poetry was published in 1967 when he was twenty-one. He has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the National Institue of Arts and Letters, and the Poetry Society Of America. His other honors include a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry . Simic, who is Serbian, but writes in English, has published many books of translations of Yugoslav poetry and his own poetry has appeared all over the world. Simic was born in 1938 in Belgrade, raised in Paris, Chicago, and New York City. He received a B.A from NYU. He has worked as a bookkeeper, acountant, house painter, and shirt salesman. He served in the U.S. Army from 1961-1963. He has described himself as "a realist and a surrealist drawn between the two."
His poems are generally humorous and his images come from tiny things such as a piece of thread, tying his shoe, or looking at his earth. Child experiences of war, poverty, and hunger...
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... carefully to get the right mood. "Simic has become one of those writers for whom there is no word but the individuality of their work. Just as we can always tell a Dickinson poem, a Cornell box, or a Keaton in profile, you can always tell a Simic (Poets&Writers)."
Bibliography:
Sources
Chicago Review, Spring-Summer 1995 v41 n2-3 p13
Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group. 1999
Gwynn, R.S. (1998). Poetry (2nd Ed.) New York: Addison-Wesley Educational
Microsoft. (1998). Encarta Encyclopedia 99. Charles Simic [CD-ROM]
Mid-America Review, Vol. VIII, No 1, 1998, pp. 89-96
New Republic, Vol. 144, No., January 24, 1976, pp. 25
Poets & Writers, Vol. 24, No 3, May/June, 1996, pp. 30
Publishers Weekly, Nov 2, 1990 v237 n44 p56
The Economist (US), July 8, 1995 v 366 n7922 p82
The Explicator, Vol. No 4, Summer, 1993, pp. 257
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