ABSTRACT
Charles Simic unnerves the reader from the beginning and ushers her into an almost cartoon-like garden in the midst of candy-wrapper houses. The form of the poem is much different than Simic’s later work, which tends to have capitalized initial words on the hard-left margin of each line. Indeed, history, language, and geography complicate the question of how Simic’s work can be considered “American.” Simic’s work published between the mid-1960s through the early-1970s obliquely negotiates the boundaries between his Serbian and American sensibilities. The propensity of many critics to over-emphasize the link between Simic’s folktale-influenced poems and his Yugoslavian childhood is only matched by Simic’s propensity to understate the same connections. In one interview with Simic, in which he is asked about the nature of the American mythic consciousness, the interviewer insists that Simic seems to be searching for this consciousness.
