Charles Simic

00:00:00.00

I was asking Ksemi Rothers  about, you know, who are my great grand-uncles, and great-grandfathers and so on, and I found out that they all were killed or disappeared in some completely forgotten nineteenth-century Balkan wars which no one knows any more the cause or the reason or why they were started.  And so this poem kind of happened out of that.  It's called "Marching."

Annotation

00:00:47.39

Reads "Marching"

Charles Simic

00:03:28.45

This is a kind of a, you could say that it's sort of an elegy for my father, in seven parts.

Annotation

00:03:47.21

Reads ["Elegy for my father"]

Charles Simic

00:07:44.33

This is a love poem.  I have a series of love poems in the new book but this is one of them.  And I might use the title of this poem as the title of the new book.  The title is "Return to a place lit by a glass of milk."

Annotation

00:08:8.14

Reads "Return to a place lit by a glass of milk"

Charles Simic

00:09:20.92

I want to read a couple more poems now.  "Dismantling the Silence."

Annotation

00:09:54.30

Reads "Dismantling the Silence."

Charles Simic

00:11:17.80

The last poem in this book is called "Errata" for the good reason that after I finished the book I felt again, you know, a sense of frustration.  I didn't say everything.  And so each of the lines in this particular poem are really, refer to actual lines in the book.  I'm kind of correcting myself.  "Errata."

Annotation

00:11:53.17

Reads "Errata."

Charles Simic

00:13:20.93

Thank you.  [Applause]

Unknown

00:13:35.88

The next reading will be on January 14th, Dorothy Livesay will read that night.

Annotation

00:13:44.25

Recording ends.