Night Picnic: Poems

By Charles Simic

The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet “illuminates the shadow side of life in poems as perfectly formed and directed as the beam of a flashlight” (Booklist).

The poems in Charles Simic’s new collection evoke a variety of settings and images, from New York City to small New England towns; from crowds spilling onto the sidewalk on a hot summer night to an abandoned wooden church and a car graveyard overgrown with weeds. His subjects range from a bakery early in the morning to the fingerprints on a stranger’s front door; from waiters in an empty restaurant to the decorations in a window of a funeral home; from a dog tied to a chain to a homeless man sleeping at the foot of a skyscraper; and other moments of solitude and clear vision.

“What is beautiful,’ he writes in one poem, “is found accidentally and not sought after. What is beautiful is easily lost.” Simic is the metaphysician of the ordinary, a poet who reminds us of the mysteries of our daily lives.

“This first book of poems since 1999’s Jackstraws continues Simic’s familiar, unsettling methods and extends them into the terrain of older age . . . Simic remains a powerful, and funny, chronicler of an individual world one where pastry, omelets and queen-size beds offer their ambiguous pleasures, and where, inseparably, ‘the butchery of the innocent/ Never stops.’ It is a world that should be familiar.” —Publishers Weekly

“Nabokovian in his caustic charm and sexy intelligence, Simic perceives the mythic in the mundane and pinpoints the perpetual suffering that infuses human life with both agony and bliss.” —Booklist

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 23, 2012
• ISBN: 9780544102422

Charles Simic

Charles Simic was a poet, essayist, and translator who was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. He published more than twenty books of poetry, in addition to a memoir and numerous books of translations for which he received many honors, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Wallace Stevens Award. In 2007, he served as poet laureate of the United States. He was a distinguished visiting writer at New York University and professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire, where he taught since 1973. He died in January 2023 at the age of eighty-four.

Book preview

title page

Contents

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Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Part I

Past-Lives Therapy

Street of Jewelers

Three Doors

The Avenue of Earthly Delights

Couple at Coney Island

Angel Tongue

Unmade Beds

Firecracker Time

Sunday Papers

Cherry Blossom Time

People Eating Lunch

Sweet Tooth

The One to Worry About

The Golden Age of Opera

The Improbable

My Father Attributed Immortality to Waiters

Window Decorator

Part II

The Altar

Bible Lesson

For the Very Soul of Me

Stand-In

The Devil Minds His Own Children

Demonology

Sleepwalkers

And Then I Think

Leaving an Unknown City

Views From a Train

Along With the Name Came His Shadow

Book Lice

Madge Put On Your Teakettle

The Loons

The Secret of the Yellow Room

Dog on a Chain

Burning Edgar Allan Poe

The Cemetery

Summer in the Country

I Climbed a Tree to Make Sure

The Truth About Us

Roadside Stand

New Red Sneakers

Grand Theatrics

The Number of Fools

Tree of Subtleties

Jar of Fireflies

We Were Adding and Subtracting

With Heart Racing

Part III

The Grand Casino

In Solitary

In the Rathole

Drawing a Blank

The Inexplicable

Blind Typist

Death’s Little Helpers

We All Have Our Hunches

Night Picnic

Whispered in the Ear

In the Courtroom

Car Graveyard

Wooden Church

Gas Station

The Unseen Hand

Interrogating Mr. Worm

Another Doomsday Sect

No One in the Room

The Lives of the Alchemists

With Paper Hats Still on Our Heads

I’ve Had My Little Stroll

The Cackle

Acknowledgment

About the Author

Copyright © 2001 by Charles Simic

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print version as follows:

Simic, Charles, 1938–

Night picnic: poems/Charles Simic.—1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-15-100630-x

I. Title.

PS3569.14725 N54 2001

811’.54—dc21 2001024100

eISBN 978-0-544-10242-2

v3.0421

Part I

Do you want to hear about the ants in my pants