Blog - Rhythm Tangent

Charles Simic has been named the 15th Poet Laureate of the United States August 2nd, 2007. He had won the MaCarthur Fellowship and the Pulitzer prize in 1990 for poetry.

"he balks at questions about the role of poetry in culture. 'That reminds me so much of the way the young Communists in the days of Stalin at big party congresses would ask, "What is the role of the writer?" ' he said.

Mr. Simic said he preferred to think of the point of poetry in the way a student at a school in El Paso put it when he visited in 1972: 'to remind people of their own humanity.' "

That's good. That's a good start.

Charles Simic