Charles Simic was born in Belgrade in 1938, and has been publishing poetry in the US since 1961. In 1990 he received the Pulitzer for The World Doesn’t End, a book of prose poems. He has been called minimalist and surrealist. His poems detail everyday scenes in ways that make them seem inexplicably odd.

Most of the poems in his newest collection, Night Picnic, start by gradually revealing something plain and recognizable, like a fruit stand, a church or a restaurant. Once the scene is set, the poem will ask you to look at it in an odd way, with an effect that is sometimes fantastic in the clearest way. The payoff is the jolt you get from being forced into a new way of seeing that is somehow off—sometimes violently off.

The poem “Roadside Stand” begins: “In the watermelon and corn season, / The earth is a paradise”: just the set-up one might expect from a summer poem. However, further on we read: “It’s all there, the bell peppers, the radishes, / Local blueberries and blackberries / That will stain our lips and tongues / As if we were freezing to death in the snow.” Though they may seem out of place, the image of our purple-stained lips is too hauntingly accurate to dismiss. So we are forced to find a way of seeing summer berries that has to do with our own freezing to death. And we do.

We sat down with Charles Simic last Saturday at Wordsworth Books just before a reading for Night Picnic.

The Harvard Crimson: I really enjoyed these poems. I guess I’ll start by asking you how you’ve been affected by the events of the last couple of weeks.

Charles Simic: Of course, very much. I completely forgot I had a new book. When people say, “I like your new book,” I have to stop and think because I have given it no thought whatsoever. We’re all so consumed by these events.

THC: Who are some of your influences?

CS: Well, that’s a long question. Starting off with the early American modernists: Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane and William Carlos Williams. I would say my great loves which I can read with infinite, infinite pleasure would be Wallace Stevens and Emily Dickinson.

THC: What’s on your bedside table right now?

CS: I’m usually reading three or four books at a time. I’m reading a Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, whose collected poems have just come out. Like everybody else, I’m reading a lot of newspapers and magazines about these events.