Dr. Charles Simic, Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, spoke to the school on Tuesday night. Appointed Poet Laureate in 2007, Dr. Simic arrived at Choate on Monday night in preparation for his presentation to the Choate community the next day. Simic read his poetry to an auditorium full of students and faculty and ended up also sharing his insights regarding his own life and the world around him.
Dr. Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1938, and as such was subjected to the hardships and horrors of a war-torn nation throughout his childhood. After learning English at the age of 15, he immigrated to the United States with his family in 1953, and lived out the rest of his adolescence in Chicago. Although he enjoyed writing, Simic interestingly did not write his first poem until his senior year in high school. When speaking with an English 350 class on Tuesday, Simic recalled his first attempt at poetry as an effort to write something better than two of his friends had written. “To my surprise,” Dr. Simic laughed, “what I wrote down was even worse than what they had written.” After high school, Simic attended New York University, where he attained his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1967. Simic has been awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize Poetry, and the Wallace Stevens Award for his poetry works, and today is professor emeritus of American Literature and creative writing at the University of New Hampshire.
Dr. Simic’s presentation on Tuesday night played out like a poetry recitation to the masses. Simic read approximately fifteen of his poems to the Choate audience, adding explanations and other banter between readings as he saw fit. While his poetry was supposed to be the main attraction, the audience roared with laughter at Dr. Simic’s deadpan wit: at one point, Simic explained the common dilemma of originality among poets, exemplifying the trite sound of older poetry by saying “’Your eyes are like stars. Your mouth is like… whatever.’ Back then, people would say ‘Wow, what great poetry!’” Subsequently, Simic put the audience in stitches again with his poem “My Beloved,” which declares, after a few attempts at describing them, “To hell with your eyes!” In another instance, Simic responded to a student’s question of whether or not he had a single most inspiring moment in his life by stammering, stalling, and finally uttering a flat-out “No.” Unfortunately, Simic’s quiet voice turned some people off from listening: “I found it really difficult to hear him up in the balcony… I was pretty disappointed,” says Geetanjali Talpade ’10. Kat Selberg ’10 remarked that “The ridiculously immature audience ruined it. I felt like the speaker was given virtually no respect by the majority of our student body.”
Both in the auditorium and in the classroom on Tuesday, Dr. Simic shared many elements of his philosophy and ideas as a writer. Simic’s reflective nature came through in his answers to the questions he fielded on Tuesday; when asked about his writing process by a student in Mr. Cook’s English 350 class, Simic said carefully that “[Ideas] have to come to me… [they] can come from all sorts of places, things I read or heard… Poems are an attempt to find words for something that really cannot be said.” His sense of humor was also apparent: the special program, when someone inquired about how he decided to become a poet, Dr. Simic stated “I wrote poems, but I did a lot of other things too… I never said to myself ‘I want to be a poet.’ You’d have to be crazy!”
Dr. Simic’s decision to speak at Choate largely resulted from Choate English teacher Cyrus Cook’s efforts: Mr. Cook wrote to Simic in 2007, inviting him to visit and read his poetry at Choate. “He struck me as someone who would be accessible and interesting to students,” Cook explained. Arrangements had been in the process of being made since September of 2007, and finally, Dr. Simic was able to come to campus and share his poetry. Olivia Bee ’10 said that “He was very insightful into the world of poetry… I was really excited to hear him speak.” In the end, Dr. Simic shows no signs of stopping his work: as he wound up his presentation on Tuesday night, Simic smiled and said “After fifty years, I still don’t know how to do it or how I want it done… so I keep on doing it.”
Digital Video Studio in Humanities. This was their third meeting of the year. In this committee students play an active role and are chosen by their dean to participate. This year the committee had one of its largest groups. Among the students present were Kate Goldmann ’08, Jin Ha ’08, Learah Lockhart ’08, Loren Olson ’08, Lauren Provini ’08, Katie DeFusco ’09, Sharon Delvecchio ’09, David Lam ’09, David Lim ’09, Billy Rivellini ’09 and Dan Fallahi ’09. Some of the adults present were Mrs. Davidson, Mr. Ford, Doc. Gardner, Ms. LiPuma, Mrs. Morch, Mrs. Grant, Reverend Trister and four other trustees.
Prior to the meeting, Mr. Greene had emailed the senior student members with a list of questions that he wanted them to answer. The topic: the college experience at Choate. He introduced the meeting by asking the seniors to “share with all of us, most importantly the trustees and your under classman [your] perspective, not how you did the college process.” He also asked for their “advice for underformers” and to use this as a “time to reflect.” After asking them these questions, he briefly added that the seniors should remember that their “acceptance [to college] is contingent upon keeping [their] grades up for the rest of the year.”
Lauren Provini was first to answer these questions. She said that the “most important advice that [I] can give to any under classman is to listen to their gut and to start visiting colleges early.” One of the methods that Lauren used to help her decision process was to keep a mental tally of which school she thought about the most. Lauren also stated that her advice to parents was that “it is important to go on college visit trips with your child.” Other members chimed in and agreed that visiting was one of the most important factors that weighed heavily when they were trying to make their choices. Learah Lockhart also added that sleeping over was important because the atmosphere during the school day is different than that of the evening. Among other comment, she said that “writing about things that you know, [because] when it’s coming from inside of your heart it’s easier to get it down on paper.” Loren Olson’s advice was to “treat yourself as a sick person.” She believes that the college process is stressful and getting away from it might be the healthiest thing a person can do.
The meeting went on and for the most part, the points that were emphasized by all of the seniors was to start early, actually like all the schools on your list, consider speaking with random students to get an honest answer of what the school is like, and be open to criticism while writing your college essays. But in the words of Jin Ha “college is a right of passage” and as Katie Goldmann said, “Things work out.”
Charles Simic reads one of his poems to the student body on Tuesday. PHOTO/Matt Cheng‘10
