Charles Simic was born in Yugoslavia and came to the U.S. in 1954, when he was sixteen. He went to high school in Oak Park, Illinois, and attended the University of Chicago at night while working by day at the Chicago Sun-Times. His poetry has been collected in Selected Poems 1963-1983 (Braziller, 1985), The Book of Gods and Devils (Harcourt, 1990), and many other books. His translations include Homage to the Lame Wolf: Selected Poems by Vasko Popa (Field, 1979), Roll Call of Mirrors by Ivan Lalic (Wesleyan University Press, 1987), and Selected Poems of Tomaz Salamun (Ecco Press, 1987). Simic's essays have been published in The Uncertain Certainty (University of Michigan Press, 1985) and Wonderful Words, Silent Truth (Michigan, 1990). He won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1990. I interviewed Simic about his education in general and about his Chicago experiences in particular. As a recent immigrant, Simic had an experience at the university which was less than typical. That was what he chose to emphasize, modestly but heartily. In what follows, I've edited the transcript of our interview so that it reads as a first-person essay. My father was an optimist. He always felt like the money would just sort of appear one day, you know? Here it is! But it never did. He went along with everything I said, as long as I was healthy and did not break the law. In that respect, my parents were very nice. My father wanted me to be an artist of some sort. I studied painting first. He was happy about that. When I was a senior in high school, my father, who at one time had been accepted at Columbia University - he never actually went - asked me to apply to Columbia, and I did. I also applied to Purdue and to the University of Chicago. I was accepted at all three places, but discovered that my father didn't have the money to put me through those schools. So I went to Chicago at night and worked during the day at the Chicago Sun-Times. I must say, it was a very strange period in my life. I started college in 1957, an emigre from Yugoslavia living in Oak Park. I had been in the United States for only three years. I never had much confidence. I didn't even raise the question. Everything happened so quickly. For a long time, I couldn't sort things out. I'm saying this only now; I wasn't thinking it in those days. It seems very strange that I should have come from this to that to that. I just wanted to drift along. It was easy to live, to get a job. But I had no plans. I couldn't imagine what I would be. We all came to America as if to an ideal. America was Hollywood, an incredible place. All American movies were made in southern California, and if you were in Europe, you were watching those palm trees in the wind, convertibles, Lauren Bacall, Rita Hayworth. There's something about the place that was very attractive, but also troubling. America was too much, too different, enormous compared to what I knew when I came. There was something wonderfully reassuring, though, in discovering suffering humanity in America. You'd say, Okay, this I This I understand. Chicago in those days was a scene that Dostoyevsky would have found congenial and familiar. Chicago was like Dostoyevsky's descriptions of the slums of St. Petersburg: there was ugliness, tremendous ugliness. And impoverished Eastern Europeans. Well, not so impoverished, because they did have jobs. A Ukrainian, let's say, would come to Chicago when he was a boy, get on a shift in some factory and then, because overtime was so well paid, stay for the next forty years. He would speak some English, a little bit of Hungarian, a little bit of Italian, and Polish, because he'd worked for years with those people. But these were the kind of people who were not at home in any culture anymore. They had forgotten their own culture, and they were not participating in American culture. Actually, they didn't speak any languages. …