Charles Simic, the 15th U.S. Poet Laureate. Photo by Peter Gregoire. Source.
"Simic has never been directly confrontational…but he has, he says, “pretty much endorsed that sense of the poet who speaks truth to power.”" - Michael Scharf, "Charles Simic grapples with an unexpected national title," NYU Alumni Magazine.
Wikipedia:
Dušan "Charles" Simić (born 9 May 1938) is a Serbian-American poet and was co-poetry editor of the Paris Review. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 for The World Doesn't End, and was a finalist of the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for Selected Poems, 1963-1983 and in 1987 for Unending Blues. He was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2007.Excerpt from poem:
Shelley spoke of a mad, blind, dying king;
Of rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know;
Of graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst to illumine our tempestuous day.
Charles Simic - Shelley. YouTube channel: poetictouch2012.
