Charles Simic had a hell of a day yes­ter­day. Not only was he named Poet Lau­re­ate, an hon­orary post that includes a $35,000/year stipend, but he was also announced as this year’s winner of the Acad­emy of Amer­i­can Poets Wal­lace Stevens Award, which brings with it a some­what more sub­stan­tial $100,000 prize.

It wasn’t until I read the NYT arti­cle announc­ing Simic’s lau­re­ate­ship that I learned Simic’s first poems were pub­lished in Chicago Review when he was 21. We went back yes­ter­day to find the issue, from Winter 1959, and while I was look­ing it over, it struck me: that issue should never have been published.

That’s no dig at Simic. It is, rather, a recog­ni­tion that that Winter 1959 issue of CR was really the second Winter 1959 issue that had been pre­pared for pub­li­ca­tion. The first was sup­pressed by the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago in a cen­sor­ship scan­dal; when the con­tents of that issue even­tu­ally saw the light of day, they did so only under a new title.

The story starts in 1958. [Read more]