We have a new poet laureate. “He’s very hard to describe, and that’s a great tribute to him. His poems have a sequence that you encounter in dreams, and therefore they have a reality that does not correspond to the reality that we perceive with our eyes and ears,” James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, said of Charles Simic. Not a native of the States, Simic was born on May 9, 1938, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. He has lived stateside since 1954, and he is an American poet. Today, he won the 2007 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets for “outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.”

The New York Times reports:

Mr. Simic said his chief poetic preoccupation has been history. “I’m sort of the product of history; Hitler and Stalin were my travel agents,” he said. “If they weren’t around, I probably would have stayed on the same street where I was born. My family, like millions of others, had to pack up and go, so that has always interested me tremendously: human tragedy and human vileness and stupidity.”

Yet he balks at questions about the role of poetry in culture. “That reminds me so much of the way the young Communists in the days of Stalin at big party congresses would ask, ‘What is the role of the writer?’ ” he said.

Mr. Simic said he preferred to think of the point of poetry in the way a student at a school in El Paso put it when he visited in 1972: “to remind people of their own humanity.”