23:1 Summer 1971

JAMES TATE AND CHARLES SIMIC

Poems for Salomé

Though both James Tate and Charles Simic had published individual works in Chicago Review, this poem from the Summer 1971 issue represents a unique collaborative venture. Simic explains how it came about:

Tate and I wrote the sequence during one long night of drinking wine and listening to jazz. We had a rough idea that we wanted a poem in the spirit of Baudelaire, a kind of homage employing the clichés of French Symbolist poetry. I remember being dazzled by Tate’s seemingly endless inventions. He came up with many more terrific images, but we kept them out of the poem for the sake of its coherence. This is my only collaboration ever, and I must say it was a lot of fun.

[DN, 1996]

previous | next