A Study Guide for Charles Simic's "Cameo Appearance"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Charles Simic's "Cameo Appearance", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Studentsfor all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Mar 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781535845830

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18

Cameo Appearance

Charles Simic

1996

Introduction

Charles Simic is a Yugoslav American poet whose youthful experiences in Eastern Europe date back to the 1940s—to World War II and the origins of the Cold War. Heavy as this historical background may be, Simic's move to America in 1949 allowed him to mature through the fifties and beyond in a comfortable environment that nurtured a powerful degree of literary playfulness. In the words of Dictionary of Literary Biography writer David Kirby, More often than not, Simic's poetry is surrealistic, folkloristic, and Freudian—the stuff of dreams.

One sees evidence of this characteristic side of Simic in Cameo Appearance, a short poem that hops back and forth between two settings: a time of war in a city under siege and a modern-day viewing of a video of that time. There is an inherent gravity to the scene from the war, experienced by the narrator himself some years ago, and yet a rather disconnected air to the narrator's consideration of the video in the company of his children. The poem thus offers intriguing commentary on war, the media, and the perception of historical reality. Cameo Appearance was first published in Simic's Walking the Black Cat: Poems (1996) and can also be found in The Voice at 3:00 A.M.: Selected Late & New Poems (2003).

Author Biography

Simic was born in the city of Belgrade—the capital of Yugoslavia then, now of Serbia—on May 9, 1938. While he was still a toddler, World War II began, and it was on April 6, 1941, that the Axis powers, as part of the German-led invasion of Yugoslavia, began bombing Belgrade. Though he was only three years old at the time, Simic would remember this bombing, which destroyed the house across the street from his family's. Later in life, while residing in America, Simic happened to see video of the bombing of Belgrade as part of a History Channel documentary, and he realized that part of the footage of civilians showed a street corner near to where he lived. Less than two weeks after the attack commenced,