Here’s a brief interview with the nation’s current poet laureate, Charles Simic.  He’s refreshingly unpredictable.  When asked about why more people aren’t interested in poetry, he said, “Poetry [...] is doing quite well in this country. I gave a reading the other night in Concord, N.H., with two former poet laureates – Donald Hall and Maxine Kumin -and 740 people came. That’s a lot of people!”

When asked about the kids who ransacked Robert Frost’s historic home and how awful kids are these days, he said, “In Frost’s day, too, awful things went on in the countryside. There were nasty things happening in remote villages. There’s that poem where there is the skeleton of the ex-lover of the mistress of the house in the attic.”

When asked about his vote in the New Hampshire primary, he said he voted for John Edwards: “I like a lot of things that he said. Greed is going to do us in – stupid, selfish greed. We have essentially squandered the wealth of this country and forgotten the whole idea of the common good.”

When asked about we produce so many nonfiction books on happiness, he said, “It’s really frightening. People need to read a book on how to be happy? It’s completely an American thing. Can you imagine people in Naples sitting on a bus or in a trattoria reading a book about happiness?”