“I grew up in a slaughterhouse. We were not only occupied, but there was a civil war going on with multiple factions fighting each other. Blood in the streets was not a figure of speech, but something I saw again and again. There’s no question that all that had a lot to do with my outlook on life. Innocent human beings get killed—that was my earliest lesson. Whenever I read about a ‘just war’ in which thousands of innocents have died or will die, I want to jump out of my skin.” – Charles Simic, “The Art of Poetry,” Paris Review