Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships.

Simic received the US$100000 Wallace Stevens Award in 2007 from the Academy of American Poets. " Simic immigrated to the United States with his family in 1954 when he was sixteen. Career
He began to make a name for himself in the early to mid 1970s as a literary minimalist writing terse imagistic poems.

He received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 for The World Doesn't End and was a finalist of the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for Selected Poems 1963-1983 and in 1987 for Unending Blues. Dušan "Charles" Simić (Serbian: Душан "Чарлс" Симић [dǔʃan tʃârls sǐːmitɕ]; born 9 May 1938) is a Serbian-American poet and was co-poetry editor of the Paris Review.