From the obituary "Charles Simic, Pulitzer-Winning Poet and U.S. Laureate, Dies at 84" by Dwight Garner in the New York Times:

... The family settled in Chicago, where Charles — he changed his name after arriving — learned English and became a committed reader. Recalling the faculty at Oak Park and River Forest High School in suburban Chicago, where he spent his senior year, he told Mr. Bruckner of The Times: “They did remind you all the time this was the high school of Ernest Hemingway, and that made you wonder who you were. But if they found you were interested in reading they just kept handing books to you.” ...

... and from "Charles Simic in The New Yorker" by Hannah Aizenman:

When I was a student in his workshop at N.Y.U., the poet Charles Simic would frequently counsel me and my classmates, “You could write a poem about anything!” (A toothpick, for example, or a rat on the subway tracks—he would perform a little impression, protruding his front teeth and waggling his fingers before his cheeks like whiskers.) ...

and his poem "Left Out of the Bible" (2021):

What Adam said to Eve
As they lay in the dark.
Honey, what’s making
That dog out there bark?

and from "Charles Simic, Pulitzer prize-winning poet, dies at age 84" in The Guardian:

... “Of all the things ever said about poetry, the axiom that less is more has made the biggest and the most lasting impression on me,” Simic told Granta in 2013. “I have written many short poems in my life, except ‘written’ is not the right word to describe how they came into existence. Since it’s not possible to sit down and write an eight-line poem that’ll be vast for its size, these poems are assembled over a long period of time from words and images floating in my head.”

^z - 2023-01-14

PS and a few rhapsodic lines from Simic's ode Breasts, taken out of their beautiful but naughtier context:

They come in the night.
The bestiaries of the ancients
Which include the unicorn
Have kept them out.

Pearly, like the east
An hour before sunrise,
Two ovens of the only
Philosopher's stone
Worth bothering about.