Let's get one thing straight right off the top: Charles Simic was not George Bush's poet laureate.

Simic, a retired University of New Hampshire professor who lives in Strafford, chose to step down as the poet laureate of the United States this summer rather than seek extension of his appointment for a second year. Last week, the librarian of Congress - not President Bush, please note - named Kay Ryan to succeed him. Simic respects Ryan's work and applauds her selection.

He is also pleased to be back at his writing desk in New Hampshire, where he lives with his wife, Helen, in the woods near Bow Lake. During a conversation on his deck over good wine, cheese, artichokes, olives, squid and local strawberries, Simic described the poet laureate's job as he saw it and explained why he was glad to leave the national spotlight. He responded to follow-up questions by e-mail.

Simic, who succeeded Donald Hall, another New Hampshire poet, said the job required far more work than he expected. He traveled so much, attended to so many duties and performed at so many events that he went the entire year without writing a new poem.

Especially for a prolific poet like Simic, this is a serious flaw in a job, no matter how much fame and money come with it. The poet laureate is paid $35,000 and has a modest travel budget, but he or she is also in demand for paid readings.

"One year is enough," said Simic. "Washington is too far, and the travel these days is no fun."

Beginning last fall, he made nine trips to Washington. He did dozens of interviews with newspapers and electronic media, arranged readings and a poetry fellowship and answered hundreds of letters and e-mails. He went to New York each week to teach a course at Baruch College and read at other colleges in the East, Midwest and California. "I was like a traveling salesman," he said.

One thing he did not do was sit down with the president. "I got invitations to the White House, but I didn't go," he said.

Simic's feeling for Bush is not the typical snub of a liberal academic of his generation. Simic began life in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, on the eve of World War II, and his earliest memories are of what bombs do to a city. A series of poems in his most recent book catalogues horrors of war, some witnessed, some imagined. One begins:

The president smiles to himself; he loves war

And another one is coming soon.

Each day we can feel the merriment mount

In government offices and TV studios

As our bombers fly off to distant countries.

The poet laureate has an office with a parlor overlooking the Capitol. What Simic saw from the balcony and elsewhere in Washington only sharpened his opinions of the national political culture.

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