Orphan Factory: Essays and Memoirs

Poets on Poetry

by Charles Simic

The poet explores his early life in Belgrade, his feelings about Serbia and Croatia, his days in New York, dreams, other poets, and books he never completed

Genres: Essays, Poetry, Memoir, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published December 1, 1997

About the author

U.S. Poet Laureate, 2007-2008

Dušan Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, former Yugoslavia, on May 9, 1938. Simic’s childhood was complicated by the events of World War II. He moved to Paris with his mother when he was 15; a year later, they joined his father in New York and then moved to Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, where he graduated from the same high school as Ernest Hemingway. Simic attended the University of Chicago, working nights in an office at the Chicago Sun Times, but was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1961 and served until 1963.

Simic is the author of more than 30 poetry collections, including The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems (1989), which received the Pulitzer Prize; Jackstraws (1999); Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (2004), which received the International Griffin Poetry Prize; and Scribbled in the Dark (2017). He is also an essayist, translator, editor, and professor emeritus of creative writing and literature at the University of New Hampshire, where he taught for over 30 years.

Simic has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His other honors and awards include the Frost Medal, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the PEN Translation Prize. He served as the 15th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, and was elected as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2001. Simic has also been elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Reviews

[Lauren]

• ORPHAN FACTORY: Essays and Memoirs by Charles Simic, 1997.

#ReadtheWorld21 📍 Serbia

ORPHAN FACTORY is a collection of short and punchy essays and memories/vignettes of Serbian-American poet Simic, former US Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner, and former editor at The Paris Review.

Having read and really enjoyed some of Simic's poetry in various modern anthologies, I liked reading more about his youth in Belgrade, his memories of WWII in the Balkans, stories of his family, and his immigration to Chicago as a young man. Funny, irreverent, political in many of his short memoir essays, others touch on the life of a poet, literary criticism of some of his favorite writers (notably Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann who I am planning to read next month...) and book reviews.

All essays were short - none more than 4 pages - so it breezed along and left me with several things to ponder. Likely one I'll return to and pair with more of his poetry.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charles Simic's poetry or prose is always interesting, top shelf with something quotable in almost every essay, and ponderable in every poem.

Here's one I copied out from this book, though there's lots more about politics, consciousness, writing: The quality of any experience depends on how aware we are of ourselves while it is taking place.

I'm a writer, and as I go through life I wonder if any particular happening is worth writing about. If it is, I consider it a quality experience. In looking for a description of this state, the best I can come up with is "integrated dissociation." I dunno...works for me.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked this every odd collection of writings. These are all relatively brief pieces on life and the writing life. They draw on the author’s childhood - what was happening around him in the midst of the war that drove his family from their home - to the shaping of a new life here in this country. He writes brilliantly and beautifully about his own journey to becoming a writer and being alive in this day and age.

[Brian Foley · Rating 4 out of 5]

great snapshot essays and memoirs.
This gave me fodder to finialize grad school application essays. Hope it pays off.

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cha, Bra . . . It's Simic!