Gregory Orr Quotes

Whenever I read a poem that moves me, I know I'm not alone in the world. I feel a connection to the person who wrote it, knowing that he or she has gone through something similar to what I've experienced, or felt something like what I have felt. And their poem gives me hope and courage, because I know that they survived, that their life force was strong enough to turn experience into words and shape it into meaning and then bring it toward me to share.

GREGORY ORR, All Things Considered, Feb. 20, 2006

When it's right you can't say
Who is kissing whom.
GREGORY ORR, Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved

Beauty is like life itself: a dawn mist
the sun burns off. It gives no peace, no rest.
GREGORY ORR, The Caged Owl: New & Selected Poems

Gregory Orr: My own calling to art was a negative invitation: the sudden deaths of my brother and mother, the way I was implicated in my brother's death in a hunting accident where I held the gun that killed him, my mother's mysterious, overnight death-both of these happening before I was fourteen, both of them greeted with and surrounded by silence. All these experiences were negative gifts: they destroyed meaning for me and challenged my right to exist (as traumatic violence often does). By destroying meaning, they left me two choices: die or survive by creating/discovering meaning. To me, the discovery of lyric poetry (when I was about 17) was the discovery of meaning-making at its most intimate, primal level: a blank page like the emptiness of existence when there is no meaning and then you put the words on the page: create meaning. Create it in the smallest, most passionate cultural space we know: the space of the personal lyric, a handful of words on a page.

Gregory Orr: What you're really asking, framed in the terms of my thinking, is: Are workshops good or bad for poets? Or at least, that's a good question to ask. And a hard one. After 28 years of teaching, I still go back and forth on the virtues and vices of workshop. Today, I'll say this (tomorrow, maybe something different): what I always worry about is that when a poet brings a poem to a workshop, she/he has brought it to an audience. A responsive audience, perhaps too responsive at times. Has the poet done enough on his or her own to locate the depths of the poem before asking for audience response? Or, put another way: once a poet has shown the poem to twelve other poets, how does he or she retain sufficient ownership of the poem to continue struggling with its issues and deficiencies? How do you take your poem back from the workshop? It has to be your poem. Not a good poem or even a great poem, but your poem first.

To me poetry is both Quest and Craft. The quest aspect: what poetry means to you as an individual who has decided to orient her life in relation to this thing called 'poetry'—no one can really solve that for you. You search for guides and poetic forebears, but it's a personal search and struggle. Workshops necessarily stress craft, they can do only so much in relation to quest. But craft is easier than quest and less lonely. You can learn craft; you can improve, you can utilize your intelligence to master it. Why not call poetry Craft and forget Quest, or give the quest aspect short-shrift? That's the temptation that workshops breed. We know that. I guess the main defense would be to be forewarned. To tell yourself, "yes, this workshop response matters, but what is it that I personally need to learn or understand that poetry is trying to teach me?"

There's a wonderful joke someone showed me recently: an anthology of poems about Emily Dickinson published by University of Iowa Press where someone did a poem of Dickinson's all marked-up with 'sympathetic' and encouraging workshop suggestions. It's hilarious and heart-breaking at the same time. Of course, Emily would have mocked anything that didn't honor her oddness and genius-when Higginson, her mentor saw her first poems and noticed they weren't precisely metrical, she wrote back, “You think my gait 'spasmodic.' I am in danger, sir." The tone of that second sentence is pure mockery, pure confidence that this guy is not up to the level of the stuff she's taking on.

Gregory Orr: Here's an anecdote that could cover the veracity question. In an earlier poem, “Litany,” I spoke of a bowl of soup given to me on the day my brother died. The poem has the soup being an alphabet soup and ends with the image/symbol of how the letters “bobbed at random, or lay in the shallow spoon.” The alphabet nature of the soup enacting a randomness that has destroyed meaning, broken words down into letters (all the old alphabet soup ads used to spell things like “Uhmm good!”) and then the inertness of lying in the spoon as if dead. That's how the poem dramatized the meaning of that day, or loss of meaning.

When I wrote the memoir five years later, it was simply true that I had no memory of the kind of soup the woman brought that day. I'd made that up, or my imagination had made that up in the poem to create meaning. On the other hand, in the prose I could tell more about another way that meaning vanished that day: the woman who brought the soup said to me: “Peter, your brother, is in heaven now, sitting with Jesus.” And that earnest but 'glib' attempt at consolation abolished all my conventional religious faith forever-so the truth was still the same, though the facts were different. In poetry, truth may often come as symbol.

Another anecdote, about sources. When I was eighteen, I had worked briefly in Mississippi for the Civil Rights Movement as a volunteer in the summer of 1965. I'd been jailed and beaten in Mississippi, then kidnapped at gunpoint in Alabama and held in solitary in a rural jail for a bit over a week. That political activism was aberrant for an introvert like myself and many of the experiences I had there were violent and traumatic, life-threatening. The upshot was that I knew these things had happened, but I never talked about them and gradually some of the odder facts began to seem as if, perhaps, since I was the only one who knew about them, maybe they hadn't happened in the real world. Specifically, the two vigilantes who kidnapped me outside Selma—one of them, two months after I was there, killed a Rights worker in broad daylight with a shotgun. By then, I was living in New York City, feeling a bit fragile, but functional. One afternoon, I opened the New York Times and saw a photograph of this guy who had held a pistol to my head by a highway not two months before, was the killer. I was totally stunned. Cut to thirty-five years later, when I decide to see if this could possibly be accurate and I'm in a library basement scrolling through an old microfiche of the newspaper from that summer and suddenly, there is the photograph and the story and it's all true, just as remembered. Obviously, it's not always that way. Memory is notoriously unreliable, though traumatic memory less so. Hazy also. The more you work on memoir, the more you remember.

“The Heart of Orr’s poetry, now as ever, is the enigmatic image . . . mystical, carnal, reflective, wry.” - San Francisco Review

“Poetry is the thread that leads us out of the labyrinth of despair and into the light.” - Gregory Orr

I used to foolishly think poets weren’t still around, writing and creating today. I thought they were all dead, and I felt so forlorn.

And then I read Gregory Orr and realized modern poetry is very much alive. All we have to do is read it.--Lucia Perillo