Award winning poet Gregory Orr will read for the City Art Reading Series on
November 14th at 7:00 P.M. at the Salt Lake City Librarys Main Branch.
GREGORY ORR is the author of nine collections of poetry, the most recent of
which is Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved (Copper Canyon
Press, 2005). A tenth collection, How Beautiful the Beloved, will appear from
Copper Canyon Press in spring of 2009. Among his earlier volumes of poetry
are: The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems (2002), Orpheus and Eurydice
(2001), City of Salt (Finalist, LA Times Poetry Prize), We Must Make a Kingdom
of It, The Red House, Gathering the Bones Together, and Burning the Empty
Nests.
He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two poetry fellowships from
the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2003, he was presented with the Award
in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In addition, he has
also been a Rockefeller Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Culture and
Violence.
He is also the author of a memoir, The Blessing (Council Oak Books, 2002),
which was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the fifty best non-fiction
books of 2002.
His recent book, Poetry as Survival (University of Georgia Press, 2002) an
extended meditation on the dynamics and function of the personal lyric, was
characterized by Adrienne Rich as a wise and passionate book. Earlier prose
collections include Richer Entanglements: Essays and Notes on Poetry and Poems
(University of Michigan Poets on Poetry), and Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction
to the Poetry (Columbia University Press). His personal essay was broadcast on
National Public Radios This I Believe series in 2006 and included in the
anthology, This I Believe (Holt, Rinehart, 2007).
He is a Professor of English at the University of Virginia, where he has
taught since 1975 and was the founder and first director of its MFA Program in
Writing. He served from 1978 to 2003 as Poetry Editor of the Virginia
Quarterly Review. He lives with his wife, a painter, and his two daughters in
Charlottesville, Virginia.
The event is free and open to the public. City Art is sponsored by the Utah
Arts Council, the Salt Lake City Arts Council, Zoo, Arts, and Parks,
X-mission, and audience donations. The featured reading will be followed by
an open reading.
NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO
The following brief essay was broadcast on National Public Radio the week of
February 20, 2006 on Morning Edition or All Things Considered as part of
their ongoing This I Believe series (see their website after February 20 for
more details about the program, which is based on an Edward R. Murrow program
from the 1950s and has become the mot popular weekly broadcast on NPR).:
THIS I BELIEVE
I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual
confusions, and traumatic events that come with being alive.
When I was twelve years old, I was responsible for the death of a younger
brother in a hunting accident. I held the rifle that killed him. In a single
moment, my world changed forever. I felt grief, terror, shame, and despair
more deeply than I could ever have imagined. In the aftermath, no one in my
shattered family could speak to me about my brothers death, and their silence
left me alone with all my agonizing emotions. And under those emotions,
something even more terrible: a knowledge that all the easy meanings I had
lived by until then had been suddenly and utterly abolished.
Other traumatic events followed: When I was fourteen, my mother died
overnight and with no warning. When I was eighteen and a civil rights
volunteer in the Deep South, I was kidnapped by armed vigilantes and held in
solitary confinement for a week that seemed to stretch forever and that left
me confused, frightened, and disillusioned.
One consequence of traumatic violence is that it isolates its victims. It can
cut them off from other people, and it can also cut them off from their own
emotional lives until they go numb and move through the world as if only half
alive. As a young person, I found something to set against my growing sense of
isolation and numbness: the making of poems.
When I write a poem I process experience, I take whats inside me the raw,
chaotic material of feeling or memoryand translate it into words and then
shape those words into the rhythmical language we call a poem. This process
brings me a kind of wild joy: before I was powerless and passive in the face
of my confusion, but now I am active: the powerful shaper of my experienceI
am transforming it into a lucid meaning.
Because poems are meanings. And even the saddest poem I write is proof that I
want to survive and therefore it represents an affirmation of life in all its
complexities and contradictions.
But I believe an additional miracle awaits me as the maker of poems, a miracle
that moves both poet and audience beyond survival and toward healing. Whenever
I read a poem that moves me, I know Im 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 Ive 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 to bring it toward me to share. And I
believe the gift of their poem enters deeply into me and helps me live.
Gregory Orr
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