Gregory Orr at City Art

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 Library’s 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 Publisher’s 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 Radio’s “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 brother’s 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 what’s inside me— the raw, chaotic material of feeling or memory—and 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 experience—I 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 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 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 __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com