He is the author of nine collections of poetry, including How Beautiful the Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2009); Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved (2005); The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems (2002); Orpheus and Eurydice (2001); Burning the Empty Nests (1997); City of Salt (1995), which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Poetry Prize; and Gathering the Bones Together (1975).
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 the year, and three books of essays, including Poetry As Survival (2002) and Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction to the Poetry (1985).
He is considered by many to be a master of short, lyric free verse. Much of his early work is concerned with seminal events from his childhood, including a hunting accident when he was twelve in which he accidentally shot and killed his younger brother, followed shortly by his mother's unexpected death, and his father's later addiction to amphetamines
In the opening of his essay, "The Making of Poems," broadcast on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, Orr said, "I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions and traumatic events that come with being alive."
In a review of Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved from the Virginia Quarterly Review, Ted Genoways writes: "Sure, the trappings of modern life appear at the edges of these poems, but their focus is so unwaveringly aimed toward the transcendent—not God, but the beloved—that we seem to slip into a less cluttered time. It's an experience usually reserved for reading the ancients, and clearly that was partly Orr's inspiration."
Orr has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2003, he was presented the Award in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a Rockefeller Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Culture and Violence, where he worked on a study of the political and social dimension of the lyric in early Greek poetry.
He teaches at the University of Virginia, where he founded the MFA Program in Writing in 1975, and served from 1978 to 2003 as Poetry Editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives with his wife, the painter Trisha Orr, and their two daughters in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Asked about recent inspirations and sources, he owns up to an "eclectic grab-bag of reading. I've always read six books at a time, seldom finishing any. Reckless and restless searching of the sort you'd expect from the short attention-span of a lyric poet."
That "reckless and restless" genius has demanded expression beyond writing poetry. Orr is also a Professor of Literature at the University of Virginia; he was the 2000 Rockefeller Fellow at the Institute of Culture and Violence; he edits Sacred Bearings, A Journal on Violence and Spiritual Life.
I can't see any real reason why we'd have to associate the project of the personal lyric with a human time-line for several reasons. When I was young, they used to mention lyric poets when they discussed a notion of how certain 'professions' peaked early-in their late adolescence, early twenties-they used theoretical mathematicians and physicists, athletes, and lyric poets.
I think we lyric poets have been removed from that dubious list, but who knows? The association might have had to do with intensity of passion, and passion is one of the human forms of disorder. So, when you are young the disordering and vitalizing passions are stronger, and you could argue that the poems are therefore more exciting or whatever.
On the other hand, as you get older as a poet, you learn more about what disturbs you in a way that leads to poems, and what was passion in your youth might become theme in your maturity. As long as it's still authentic, still real to you.
My thinking about disorder and order has to do with a feeling for the two forces and their interplay in our consciousness and on the page. And remember that 'disorder' can be vitalizing as well, a positive quality like 'joy' or 'freedom'; likewise, 'order' can be oppressive as it is felt by Blake in the form of state and organized religion; or by Whitman as the constraints of civilization, the tight collar and tie. So, I guess I'd say I don't accept any notions of timeline.
"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. 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?" An 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."
Courtesy: Poets.org& Folio(Magazine)
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