Gregory Orr Quotes

I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions and traumatic events that come with being alive.

Gregory Orr

Spiritual, Believe, Emotional

"The Making of Poems" by Gregory Orr, www.npr.org. February 20, 2006.

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Every breath is a resurrection.

Gregory Orr

Resurrection, Breaths

Gregory Orr (2013). “Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved”, p.12, Copper Canyon Press

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To me, poetry is about survival first of all. Survival of the individual self, survival of the emotional life.

Gregory Orr

Emotional, Self, Survival

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Poetry is the thread that leads us out of the labyrinth of despair and into the light.

Gregory Orr

Light, Labyrinth, Despair

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I want language to help us live in a world of wonder/terror/change. I want it to be about "becoming" rather than "being." I think that being and nouns are part of our hopeless dream that time will stop and we will not die. but it's not that way. So, why not celebrate verbs and the beloved's metamorphosis into other people or creatures or places - the same spirit but moving through things, not static.

Gregory Orr

Dream, Moving, Thinking

Source: therumpus.net

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No one can threaten poetry. It's always been there, always will be. Humans need it to live: it has sustaining powers. How could we (anyone) get through adolescence without some form of song? Song is only a version of lyric poetry that is carried more by melody than by internal coherence and unity. but lyric and song - they are the same.

Gregory Orr

Song, Lyric Poetry, Unity

Source: therumpus.net

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When you're a young poet, reading is a search for your lost family.

Gregory Orr

Reading, Poet, Lost

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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

Strong, Moving, Knowing

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When it's right you can't say Who is kissing whom.

Gregory Orr

Kissing

Gregory Orr (2013). “Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved”, p.29, Copper Canyon Press

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That's crudely put, but
If we're not supposed to dance,
Why all this music?

Gregory Orr

Ifs

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"Similar but not the same" - that's like the return of the beloved for me. And metamorphosis: the spirit of the beloved moving through things, not lingering long in any one thing or place, no matter how we might wish it.

Gregory Orr

Moving, Long, Wish

Source: therumpus.net

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Another way of saying "put it in the Book" would be that each poem we write pops up in the city of poetry, where anyone can visit it. Just as we visit the poems written before us. Go to Dickinson's house, or Li Po's or whomever we think has something to say to us that might help or be beautiful.

Gregory Orr

Beautiful, Book, Writing

Source: therumpus.net

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D.H. Lawrence says that myths are "inexhaustible" because they are symbols of heart mysteries. That is, they can't be exhausted - they somehow have embodied some central human mystery (love, loss, being a body in time, who knows which or what?) and thus can be retold infinitely and still be rich. That's part of your saying: it's old, but it's also new. Or: there's nothing "new" in the human heart, but it still matters lots.

Gregory Orr

Heart, Loss, Body

Source: therumpus.net

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Language is a theme in the whole book, no? I mean it ends with the title poem about words are all we have. I guess midrash makes sense. How does it change in the course of the sequence? Well, God is into No and into Stasis/Nouns. Adam and Eve, in order to be in this world (and get this world going) must choose verbs. Which is to gain sex but also to choose death and all else that goes with change. To choose becoming over being.

Gregory Orr

Sex, Book, Mean

Source: therumpus.net

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Beauty is like life itself: a dawn mist the sun burns off. It gives no peace, no rest.

Gregory Orr

Beautiful, Giving, Dawn

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Speaking of people I had to exclude: Hank Williams. which is to say, songs are part of lyric poetry in my book, my thinking. In fact they are the urgent element of poetry in our time, they carry the most emotion for the most people in our culture. everyone LOVES poetry, because we all love (one form or another) of rock and roll (be it folk to emo to rap). It's all rock and roll and all lyric poetry.

Gregory Orr

Song, Emo, Book

Source: therumpus.net

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To guide someone
through the halls of hell
is not the same as love.

Gregory Orr

Hell, Guides, Halls

Gregory Orr (2013). “Orpheus & Eurydice: A Lyric Sequence”, p.22, Copper Canyon Press

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Rhyme as an echo not a closing off of sound. Love it. I don't know where the rhymes came from. Or the puns like "no/know" and so on. Just a way my mind start moving toward what seemed urgent to it. I'd like to claim complete rational intent for it all, but it wasn't that way. if you asked me about rhyme thirty years ago, I'd have said: not me, never. And now I done it.

Gregory Orr

Moving, Years, Echoes

Source: therumpus.net

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In Eden I "saw" that Adam or Eve probably spoke each word FOR THE FIRST TIME and that seemed wild and seemed to me that that might have brought them to some essence of language. Once I "saw" the city, I knew it was real. once I saw that a poem was a house, i knew it was real and could go back to it or else write a flurry of poems around it, both worked.

Gregory Orr

Real, Writing, Essence

Source: therumpus.net

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I can't actually explain why my lines got shorter, but they did. Just as I can't explain why my early poems were 'all image' and my current ones are relatively abstract. The sense of the line changed with the theme, somehow my ear (or brain or heart/mind) fell in love with a short line and very very simple words.

Gregory Orr

Heart, Simple, Mind

Source: therumpus.net

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With "poets dead and gone" as Keats says in "Mermaid Tavern" they are alive and talking to us and us to them.

Gregory Orr

Talking, Mermaid, Taverns

Source: therumpus.net

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I am committed now to one thing: lyric sequences. I want the intensity of lyric, but the scope and arc of narrative. so, I think I'll just write sequences for the foreseeable (the Beloved sequence doesn't have a 'plot' so I can just keep adding poems to it, it's like a giant bag I can just put beloved lyrics into - I think there are about 300 of them i've published by now).

Gregory Orr

Writing, Thinking, Want

Source: therumpus.net

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Born: 1947
Occupation: Poet
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