When studying literature I did my best to avoid poetry. I found it very difficult to find a place for my own feelings & reflections – reading poetry was like doing maths = trying to find THE right answer. Maybe this is why Gregory Orr has made such a difference in my literary life? Here…
Tag: Gregory Orr
Poetry As Survival
Ars Poetica V (personal lyric, cont.); Poetry as Survival – postscript: It is difficult to get the news from poems …
Silence & Suffering
Ars Poetica V (personal lyric, cont.) Speech is among the most fundamental ways we have to connecting our selves to other selves. This is what Gregory Orr can tell us about silence & suffering There are silences that are positive and powerful and willed by the self, but many silences have a destructive origin and destructive…
The Two Survivals
Ars Poetica V (personal lyric, cont.) Gregory Orr writes: Survival no. 1 The difference between a lyric poet and a person who does not write poems is that the poet has an arena in which to focus his/her encounter with disorder. Every encounter with disorder of any sort that results in a poem is a successful…
Poetry – Philosophy – Religion
There is this situation, or maybe constellation is a better word for it, which really interests me; it has to do with the relationship between art, philosophy and religion. Ars Poetica V (personal lyric, cont.) – or: why you all should go ahead and read Gregory Orr Gregory Orr calls personal lyric a gift – given…
Ars Poetica V (personal lyric)
I found this book which I had left unfinished. And started re-reading: … for a poem to move us it must bring us near our own threshold. We must feel genuinely threatened or destabilized by the poem’s vision of disordering, even as we are simultaneously reassured and convinced by its orderings Gregory Orr: Poetry as Survival…
Poem of the Day
GREGORY ORR To Be Alive / Poem of the Day : The Poetry Foundation. To be alive: not just the carcass But the spark. That’s crudely put, but… If we’re not supposed to dance, Why all this music? From Concerning the Book That Is the Body Of the Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2005)
Writing is what we do in the world –
– and as ephemeral as it might sometimes seem, the making of poems is a necessary act, one that allies itself with hope rather than despair. In my ongoing search for justification, vindication, or to put it blunt: permission to write, I just stumbled across some very wise words by Gregory Orr: As a poet,…
sub rosa 