Gregory Orr Quotes

If we’re not supposed to dance, Why all this music?

And yet I swear I love this earth that scars and scalds, that burns my feet. And even hell is holy.

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

I was born with a knife in one hand and a wound in the other.

Maybe she loved me, maybe not – who knows? Not even the gods can see into a human heart – it’s that dark.

Writing often reveals us to ourselves, lets us name what’s important to us and what has been silent or silenced inside us.

Where would I be if not for your wild heart? I ask this not from love, but selfishly— how could I live? How could I make my art?

Somehow something has gone wrong with poetry in our culture. We have lost touch with its purpose and value, and in doing so, we have lost contact with essential aspects of our own emotional and spiritual lives.

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?

To learn by heart is to learn By hurt—grief inscribing Its wisdom in the soft tissue. Song you sing, poem you are— Finger moving, precise As a phonograph needle, Along the groove of scar.

And to live only once– What if that’s not enough?

Maybe it was always simple: Loss surrounds us. Who would deny it? We ourselves are loss, are lost.

Her eye and my ‘I’: Her gazing Creates me.

In Poetry as Survival, Gregory Orr asks the survivor’s questions about violence: How could I have been that close and not been destroyed by it? Why was I spared?—questions that can initiate in a writer the quest for meaning and purpose. “But this quest born out of trauma doesn’t simply lead the survivor forward,” he writes. “First it leads him or her backward, back to the scene of the trauma where the struggle must take place with the demon or angel who incarnates the mystery of violence and the mystery of rebirth and transformation.” He is referring to Lorca’s idea of duende: a demon that drives an artist, causing trouble or pain and an acute awareness of death. Of the demon’s effect on an artist’s work, Lorca wrote: “In trying to heal the wound that never heals lies the strangeness.

I want to study The book of the world: Every vanishing page.

The way the word sinks into the deep snow of the page

Look, they descend: light, water, all things released seek the earth... All things go downward. Even the rocks settle and sink, even the flowers bow.

If your gaze takes in the world, a person's a puny thing. If a person is all you see, the rest falls away and she becomes the world.

Here, where sea Meets shore: The best of dancing floors.

If shadows could talk they would tell us everything we know already but in the melodious language of tears in which every third word rhymes. from “Some Notes on Shadows

Love is what I sought. "Hunger," they called it.

when poets go back by way of memory and imagination to past traumas to engage or re-engage them, then those poets are taking control—are shaping and ordering and asserting power over the hurtful events. In lyric poems, they’re both telling the story from their point of view and also shaping the experience into an order (the poem) that shows they have power over what (in the past) overpowered them.

Each night, I knelt on a marble slab and scrubbed at the blood. I scrubbed for years and still it was there. But tonight the bones in my feet begin to burn. I stand up and start walking, and the slab appears under my feet with each step, a white road only as long as your body.

because you’ve chosen poetry, you’re condemned to wonder at skills and felicities of language or imagination in the poems of others that you yourself may never achieve, no matter how hard you work toward them—things that will always be beyond your reach but also will always be luring you on.

I remember the cloud on its blue bicycle gliding over the leaves under the bare branches. You and I were walking. You wore your long green dress with the hem frayed so the loose threads seemed like tiny roots. We were holding hands when my hand became a yellow scarf and you stood waving it slowly. from “Daffodil Poem

The deer carcass hangs from a rafter. Wrapped in blankets, a boy keeps watch from a pile of loose hay. Then he sleeps and dreams about a death that is coming: Inside him, there are small bones scattered in a field among burdocks and dead grass. He will spend his life walking there, gathering the bones together. Pigeons rustle in the eaves. At his feet, the German shepherd snaps its jaws in its sleep.

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? —Gregory Orr

I couldn't help noticing certain parts of the statues have been polished to a high sheen by passing hands as the centuries passed. If it's a form of worship it is not much odder or more perverse than the saint's stone toe kissed to a stub by fervent lips.

For Trisha The truth's in myth not fact, a story fragment or an act that lasts and stands for all: how bees made honey in a skull.

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?

William Butler Yeats was after the same point when he remarked: “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric; but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

And yet I swear, I love this earth that scars and scalds, that burns my feet. And even hell is holy.

The dead sing us songs I’m learning to answer.

If manipulators of language (and people) use words and phrases to put their listeners under a spell, then poets are people who are themselves under the spell of language.

Not all engagement with our past is characterized by crisis.

A French writer once said that prose is walking, poetry is dancing. That’s a fine metaphor for the pleasurable intensification of emotion, language, and rhythm that is at the heart of poetry.

I’m actually after another notion here—what I’ve called Quest. Quest has to do with the intersection of your own personal life and the art of poetry in your time and place. It has to do with what you want to do with poetry and what poetry wants to do with you. It has to do with coming to understand who you are and who you hope to be when you are reborn through language and imagination as a poet.

This is what was bequeathed us: This earth the beloved left And, leaving, Left to us. No other world But this one: Willows and the river And the factory With its black smokestacks. No other shore, only this bank On which the living gather. No meaning but what we find here. No purpose but what we make. That, and the beloved’s clear instructions: Turn me into song; sing me awake.

I entered the empty room. I sat on the floor and drew pictures all day. One day I held a picture against the bare wall: it was a window. Climbing through, I stood in a sloping field at dusk. As I began walking, night settled. Far ahead in the valley, I saw the lights of the village, and always at my back, I felt the white room swallowing what was passed. from “The Room,” Selected and New Poems. (Wesleyan University Press, 1988)

Self-Portrait at Twenty" I stood inside myself like a dead tree or a tower. I pulled the rope of braided hair and high above me a bell of leaves tolled. Because my hand stabbed its brother, I said: Make it stone. Because my tongue spoke harshly, I said: Make it dust. And yet it was not death, but her body in its green dress I longed for. That’s why I stood for days in the field until the grass turned black and the rain came.