Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Gregory Orr on the Poetry of Survival

Gregory Orr has written extensively on poetry writing as a means of surviving and transforming traumatic experience. His book Poetry as Survival explores how "writing personal lyric has helped poets throughout history to process emotional and experiential turmoil, from individual stress to collective grief" and "considers how the acts of writing, reading, and listening to lyric bring ordering powers to the chaos that surrounds us." 

The following essay, "The Making of Poems," sums up some of Orr's central ideas about trauma and poetry. Orr read the essay on National Public Radio's All Things Considered on February 20, 2006:

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 12 years old, I was responsible for the death of my 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.

One consequence of traumatic violence is that it isolates its victims. It can cut us off from other people, cutting us off from their own emotional lives until we 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, 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.

An additional miracle comes to me as the maker of poems: Because poems can be shared between poet and audience, they also become a further triumph over human isolation.

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. The gift of their poem enters deeply into me and helps me live and believe in living.

Monday, January 29, 2018

In-Class Writing for Gregory Orr's “Gathering the Bones Together”

Consider the fact that the speaker of  “Gathering the Bones Together” saves until the last stanza the info that he held the gun that killed his brother. What effect(s) does this have on you as a reader? How does it change what comes earlier in the poem?


Consider the final image of the bridge of bones. How would you describe this image (what adjective might you use)? What purpose does it seem to serve, as the last moment of the poem?

Thursday, January 25, 2018

Gertrude Stein's salon and your second syllabus

Here's a photograph of the room where Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas held their famous salon at 27 Rue de Fleurus in Paris:


At the top of the photograph, near the middle, you can see the portrait of Gertrude Stein that Picasso painted in 1906-06, reproduced below:


And here's how art critic James R. Mellow described the Stein & Toklas salon in a 1968 article: "On a typical Saturday evening [in the early years of the twentieth century] one would have found Gertrude Stein at her post in the atelier, garbed in brown corduroy, sitting in a high-backed Renaissance chair, her legs dangling, next to the big cast-iron stove that heated the chilly room. A few feet away, one could hear [Stein's brother] Leo expounding to a group of visitors, his views on modern art. Among the crowd of Hungarian painters, French intellectuals, English aristocrats and German students, one might pick out the figures of Picasso and his mistress, Fernande Olivier... The man with the reddish beard and spectacles, looking like a German professor, would be Matisse. Next to him might be the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and his clinging friend, the painter Marie Laurencin. The tall figure would be that of Georges Braque, whose superior stature among the smaller cubists made him the official hanger- of-pictures in the atelier. In the American contingent, the familiars would be the painters Patrick Henry Bruce and Alfred Maurer, both of them early advocates of the modernist vision and both, at the same time, followers of Matisse. It was Alfred, as Gertrude recalled, who held up lighted matches so visitors could see that the Cézannes were, indeed, finished paintings because they were framed." (From "The Stein Salon Was The First Museum of Modern Art")

In class writing Thursday


How is the poem "How to Live" different than all the other poems we’ve read so far this quarter? How would you describe the speaker’s tone, & do you like him or not? Pick two pieces of advice from this poem that you like, and one or two that you dislike, resist, or are uncertain about.