ORR, Gregory (Simpson)

---

Nationality: American. Born: Albany, New York, 3 February 1947. Education: Hamilton College, Clinton, New York, 1964–66; Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1966–69, B.A. 1969; Columbia University, New York, 1969–72, M.F.A. 1972. Family: Married Trisha Winer in 1973; two daughters. Career: Junior fellow, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1972–75; assistant professor, 1975–80, associate professor, 1980–88, and since 1988 professor of English, University of Virginia, Charlottesville; visiting writer, University of Hawaii, Manoa, fall 1982. Since 1976 poetry consultant, Virginia Quarterly Review, Charlottesville. Awards: YM-YWHA Discovery award, 1970; Academy of American Poets prize, 1970; Bread Loaf Writers Conference Transatlantic Review award, 1976; Guggenheim fellowship, 1977; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1978, 1989; Fulbright grant, 1983. Address: Department of English, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 22903, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Burning the Empty Nests. New York, Harper, 1973.

Gathering the Bones Together. New York, Harper, 1975.

Salt Wings. Charlottesville, Virginia, Poetry East, 1980.

The Red House. New York, Harper, 1980.

We Must Make a Kingdom of It. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1986.

New and Selected Poems. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1988.

City of Salt. Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995.

Orpheus and Eurydice. Port Townsend, Washington, Copper Canyon Press, 2000.

Other

Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York, Columbia University Press, 1985.

Richer Entanglements: Essays and Notes on Poetry and Poems. AnnArbor, Michigan, University of Michigan Press, 1993.

Editor, with Ellen Bryant Voigt, Poets Teaching Poets. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1996.

*

Critical Studies: "Transparency and Prophecy" by Greg Kohl, in American Poetry Review 4 (Philadelphia), no. 4, 1975; "Silence, Surrealism, and Allegory" by Alan Williamson, in Kayak 40 (Santa Cruz, California), November 1975; "On Gregory Orr" by Hank Lazer, in Iowa Review (Iowa City), winter 1981; "Falling and Returning: The Poetry of Gregory Orr," in Pequod 15 (New York), 1983, and Out of the Sixties: Storytelling and the Vietnam Generation (chapter on survival), New York, Cambridge University Press, 1993, both by David Wyatt; interview with Sean Thomas Dougherty, in Salt Hill Journal (Syracuse, New York), 4, 1997; interview by Alan DeNiro, in Artful Dodge, 32–33, 1998.

*  *  *

The poetry of Gregory Orr attempts to come to terms with the facts of death and life. When he was twelve, he accidentally shot and killed his eight-year-old brother in a hunting accident. A few years later his mother died suddenly and unexpectedly. Both are episodes with which he has had to come to terms. Peter Orr's death is exorcised in the 1975 sequence Gathering the Bones Together. The painful memories persist in such poems as "After a Death" and "Driving Home after a Funeral," which are collected with more pleasant and varied Wordsworthian (or Roethkean) memories of boyhood in a sequence called The Red House. Many other poems draw upon the fatally paired events of his youth, and he was still dealing with them in his 1988 prose poem "The Mother."

Orr's work, however, does not reflect the kind of psychological damage or obsession that we would associate with, say, Conrad Aiken or John Berryman. He has more affinities with Stanley Kunitz, about whom he has written a book-length study. His poems have a similar burning intensity, a compactness of language, and that wise placement of a striking image that mark Kunitz's most memorable poems. While Kunitz searched for his absent and elusive father, Orr seeks to confront the pain arising from the deaths of his brother and mother. But there is also what he called in an interview the question of "whether you experience the illusion of change and growth or whether there is some self that persists," what Kunitz calls a "principle of being." This sense of change versus selfhood is central to Orr's search for a way out of a potentially crippling youthful experience toward the renewed innocence of an emotionally integrated adult. Orr's poetic career thus moves from the demons of his haunted memories to a more confident and assured sense of himself as teacher, husband, and poet.

In spite of his numerous poems about death, Orr is not a grim or tragic poet. He has at least three other strings to his lyre: a gentle wit, a love of nature, and a recurring interest in sexual desire. The subject of desire is in fact woven through Orr's poems, and he explores it in reminiscences of sexual encounters with his wife, as in "Nantucket Morning/This World," "A Storm in March," and, most memorably, "Coming Down from Volcano." His settings are varied, and they understandably reflect the places of his own life—the Hudson Valley of his boyhood, Alabama of the 1965 freedom rides, Hawaii, Virginia, Italy, Yugoslavia. He also has explored the looser and freer form of the prose poem, and he included five new ones in the 1988 New and Selected Poems. The poems are flatly but sharply told in a voice slightly wry, slightly wondering. His taste for the surrealistic, already seen in his earlier work, is given room to flourish in a medium that invites free association, as in "Padua," where his thoughts move disconcertingly but seamlessly from the murder of Aldo Moro to the sculptures of Donatello, to the preserved tongue of Saint Anthony, to an American-style jeans boutique.

Orr's imagery is often sexually charged, as it is at the end of "Nantucket Morning/This World," a poem in which he finds a heaven on earth through sexual love: "On a bed / of needles, an upturned scallop / shell, its fluted rim lipped with dew." And he often finds the image that mingles life and physical corruption. In the dedication of the 1986 volume to Trisha, his wife, Orr writes,

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

While he says in "Amor as a God of Death on Roman Stone Coffins" that "it's morbid to confuse the mysteries of sex and death," Orr nevertheless does so deliberately in "A Storm in March," in which he describes "man / and wife coupling / above their own dust / on the carved Etruscan tomb."

Orr once told an interviewer, "The analogue for my early work was the dream where the meaning is clear, not the dream that is misty and obscure. The kind of a dream that lets us wake up saying, 'I know that means something! There is some message in this to me.' Some crystallization of meaning." In the prose poem "Oysters" he writes, "What fascinates most, what compels imagination, can't be looked at directly, but only with averted eyes, as we gaze our fill in the mirror of art." Although one of Orr's strengths is looking at things directly, in many poems he employs the indirectness of dream, perhaps as a way to mitigate the pain of confronting reality and at the same time to plumb the psychological depths of his experience, as in "Spring Floods":

In a muddy field
an open coffin
only I could see;
it was a boat my mother
sent to fetch me,
just as she sent the flood.
Water roiled so deeply
who could calm it
as she once did,
laying her cool hand
on my forehead in the dark
room before sleep?

The most attractive things about Orr's poems are their utter honesty and directness, their refreshing lack of pretension, their flashes of humor, their occasional Roethkean flashes of mystical vision in nature, and their frank, sensitive, and circumspect treatments of sexual love, sometimes set against a background of death and dissolution.

Orr is a poet who has achieved an equilibrium. He has had to battle his childhood experiences and in order to do so has had to confront them. These traumatic events are the material, perhaps even the reason, for his poems. Yet they are not formless cries of anguish; they are finished poems. As he writes in "Oysters," "We need borders and forms to contain the terror we feel but don't understand."

—Donald Barlow Stauffer