Poetry As Survival

by Orr, Gregory

• ISBN13: 9780820324289
• ISBN10: 0820324280
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-10-01
• Publisher: Univ of Georgia Pr

Summary

Intended for general readers and for students and scholars of poetry,Poetry as Survivalis a complex and lucid analysis of the powerful role poetry can play in confronting, surviving, and transcending pain and suffering.Gregory Orr draws from a generous array of sources. He weaves discussions of work by Keats, Dickinson, and Whitman with quotes from three-thousand-year-old Egyptian poems, Inuit songs, and Japanese love poems to show that writing personal lyric has helped poets throughout history to process emotional and experiential turmoil, from individual stress to collective grief. More specifically, he considers how the acts of writing, reading, and listening to lyric bring ordering powers to the chaos that surrounds us. Moving into more contemporary work, Orr looks at the poetry of Sylvia Plath, Stanley Kunitz, and Theodore Roethke, poets who relied on their own work to get through painful psychological experiences.As a poet who has experienced considerable trauma--especially as a child--Orr refers to the damaging experiences of his past and to the role poetry played in his ability to recover and survive. His personal narrative makes all the more poignant and vivid Orr's claims for lyric poetry's power as a tool for healing.Poetry as Survivalis a memorable and inspiring introduction to lyric poetry's capacity to help us find safety and comfort in a threatening world.

Author Biography

Gregory Orr is the author of such highly praised poetry collections as Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved and The Caged Owl as well as a memoir, The Blessing, which was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the fifty best nonfiction books of 2002. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Fellowship, and two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2003 he was presented with the Award in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Orr is a professor of English at the University of Virginia, where he has taught since 1975 and where he was the founder and first director of its MFA in Writing program.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Everywhere and Always	p. 1
The Self, Jeopardy, and Song
Poised on a Mountain Peak, Floating on the Ocean	p. 13
The Dinner Party and the Sailor at War	p. 24
The Embodied Self	p. 37
The Edge as Threshold	p. 51
Bags Full of Havoc	p. 59
The Two Survivals	p. 83
The Powers of Poetry	p. 93
Trauma and Transformation
The Dangerous Angel	p. 117
Convulsive Transformation of the Overculture	p. 133
Wordsworth and the Permanent Forms	p. 141
Keats and the Ardor of the Pursuer	p. 149
Whitman and the Habit of Dazzle	p. 159
Dickinson and the Brain's Haunted Corridors	p. 171
Wilfred Owen and the Horrors of War	p. 182
The Quest and the Dangerous Path	p. 189
Constellations and Medicine Pouches	p. 204
Sacred and Secular Lyric	p. 209
The Social Lyric and the Personal Lyric	p. 213
Incarnating Eros	p. 225
Index	p. 231
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