Poetry as Survival

Author: Gregory Orr
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820340111
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
Intended for general readers and for students and scholars of poetry, Poetry as Survival is 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 Survival is a memorable and inspiring introduction to lyric poetry's capacity to help us find safety and comfort in a threatening world.

Ambition and Survival

Author: Christian Wiman
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619320932
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
An intimate first book of personal essays and incisive commentary from the editor of Poetry.

Survival Is a Style

Author: Christian Wiman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374721416
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 112

Book Description
Named as a 2020 Book of the Year by The Times Literary Supplement Survival Is a Style, Christian Wiman’s first collection of new poems in six years, may be his best book yet. His many readers will recognize the musical and formal variety, the voice that can be tender and funny, credibly mystical and savagely skeptical. But there are many new notes in this collection as well, including a moving elegy to the poet’s father, sharp observations and distillations of modern American life, and rangy poems that merge and juxtapose different modes of speech and thought. The cumulative effect is extraordinary. Reading Survival Is a Style, one has the sense one is encountering work that will become a permanent part of American literature.

How Beautiful the Beloved

Author: Gregory Orr
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619320673
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 106

Book Description
“[A] confident, mystical, expansive project.”—Publishers Weekly “[D]azzling and timeless . . . focus is so unwaveringly aimed toward the transcendent—not God, but the beloved—that we seem to slip into a less cluttered time.”—The Virginia Quarterly Review, “Editor’s Choice” "Mary Oliver calls him '...a Walt Whitman without an inch of Whitman's bunting or oratory.' In these pages, he is more nearly a modern-day Rumi. This is not primarily a poetry of image, but of ideas, perfectly distilled. Orr brings together the monumental themes of love and loss in small, spare, and exquisite koan-like poems."—ForeWord "...magnetic poems that open the world of lyrical verse to the larger questions of what is true and timeless." —The Bloomsbury Review Gregory Orr continues his acclaimed project on the “beloved” with a lyrical sequence about the joys and hungers of being fully engaged in life. Through concise, perfectly formed poems, he wakes us to the ecstatic possibilities of recognizing and risking love. Mary Oliver has called this project “gorgeous,” and said that he "speaks of the events that have no larger or more important rival in our lives—of our love and our loving." If to say it once And once only, then still To say: Yes. And say it complete, Say it as if the word Filled the whole moment With its absolute saying. Later for “but,” Later for “if.” Now Only the single syllable That is the beloved. That is the world. Gregory Orr is the author of ten books of poetry. He teaches at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville.

Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved

Author: Gregory Orr
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619320649
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Book Description
“The heart of Orr’s poetry, now as ever, is the enigmatic image . . . mystical, carnal, reflective, wry.”—San Francisco Review This book-length sequence of ecstatic, visionary lyrics recalls Rumi in its search for the beloved and its passionate belief in the healing qualities of art and beauty. Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved is an incantatory celebration of the “Book,” an imaginary and self-gathering anthology of all the lyrics—both poems and songs—ever written. Each poem highlights a distinct aspect of the human condition, and together the poems explore love, loss, restoration, the beauty of the world, the beauty of the beloved, and the mystery of poetry. The purpose and power of the Book is to help us live by reconnecting us to the world and to our emotional lives. I put the beloved In a wooden coffin. The fire ate his body; The flames devoured her. I put the beloved In a poem or song. Tucked it between Two pages of the Book. How bright the flames. All of me burning, All of me on fire And still whole. There is nothing quite like this book—an “active anthology” in the best sense—where individuals find the poems and songs that will sustain them. Or the poems find them. Gregory Orr is the author of eight books of poetry, four volumes of criticism, and a memoir. He has received numerous awards for his work, most recently the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Orr has taught at the University of Virginia since 1975 and was, for many years, the poetry editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives with his family in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Song of My Softening

Author: Omotara James
Publisher: Alice James Books
ISBN: 1948579480
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Book Description
Recommended by Cosmopolitan, USA Today, Shondaland, & Book Riot “It’s not often that fat women feel such thorough representation of themselves not only in poetry but in any media and not only in the beautiful moments but in the sorrowful ones, ranging throughout life. James does a brilliant job of portraying this and all her themes brilliantly; highly recommended.” —Starred review by Library Journal The raw poems inside Song of My Softening studies the ever-changing relationship with oneself, while also investigating the relationship that the world and nation has with Black queerness. Poems open wide the questioning of how we express both love and pain, and how we view our bodies in society, offering themselves wholly, with sharpness and compassion.

The Poetry of Survival

Author: Daniel Weissbort
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 392

Book Description
Offers a guide to the major poets who found a voice for the experience of survival. This title focuses on the first post-war generation of Central and East European poets, who wrote in direct response to a war of unprecedented destruction in Europe.

The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write: Poems

Author: Gregory Orr
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324002360
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 124

Book Description
A “master of the lyric poem” (Paris Review) at the top of his form writes indelibly of grief and love. In this moving, playful, and deeply philosophical volume, acclaimed poet Gregory Orr returns with a passionate exploration of the forces that shape us. Slipping effortlessly from personal trauma (“Song of What Happens”) to public catastrophe (“Charlottesville Elegy”), Orr seeks innovative ways for the imagination to respond to and create meaning out of painful experiences, while at the same time rejoicing in love and language. The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write confirms Orr’s place among the preeminent lyric poets of his generation, engaging the deepest existential issues with wisdom and humor and transforming them into celebratory song.

The Paths of Survival

Author: Josephine Balmer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781848615298
Category : English poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 93

Book Description
The Paths of Survival explores the fragility of the written word; the ways in which it is destroyed and the ways in which it endures against all the odds. Tracing the few surviving fragments of Aeschylus's lost tragedy, Myrmidons, the volume moves back in time: from a scrap of papyrus in a library to Aeschylus revising the play in ancient Sicily.

The Caged Owl

Author: Gregory Orr
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619320630
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 150

Book Description
Gregory Orr’s genius is the transformation of trauma into art. Whether writing about his responsibility for a brother’s death during a hunting accident, drug addiction, or being jailed during the Civil Rights struggle, lyricism erupts in the midst of desolation and violence. Orr’s spare, succinct poems distill myth from the domestic and display a richness of action and visual detail. This long-awaited collection is soulful work from a remarkable poet, whose poems have been described as "mystical, carnal, reflective, and wry." (San Francisco Review) "Love Poem" A black biplane crashes through the window of the luncheonette. The pilot climbs down, removing his leather hood. He hands me my grandmother’s jade ring. No, it is two robin’s eggs and a telephone number: yours. from "Gathering the Bones Together" A father and his four sons run down a slope toward a deer they just killed. the father and two sons carry rifles. They laugh, jostle, and chatter together. A gun goes off and the youngest brother falls to the ground. A boy with a rifle stands beside him, screaming… "Orr’s is an immaculate style of latent violence and inhibited tenderness, charged with a desperate intensity whose source is often obscure."--The New York Times Book Review Gregory Orr is the author of seven volumes of poetry and three books of criticism. He is the editor at Virginia Quarterly Review, teaches at the University of Virginia, and lives with his wife and daughters in Charlottesville. In 2002, along with his selected poems The Caged Owl, he will also publish a memoir and a book about poetry writing: Three Strange Angels: Trauma and Transformation in Lyric Poetry. Also Available by Gregory Orr: Orpheus & Eurydice: A Lyric Sequence