21+ Gregory Orr Quotes On Education, Identity And Imaginative

Gregory Orr is an American poet, essayist, and professor. He is known for his lyrical, meditative, and often confessional poetry. Orr's work has been praised for its exploration of themes such as mortality, family, and the power of language. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Gregory Orr on love, education, identity.

Top 10 Gregory Orr Quotes

1. I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions and traumatic events that come with being alive.
2. To me, poetry is about survival first of all. Survival of the individual self, survival of the emotional life.
3. Beauty is like life itself: a dawn mist the sun burns off. It gives no peace, no rest.
4. When you're a young poet, reading is a search for your lost family.
5. When it's right you can't say Who is kissing whom.
6. Every breath is a resurrection.
7. With "poets dead and gone" as Keats says in "Mermaid Tavern" they are alive and talking to us and us to them.
8. That's crudely put, but If we're not supposed to dance, Why all this music?
9. To guide someone through the halls of hell is not the same as love.
10. Poetry is the thread that leads us out of the labyrinth of despair and into the light.

Gregory Orr Famous Quotes And Sayings

"Similar but not the same" - that's like the return of the beloved for me. And metamorphosis: the spirit of the beloved moving through things, not lingering long in any one thing or place, no matter how we might wish it. — Gregory Orr

No one can threaten poetry. It's always been there, always will be. Humans need it to live: it has sustaining powers. How could we (anyone) get through adolescence without some form of song? Song is only a version of lyric poetry that is carried more by melody than by internal coherence and unity. but lyric and song - they are the same. — Gregory Orr

I am committed now to one thing: lyric sequences. I want the intensity of lyric, but the scope and arc of narrative. so, I think I'll just write sequences for the foreseeable (the Beloved sequence doesn't have a 'plot' so I can just keep adding poems to it, it's like a giant bag I can just put beloved lyrics into - I think there are about 300 of them i've published by now). — Gregory Orr

Speaking of people I had to exclude: Hank Williams. which is to say, songs are part of lyric poetry in my book, my thinking. In fact they are the urgent element of poetry in our time, they carry the most emotion for the most people in our culture. everyone LOVES poetry, because we all love (one form or another) of rock and roll (be it folk to emo to rap). It's all rock and roll and all lyric poetry. — Gregory Orr

I can't actually explain why my lines got shorter, but they did. Just as I can't explain why my early poems were 'all image' and my current ones are relatively abstract. The sense of the line changed with the theme, somehow my ear (or brain or heart/mind) fell in love with a short line and very very simple words. — Gregory Orr

Rhyme as an echo not a closing off of sound. Love it. I don't know where the rhymes came from. Or the puns like "no/know" and so on. Just a way my mind start moving toward what seemed urgent to it. I'd like to claim complete rational intent for it all, but it wasn't that way. if you asked me about rhyme thirty years ago, I'd have said: not me, never. And now I done it. — Gregory Orr

D.H. Lawrence says that myths are "inexhaustible" because they are symbols of heart mysteries. That is, they can't be exhausted - they somehow have embodied some central human mystery (love, loss, being a body in time, who knows which or what?) and thus can be retold infinitely and still be rich. That's part of your saying: it's old, but it's also new. Or: there's nothing "new" in the human heart, but it still matters lots. — Gregory Orr

In Eden I "saw" that Adam or Eve probably spoke each word FOR THE FIRST TIME and that seemed wild and seemed to me that that might have brought them to some essence of language. Once I "saw" the city, I knew it was real. once I saw that a poem was a house, i knew it was real and could go back to it or else write a flurry of poems around it, both worked. — Gregory Orr

I want language to help us live in a world of wonder/terror/change. I want it to be about "becoming" rather than "being." I think that being and nouns are part of our hopeless dream that time will stop and we will not die. but it's not that way. So, why not celebrate verbs and the beloved's metamorphosis into other people or creatures or places - the same spirit but moving through things, not static. — Gregory Orr

Language is a theme in the whole book, no? I mean it ends with the title poem about words are all we have. I guess midrash makes sense. How does it change in the course of the sequence? Well, God is into No and into Stasis/Nouns. Adam and Eve, in order to be in this world (and get this world going) must choose verbs. Which is to gain sex but also to choose death and all else that goes with change. To choose becoming over being. — Gregory Orr

Another way of saying "put it in the Book" would be that each poem we write pops up in the city of poetry, where anyone can visit it. Just as we visit the poems written before us. Go to Dickinson's house, or Li Po's or whomever we think has something to say to us that might help or be beautiful. — Gregory Orr

Life Lessons by Gregory Orr

1. Gregory Orr's work emphasizes the importance of facing difficult emotions and experiences head on in order to heal and grow.
2. He also encourages readers to find beauty in the world, even in the midst of suffering.
3. Lastly, he reminds us to be compassionate with ourselves and others, as we all have our own unique stories and struggles.