The following is a short essay I wrote while I was in school at Vermont College a couple of years ago. It’s on the book, Poetry as Survival by Gregory Orr, which is still one of my all-time favorites on the power of poetry to transform the individual, be it the writer or the reader. I’ve also included a few quotes from the book at the end and if you click on his name it will take you to the poets.org page on Mr. Orr.  Because of the length of the piece you have to click "Read On" to get it all.

At the age of twelve Gregory Orr was responsible for a hunting accident in which his brother died. He was devastated for many years. He eventually found his way back to a fulfilling and productive life through writing lyric poetry where he could express the guilt, shame and horror of that day. Orr has written and taught the art of poetry for the past twenty-five years and says of lyric poetry: “Everything I’ve learned in that time reinforces my own experience that the personal lyric helps individual selves, both writers and readers, survive the vicissitudes of experience and the complexities and anguish of subjectivity and trauma.”           

This book, especially in the first couple of chapters, read like a love story. I found myself richly absorbed in this homage to language, to language in the form of the personal lyric, where the hurts and longings of the soul can spread out onto the page as a salve upon a festering wound. Orr speaks authentically, with a wisdom and clarity that allowed me to take in what he had to say as if he was speaking as a friend, not as a scholar expounding with unquestionable authority. It is in Orr’s willingness to simply state what he has found true for himself, through experience and investigation, that I found myself relaxed and confident that we were in this together and he had my best interests at heart.

Orr gives the poet permission to be “self-centered” in writing the personal lyric. In fact, he insists it is essential for the speaker in the poem to “absolutely believe that he or she is the central point around which all meaning constellates.” He goes on to say that, of course, this is not healthy as a principle for daily life, but without the assertion of the poet’s confidence in the writing of the personal lyric the poet, as Antonio Machado says, “wanders disoriented again among objects.” It is heartening and empowering to hear this call to the poet to stand firmly in his or her experience, to claim dominion over the expression of their poem as truth, if only for them, if only for that moment. It is at once liberating, and a responsibility, to be taken seriously in the crafting of a poem; keeping attuned at all times to the honest nature of what is emanating from the self into the language of the poem. To do otherwise is to create something lifeless, words that will suck energy from the reader, rather than imbue him/her with a kind of life-juice, an electrical current flowing from poet to poem to reader.

Orr illustrates the transformative powers of the lyric poem through the examples of a multitude of works where the poets have written of struggles, tragedies and transcendence. He speaks of the need, no matter what our level of trauma, to create order from disorder; to have a methodology in which our psyche can comprehend the incomprehensible. Often, as can be seen in the mentally and criminally ill, a distorted order has been achieved, one which has not been allowed to be expressed healthily, to be heard in a way that brings a peaceful resolution. When one does not use an outlet, such as art, to “make sense” of the paradox which is human existence, the mind is stuck, as a scratched record, repeating the trauma over and over, until there is an implosion or explosion.

In my experience as a Life Coach, working with clients to release themselves from old ways of thinking and behaving, there is always somewhere that these belief systems originated and one must go to that time and place, in some way or another, to address their initial purpose and why we adopted them as truth. One of the strongest ways of releasing oneself from these now harmful beliefs and habits is to have a conversation with them, to speak as if they exist outside of the “self” as a separate identity. In this way the client is empowered to act as commander of their ship and to either reform the mutinous sailor or cast him into the sea.

The personal lyric acts very much like a conversation where the subject of the poem is at the whim of the poet, who can form it and speak to it in any language or tone he/she wishes. There can be a bonding and acceptance or a total annihilation of the source of the pain. The poet can use the personal lyric as a tool, as a pathway to inner peace. This, of course, will depend on the willingness of the poet to “go the distance” with the subject; to use the craft of poetry to hone and refine it into art, art which, at one point moves beyond the personal tragedy of the narrator into the realm of universal consciousness. It is at this point that a release can occur which frees some, or all, of the past affliction from the heart.

In Part Two of the book Orr briefly examines the lives and works of Keats, D. H. Lawrence, Wordsworth, Whitman, Dickinson, Wilfred Owen, Sylvia Path, Stanley Kunitz, and Theodore Roethke. His insights into how their childhood and cultural environments, as well as traumatic incidents, shaped their poetry, were helpful to me in understanding the poetry of these writers, as well as providing clues as to my own particular style, subjects and intentions in writing poetry.

Gregory Orr, in Poetry as Survival, has written a very specialized book in its subject matter of the lyric poem. He, as well, has intelligently and lovingly spoken on a deeply imbedded human need: to experience the world we live in as whole, as having meaning, and embodying order. We live in a time where greed,  power and a need to keep moving, moving, moving so as not to ever catch up with ourselves, has taken us to the brink. So much of all we see on the television, the front page and in the eyes of those we pass on the street is more and more based in fear, in withholding from others and the self, with little hope of ever finding personal freedom. The art form of the personal lyric, whether we participate as writer and/or reader, serves as an effective pathway to self acceptance and a ordering of the world. Gregory Orr offers this beloved source of his own inner transformation as a method to break us open, lay our wounds bare, and bring us back to our wholeness once again.

Poetry as Survival
Gregory Orr
The University of Georgia Press

Quotes from the book:

All thoughts and actions emanate from the body….
Through my small, bonebound island I have learnt all
I know, experienced all, and sensed all. All I write is
inseparable from the island. As much as possible, therefore,
I employ the scenery of the island to describe the scenery
of my thoughts, the earthquakes of the body to describe
the earthquakes of the heart.
The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas

I don’t believe that poetry can save the world. I do believe
that the forces in us wish to share something of our experience
by turning it into something and giving it to somebody:
that is poetry. That is some kind of saving thing, and as far
as my life is concerned, poetry has saved me again and again.
Muriel Rukeyser

What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe
To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing,
A fever of thyself.
John Keats, Hyperion: A Vision

The plucked chord performs its natural duty: it sounds!
It call for an echo from one that feels alike.
J. G. Von Herder, “Essay on the Origin of Language”