Poetry as Survival
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.
