Gregory Orr, born 1947, is an American poet. He received a B.A. degree from Antioch College and an M.F.A. from Columbia University. He is a professor of English at the University of Virginia where he founded the MFA Program in Writing in 1975, and served from 1978 to 2003 as Poetry Editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. He is also a columnist and editor of the magazine, Sacred Bearings: A Journal for Survivors. He lives with his wife, the painter Trisha Orr, and their two daughters in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Featured on National Public Radio’s This I Believe, Orr has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and of an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Orr is the author of twelve collections of poetry, including City of Salt (1995) which was a finalist for the LA Times Poetry Prize. He is also the author of a memoir, The Blessing (2002), which was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the fifty best non-fiction books of the year, and three books of essays.
In reviewing Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2005), Ted Genoways writes in the Virginia Quarterly Review: “Sure, the trappings of modern life appear at the edges of these poems, but their focus is so unwaveringly aimed toward the transcendent—not God, but the beloved—that we seem to slip into a less cluttered time. It’s an experience usually reserved for reading the ancients, and clearly that was partly Orr’s inspiration.” In reviewing How Beautiful the Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2009) in Bookslut, Sean Patrick Hill writes that Orr’s “poems themselves are as Frost said they must be: momentary stays against confusion.”
Gregory Orr wrote an opinion piece in the Sunday Magazine of the New York Times on August 29, 2014 about accidentally killing his brother in a hunting accident in response to the fatal shooting with an Uzi machine gun of a gun instructor by a 9 year old in Arizona.
SELF PORTRAIT AT TWENTY
Gregory Orr
I stood inside myself
like a dead tree or a tower.
I pulled the rope
of braided hair
and high above me
a bell of leaves tolled.
Because my hand
stabbed its brother,
I said: Make it stone.
Because my tongue
spoke harshly, I said:
Make it dust.
And yet
it was not death, but
her body in its green dress
I longed for. That’s why
I stood for days in the field
until the grass turned black
and the rain came.
========
UNTITLED [This is what was bequeathed us]
Gregory Orr
This is what was bequeathed us:
This earth the beloved left
And, leaving,
Left to us.
No other world
But this one:
Willows and the river
And the factory
With its black smokestacks.
No other shore, only this bank
On which the living gather.
No meaning but what we find here.
No purpose but what we make.
That, and the beloved’s clear instructions:
Turn me into song; sing me awake.