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the world.
Is the world.
Becomes the hundred things we love
Or
the one and only thing or person
We love.
Shifting, restless,
Refusing
to incarnate in a final form,
As if to teach us to keep our eyes
Moving if
we want to see the bird
Flitting from bush to tree:
No,
It's hidden now, you can't see it,
But you can hear its
song.
Body of the Beloved)
IMAGE: Grinnell Point and Swiftcurrent Falls
Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/The_Beloved_Moves.html
Gregory Orr was born in 1947 in Albany, New York, and grew up in
the rural Hudson Valley, and for a year, in a hospital in the
hinterlands of Haiti. He received a B.A. degree from Antioch College,
and an M.F.A. from Columbia University.
He is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2005); The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems (2002); Orpheus and Eurydice (2001); Burning the Empty Nests (1997); City of Salt (1995), which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Poetry Prize; and Gathering the Bones Together (1975).
He is also the author of a memoir, The Blessing (Council Oak Books, 2002), which was chosen by Publisher's Weekly as one of the fifty best non-fiction books the year, and three books of essays, including Poetry As Survival (2002) and Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction to the Poetry (1985).
He is considered by many to be a master of short, lyric free verse.
Much of his early work is concerned with seminal events from his
childhood, including a hunting accident when he was twelve in which he
accidentally shot and killed his younger brother, followed shortly by
his mother's unexpected death, and his father's later addiction to
amphetamines. Some of the poems that deal explicitly with these
incidents include "A Litany," "A Moment," and "Gathering the Bones Together," in which he declares:
"I was twelve when I killed him; / I felt my own bones wrench from my
body." In the opening of his essay, "The Making of Poems," broadcast on
National Public Radio's All Things Considered, Orr said, "I
believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual
confusions and traumatic events that come with being alive."
In a review of Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved from the Virginia Quarterly Review, Ted
Genoways writes: "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."
Orr has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and two poetry fellowships
from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2003, he was presented the
Award in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and
was a Rockefeller Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Culture and
Violence, where he worked on a study of the political and social
dimension of the lyric in early Greek poetry.
He teaches 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 lives with his wife, the painter Trisha Orr, and their two daughters in Charlottesville, Virginia.
page: www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/218
