Gregory Orr > Quotes

“If we’re not supposed to dance, Why all this music?”
― Gregory Orr

“And yet I swear
I love this earth
that scars and scalds,
that burns my feet.

And even hell is holy.”
― Gregory Orr

“To me, poetry is about survival first of all. Survival of the individual self, survival of the emotional life.”
― Gregory Orr

“I was born with a knife in one hand and a wound in the other.”
― Gregory Orr, The Caged Owl: New & Selected Poems

“Writing often reveals us to ourselves, lets us name what’s important to us and what has been silent or silenced inside us.”
― Gregory Orr, A Primer for Poets & Readers of Poetry

“Maybe she loved me,
maybe not –
who knows?
Not even the gods
can see into
a human heart –
it’s that dark.”
― Gregory Orr

“Somehow something has gone wrong with poetry in our culture. We have lost touch with its purpose and value, and in doing so, we have lost contact with essential aspects of our own emotional and spiritual lives.”
― Gregory Orr, Poetry as Survival

“To be alive: not just the carcass /
But the spark.
That's crudely put, but...
If we're not supposed to dance,
Why all this music?”
― Gregory Orr

“Where would I be if not for your wild heart?
I ask this not from love, but selfishly—
how could I live? How could I make my art?”
― Gregory Orr, The Caged Owl: New & Selected Poems

“To learn by heart is to learn
By hurt—grief inscribing
Its wisdom in the soft tissue.

Song you sing, poem you are—
Finger moving, precise
As a phonograph needle,
Along the groove of scar.”
― Gregory Orr, How Beautiful the Beloved

“And to live only once–
What if that’s not enough?”
― Gregory Orr, Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved

“Maybe it was always simple:
Loss surrounds us.
Who would deny it?
We ourselves are loss, are lost.”
― Gregory Orr, Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved

“I want to study The book of the world: Every vanishing page.”
― Gregory Orr, How Beautiful the Beloved

“The way the word sinks
into the deep snow of the page”
― Gregory Orr, Burning the Empty Nests

“Look, they descend:
light, water,
all things
released
seek the earth...

All things go
downward.
Even the rocks
settle and sink,
even the flowers bow.”
― Gregory Orr, Orpheus & Eurydice: A Lyric Sequence

“If your gaze takes in
the world,
a person's a puny thing.

If a person is all you see,
the rest falls away
and she becomes the world.”
― Gregory Orr, Orpheus & Eurydice: A Lyric Sequence

“Her eye and my ‘I’: Her gazing Creates me.”
― Gregory Orr, How Beautiful the Beloved

“when poets go back by way of memory and imagination to past traumas to engage or re-engage them, then those poets are taking control—are shaping and ordering and asserting power over the hurtful events. In lyric poems, they’re both telling the story from their point of view and also shaping the experience into an order (the poem) that shows they have power over what (in the past) overpowered them.”
― Gregory Orr, A Primer for Poets & Readers of Poetry

“The deer carcass hangs from a rafter.
Wrapped in blankets, a boy keeps watch
from a pile of loose hay. Then he sleeps

and dreams about a death that is coming:
Inside him, there are small bones
scattered in a field among burdocks and dead grass.
He will spend his life walking there,
gathering the bones together.

Pigeons rustle in the eaves.
At his feet, the German shepherd
snaps its jaws in its sleep.”
― Gregory Orr

“William Butler Yeats was after the same point when he remarked: “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric; but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”
― Gregory Orr, A Primer for Poets & Readers of Poetry

“Here, where sea Meets shore: The best of dancing floors.”
― Gregory Orr, Selected Books of the Beloved

“I remember the cloud on its blue bicycle
gliding over the leaves under the bare branches.
You and I were walking.
You wore your long green dress
with the hem frayed so the loose threads
seemed like tiny roots.
We were holding hands when my hand
became a yellow scarf
and you stood waving it slowly.

from “Daffodil Poem”
― Gregory Orr, The Caged Owl: New & Selected Poems

“To be alive: not just the carcass
But the spark.
That's crudely put, but…
If we're not supposed to dance,
Why all this music?”
― Gregory Orr, Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved

“Each night, I knelt on a marble slab
and scrubbed at the blood.
I scrubbed for years and still it was there.
But tonight the bones in my feet
begin to burn. I stand up
and start walking, and the slab
appears under my feet with each step,
a white road only as long as your body.”
― Gregory Orr

“If shadows could talk
they would tell us
everything we know already
but in the melodious
language of tears
in which every third word rhymes.

from “Some Notes on Shadows”
― Gregory Orr, The Caged Owl: New & Selected Poems

“because you’ve chosen poetry, you’re condemned to wonder at skills and felicities of language or imagination in the poems of others that you yourself may never achieve, no matter how hard you work toward them—things that will always be beyond your reach but also will always be luring you on.”
― Gregory Orr, A Primer for Poets & Readers of Poetry

“Love is what I sought.
"Hunger," they called it.”
― Gregory Orr, The Caged Owl: New & Selected Poems

“I entered the empty room.
I sat on the floor and drew pictures all day.
One day I held a picture against the bare wall:
it was a window. Climbing through,

I stood in a sloping field
at dusk. As I began walking, night settled.
Far ahead in the valley, I saw the lights
of the village, and always at my back, I felt
the white room swallowing what was passed.

from “The Room,” Selected and New Poems. (Wesleyan University Press, 1988)”
― Gregory Orr

“I’m actually after another notion here—what I’ve called Quest. Quest has to do with the intersection of your own personal life and the art of poetry in your time and place. It has to do with what you want to do with poetry and what poetry wants to do with you. It has to do with coming to understand who you are and who you hope to be when you are reborn through language and imagination as a poet.”
― Gregory Orr, A Primer for Poets & Readers of Poetry

“And yet I swear, I love this earth that scars and scalds, that burns my feet. And even hell is holy.”
― Gregory Orr, The Caged Owl: New & Selected Poems