Lexington Community Education Presents: An Evening with Poet Gregory Orr

 The Heart of Orr’s poetry, now as ever, is the enigmatic image...mystical, carnal, reflective, wry.  

     —San Francisco Review 

Poetry is the thread that leads us out of the labyrinth of despair and into the light. 

     —Gregory Orr 

Considered by many to be a master of short, lyric free verse, Gregory Orr is the author of ten collections of poetry. His most recent volumes include How Beautiful The Beloved, published in 2009, and Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved, published in 2005, both by Copper Canyon Press. His other volumes of poetry include The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems (2002); Orpheus and Eurydice (2001); City of Salt, Finalist for the LA Times Poetry Prize; We Must Make a Kingdom of It; and The Red House. Orr is also a writer of nonfiction and personal essays. His memoir The Blessing was chosen by Publisher’s Weekly as one of the fifty best non-fiction books of 2002. His personal essay This I Believe was broadcast on National Public Radio in 2006 and included in the anthology This I Believe (Holt 2007). His essay about working as a teenager for the Civil Rights movement in the Deep South was selected for The Best American Creative Nonfiction, to be published in 2009. His prose book, Poetry as Survival (University of Georgia Press 2002), an extended meditation on the dynamics and function of the personal lyric, was characterized by Adrienne Rich as “a wise and passionate book.” Much of Gregory Orr’s 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.” He has received many awards and fellowships, including an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Fellowship at the Institute for the Study of Culture and Violence. 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.