Poetry as Survival

This book is worth its weight in gold. It is worth more than all the self-help-how-to-write-poetry books put together. Orr writes of the poetry of survival with complete authority. He knows what he's talking about, having suffered a psychic wound early in childhood when he accidentally killed his little brother in a hunting accident. Orr writes: "To say that I was horrified and traumatized by the event is only to state the obvious." The point, says Orr, is that his writing got him beyond the horror and the paralysis. What sets this book apart from the "how-to's" and the "can-do's" is Orr's emphasis on excellence: In other words, it isn't enough to have a psychic wound and to write about it--great writing comes about only through a careful and (usually) long apprenticeship. The first half of the book explains the psychology of writing and healing. Orr's writing is thoughtful and engaging. He has the ability to explain complex concepts in a way that is easy for the reader to understand. For instance, in explaining the "self," Orr writes: "The self, in my image, is like a tiny island in a vast sea of chaos, and it's also like those conch shells you lift to your ear to hear the ocean's roar: the chaos of the sea is inside the self also." Throughout, Orr seeks to explain how writing can give order to the seemingly chaotic life. The second half of the book deals with writers of the personal lyric, focusing on early practitioners like Blake, Wordsworth, and Whitman. In addition, in his thoroughly engaging way, Orr writes of several poets as being his "heroes." In doing so, amazingly, he humanizes them, makes them real people rather than the marble statues they seem to be in poetry anthologies. Other poets he discusses are: Plath, Roethke, Dickinson, Keats, and Wilfred Owen. One of my favorite revelations in the book was Orr's brief discussion of the Polish poet Tadeusz Rozewicz, whose "In the Middle of Life" portrays, in Orr's words, "a shell-shocked, traumatized veteran who must relearn everything from scratch and through elementary incantatory repetitions." As a university lecturer, and as someone who is familiar with literary criticism, I find that often in classrooms the writer's original and personal motivations for writing are erased from consideration. Works are often come to as though they are cadavers, opened and probed objectively on a slab. Orr, in contrast, brings poets and their poems fully alive. The experience of reading this book was thoroughly rewarding. I highly recommend this book. It is a great companion to DeSalvo's WRITING AS A WAY OF HEALING: HOW TELLING OUR STORIES TRANSFORMS OUR LIVES.