Quotes from Gregory Orr

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

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.

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.

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.

Self-Portrait at Twenty" 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.

For Trisha The truth's in myth not fact, a story fragment or an act that lasts and stands for all: how bees made honey in a skull.

Not all engagement with our past is characterized by crisis.

A French writer once said that prose is walking, poetry is dancing. That's a fine metaphor for the pleasurable intensification of emotion, language, and rhythm that is at the heart of poetry.

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.

I couldn't help noticing certain parts of the statues have been polished to a high sheen by passing hands as the centuries passed. If it's a form of worship it is not much odder or more perverse than the saint's stone toe kissed to a stub by fervent lips.

The dead sing us songs I'm learning to answer.

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)

If manipulators of language (and people) use words and phrases to put their listeners under a spell, then poets are people who are themselves under the spell of language.

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.

Here, where sea Meets shore: The best of dancing floors.

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.

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.

When you're a young poet, reading is a search for your lost family.