Poet: Gregory Orr
Poet Background:
Gregory Orr is arguably one of the most accomplished American poets of the last half-century, with his poems being widely anthologized and winning many different awards. Born in 1947 in Albany, New York, his early life was punctuated by tragedy—at the age of 12, he accidentally killed his younger brother in a hunting accident, an event that the family never was able to talk about amongst themselves, and his mother died soon after.
Unable to process the grief through healing with his own family, Orr soon turned to poetry to confront the subjects that weighed heavy on him, finding that writing poetry helped him relieve pressure and burdens that he felt built up and threatened to explode inside of him otherwise.
Orr went on to receive his B.A. from Antioch College in 1969 and his MFA from Columbia University in 1972, but not before participating in the Civil Rights struggle during the mid-1960s. Taking part in the Freedom Summer in Alabama as a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), he was jailed and severely beaten for trying to register African-American citizens to vote. The experience ultimately brought him closer to the idea of spirituality, and much of his future poetry reflects such an experience, with many of his poems dealing with existential questions related to God, the existence of any higher power, the idea of a human soul, and what actually makes humans different from other animals.
He went on to become a Professor of English at the University of Virginia, and he created the MFA Program in Creative Writing there in 1975. From 1978-2003, he also served as the Poetry Editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, one of the most respected literary journals in the entire country. He retired from teaching in the spring of 2019, and he currently divides his time with his wife, the painter Trisha Orr, between houses in the Adirondack Mountains and Virginia.
Orr has authored twelve collections of poetry, five non-fiction books, and one memoir, and he has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Amongst the many awards he has won is the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his poems have been published in many different literary journals and national magazines.
Known mainly as a master of the short, personal lyric poem, critic Hank Lazer, when describing Orr’s career evolution, said, “…Orr gradually developed the ability to fuse his incredible skill at visual precision—the signature of his image-based work in his very first book—with an insistent musical quality, joining visual precision with a beauty of sound.” In other words, Orr measures each word he uses in his poems very carefully, and he writes in a way that allows readers of his poems to see what it is he’s writing about in each poem, hoping that the images created by his work elicits an emotional and spiritual reaction inside each person, pointing to the spiritual qualities of both a well-constructed poem and the need for spiritual exploration through said poems.
Poem: ‘To Weep’
Tears were forbidden in Eden—
God didn’t want the soil embittered.
Beyond the gates, they were free
To weep.
And weeping became
A form of freedom:
It meant you felt; it meant you had a self.
Analysis:
This poem is from River Inside the River, a collection of Orr’s first published in 2013. The entire collection, composed of three distinct sections, looks at the spiritual components of human existence, with many of them touching on religious themes. The first section, lasting about forty or so pages, seeks to retell the Adam and Eve origin story/myth, and this is the section this part of the overall collection comes from.
When you look at the section as a whole, the retelling of the Adam and Eve origin story/myth is framed in much more hopeful terms—there are passages where Orr laments how Adam and Eve have been kicked out of this eternal paradise, but then he infuses that sentiment with an idea that it was necessary for that to have happened if humans were going to have an interesting life. If everything was perfect, and there were no problems, wouldn’t that result in a total lack of emotions? How can you know you’re happy when you can’t be sad or mad or disappointed? He tries to make the point that, without human sin and flaw, there is no overall ‘journey of life’ that could occur, because we would wake up every day and experience the same actions and events and emotions day after day after day, with nothing to break up the monotony of it. The section itself ends on a hopeful note, that of two people walking off into the proverbial ether and discovering what the rest of Earth has in store for them, and it’s a positive ending, one that’s refreshing and different from so many poets before Orr who spoke of Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden like it was the worst thing to ever happen to human beings, with much of that hatred directed squarely at Eve and blaming her for all the problems that have arisen since then.
With this poem specifically, Orr seeks to explore that idea of an emotion only allowed to us because Adam and Eve committed the first sin and got us, as in all humankind, banished from the Garden of Eden. He starts the poem out simply, with a declarative sentence that sets the stage perfectly—God has basically outlawed any kind of sadness in the Garden, as being sad results in a less-than-optimal state for an optimized, perfect existence for humans, and that means nothing that would depress us or get us angry or allow us to feel anything other than unbridled joy. By eating the apple, which Orr doesn’t include here because the story/myth has basically become a story/myth that everyone throughout the country, and maybe even the world, has been taught since birth, Eve might’ve caused the banishment of the two original humans from paradise, but what kind of paradise is it where you can’t be a fully-rounded individual with all the emotions that come with it?
The next sentence immediately jumps to talking about the time spent beyond the gates of Eden, after they’ve already been banished, and it’s interesting how Orr breaks up this sentence physically—he ends the first line on a positive note, letting ‘they were free’ end it, and it gives readers this idea of hope and optimism—whenever humans hear the word ‘free’ or ‘freedom,’ we almost always pair that with something optimistic. No one ever associates freedom with sadness (unless you’re reading the daily news about another dictator somewhere in the world taking more and more freedoms from his people, with the 'freedom' in that case drawing a negative connotation in regard to what the people no longer have, but that’s for another time), and it’s a note of positivity in an area where there usually isn’t any to begin with. Think about the story as it was told to you in Sunday School, or, if you aren’t a Christian or someone who was raised Christian, think about how you’ve come to heard it through other means. Adam and Eve being banished from Eden was supposed to be this extremely depressing thing—God had built this paradise, and Eve had spoiled it just by eating an apple, and now humans were cursed with sadness and sickness and disease and death and every other malady under the sun! Orr tries to change that idea on its head though and points out that, without those kinds of things, the human race would be a much stuffier, much more wooden kind of species, and we’d live the lives of robots basically, unable to process emotions and feelings and thoughts in a way that actually allows us to have varied lives.
With the next line, the second part of the sentence, Orr chooses to leave ‘To weep’ on its own—not only is it a call to the poem’s title, but it’s also isolated because he wants readers to actually question the assumptions we have about ‘weeping,’ and what it usually means when we think of someone weeping. Maybe some people would disagree with this, but I’d argue that, in general, when people hear the word ‘weep,’ it’s in the negative. You can weep for joy, but that’s not usually how it’s explained, as ‘crying tears of joy’ is usually how I would describe crying in a happy manner. The word ‘weep’ itself is a more formalized way of saying ‘to cry,’ and it’s a little more archaic, more old-fashioned than anything else, and the connotations that belong with it makes me think of earlier times than our current day, going back to Victorian times with their drab colors and ‘weeping wails’ during funeral practices. ‘Weeping’ might be one way of saying that someone is crying, but you never really hear anyone say it in a good way, that someone was ‘weeping for joy’ or ‘weeping with joy.’ Therfore, the point here is simple—Orr is, once again, trying to turn a normally negative word and its connotation into a good thing, showing that even crying out of sadness is actually a good thing in the grand scheme of life. We can take a hard situation, one that makes us cry and feel bad in some way, and look at it from a different perspective, trying to give a more optimistic spin on life itself instead of always looking at everything with such a drab undertone.
Orr ends the poem with much the same sentiment--he says, in clean, simple words, that weeping is akin to freedom, tying the themes and literal words of the poem back together at the end, a circular motion made complete over the course of just a few lines. He points out that, without emotions, both good and bad, you don’t have an individualized self, either a sense of it or self-worth, and it furthers the idea that humans need to have both positive and negative experiences happen to them during the course of their lifetime to fully understand the richness of the human condition. It furthers the old cliché that without a few tears, you can’t enjoy the smiles, and Orr writes it in such a simple, understated way that this poem, even with its religious undertones, is a beauty for all those who seek comfort in the idea of the human condition, both secularly or religiously minded.
For Future Reading: