They had gone out hunting, the two brothers. What happened then was unimaginable. Gregory Orr, Professor of English at the University of Virginia says, “When I was 12-years-old, I was responsible for the death of my younger brother in a hunting accident. I held the rifle that killed him. In a single moment, my world changed forever. I felt grief, terror, shame and despair more deeply than I could ever have imagined.”
Even as you can hear the deathly silence in his voice as he says this, you realise life would have been a struggle after that and truly enough he says, “In the aftermath, no one in my shattered family could speak to me about my brother’s death, and their silence left me alone with all my agonizing emotions. And under those emotions, something even more terrible: a knowledge that all the easy meanings I had lived by until then had been suddenly and utterly abolished.”
To live with a mind so chaotic and then face a series of tragedies even after that would have numbed any one, but what is interesting and inspiring is to understand how he manages to live with such a noisy partner. Orr says, “I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions and traumatic events that come with being alive. When I write a poem, I process experience. I take what’s inside me — the raw, chaotic material of feeling or memory — and translate it into words and then shape those words into the rhythmical language we call a poem. This process brings me a kind of wild joy. Before I was powerless and passive in the face of my confusion, but now I am active: the powerful shaper of my experience. I am transforming it into a lucid meaning.” Orr is the author of nine collections of poetry and is the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships.
Orr is quick to identify the one major emotion that shadows the one who suffers: a sense of being the only sinner in a world of “good” people. “One consequence of traumatic violence is that it isolates its victims. It can cut us off from other people, cutting us off from their own emotional lives until we go numb and move through the world as if only half alive. As a young person, I found something to set against my growing sense of isolation and numbness: the making of poems. Because poems are meanings, even the saddest poem I write is proof that I want to survive. And therefore it represents an affirmation of life in all its complexities and contradictions.”
Not just do verse and meter become expressions to the innermost feelings of the person, they also act as bridges between minds. “An additional miracle comes to me as the maker of poems: Because poems can be shared between poet and audience, they also become a further triumph over human isolation. Whenever I read a poem that moves me, I know I’m not alone in the world. I feel a connection to the person who wrote it, knowing that he or she has gone through something similar to what I’ve experienced, or felt something like what I have felt.”
Orr whose mind continues to throw up memories of regret and if-only-it-had-not-been-that-way kind of feelings says, “And their poem gives me hope and courage, because I know that they survived, that their life force was strong enough to turn experience into words and shape it into meaning and then bring it toward me to share. The gift of their poem enters deeply into me and helps me live and believe in living.”
And so literature has the ability to heal.
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