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Tuesday, June 2, 2020

On Writing from Loss



Poet and teacher Gregory Orr is featured in a recent broadcast of On Being. 

In the segment, titled “Shaping Grief with Language,”  Orr discusses, as Tippet puts it, “how language can become a tool for carrying what feels unbearable.” 

Orr founded the University of Virginia’s Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing and is the author of more than 10 books: poetry, non-fiction, memoir, and commentary on writing. 

Poetry, he says in the interview, enables one to “Turn your confusion into words; take it outside yourself and turn it into language.   [Poetry says] You just bring me your chaos; I will bring you all sorts of ordering principles.”

And at the end of a brief poem he asks “If we’re not supposed to dance, Why all this music?”

Check out the interview if you get the chance: you can listen to it or read the transcript. 

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