Gregory Orr: Resources of the personal lyricHank Lazer. The American Poetry Review. Philadelphia: Nov/Dec 2003.Vol. 32, Iss. 6;  pg. 43

Torn open by us ever and again,

the god is the place that heals.

-Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, II.16, II. 1-2(1)

THERE IS AN ODD, STUBBORNLY HEROIC quality to Gregory Orr's career as a poet. Over a thirty-year period, when the American poetry world has seen many changes in the most admired styles, identities, and affiliations, Orr has retained a steadfast commitment to what he calls the personal lyric, and he has continued to explore and develop the resources of the image in the service of the personal lyric. In 2002, Orr reports on a lifetime of witness and accomplishment with the publication of three books: The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems, Poetry as Survival (essays), and The Blessing: A Memoir.2

The Blessing is an extraordinary book, full of luminous details, beautifully clear writing, and short, gorgeous chapters. Interestingly, as Orr wrote to me in a recent e-mail3, this memoir, published by a little known press, Council Oak Books, has received more critical attention and discussion than his thirty years of published poetry. I would like to think of The Blessing as an endeavor that complements Orr's poetry-similar in its lyrical intensity and visual precision, different in its extended narrative specificity. Orr's memoir provides a narrative, factual basis for the genesis of his poetry; it also clarifies the personal necessity and the profoundly healing and spiritual quality of Orr's poetry.

The Blessing begins with an important etymological consideration, linking the word "blessing" to the French verb blesser, to wound, to the Old English bletsian, to sprinkle with blood, and to Orr's conflation of these meanings: "To wound, to confer spiritual power, to sprinkle with blood" (46). Orr's book is an intense prose equivalent of Wordsworth's The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet's Mind and an illumination of one of Orr's favorite passages in The Prelude: "Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up / Fostered alike by beauty and by fear." While The Blessing tells the story of becoming a poet and recounts a childhood full of wonder, it is more insistently a tale of survival, of a painful blessing, wounding, and growing through trauma and tragedy as Orr tells the story of his accidental killing of his brother (which, horribly, parallels his father's accidental shooting of a childhood friend), the death in infancy of another brother, the early death of his mother, and the at times horrifying experiences at the hands of his amphetamine-addicted country doctor father. The Blessing shows what was needed-maternal love and contact-and not delivered; offers the stock explanations that did not work-"It may not make sense now but it's all part of God's plan" (15B); and, slowly develops what does allow Orr's survival and soul-making: a life in writing (and reading), and specifically a life in reading and writing lyric poetry

and the personal lyric.

The accidental killing of his brother Peter plunges Greg into a world of intense questioning: "How could I live in a world where everything was random, where Accident ruled and where one day I might wake to sunshine and blue sky and another, find my own brother dead at my feet? Accident. Unbearable word, unbearable world" (22B). This quest for explanation, for order, and for meaning is at the heart of The Blessing and the poetics that Orr articulates in Poetry as Survival. In the memoir, Orr asks,

If not for a god, a strange and dangerous god, how could anyone explain a repetition as bizarre as this? My father and then myself-each performing the same, almost unimaginable deed. Here was a chilling and compelling pattern right before my eyes. I might not believe God could lift Peter out of the morgue to dine at his celestial banquet, but how could I doubt that this violent coincidence was full of meaning? And wasn't that what I wanted and desperately needed that day of Peter's death: a world where meaning existed? (22B)

Initially, Orr found some refuge in the story of Cain: "Frightening as my dream of Cain was, it offered me the shelter of a story. And stories are where human meanings begin. If I was Cain, I knew who I was and where I was situated in the universe" (28B). It is the power of story-particularly of the story based on myth, on repetition, on resonance, and on a central image-that assumes critical importance in all of Orr's writing and thinking.

From his parents, Orr declares that he received "no model for my own coping" (41B). In each instance of tragedy, "there would be no grieving, but instead fortitude and action and a sudden departure like flight from the scene of a crime" (121B). Eventually, Orr "felt my identification with Cain beginning to lose its explanatory power" (134B). For his own survival, Orr must reconstruct a sense of meaning:

Violent trauma shreds the web of meaning. It destroys all the threads of relationship that link the hurt self to the world-to other people and objects, or to nature, or even to the inner world of its own feelings. The real task of a trauma victim -the task that makes life worth living again-is to reconnect the self to the world. To do that, you need to reweave the web, to risk the spinning of new threads until they form a sustaining pattern the self can inhabit. (134-135B)

For Orr, the rebuilding of that web gradually comes about through his entry into the world of poetry, beginning with a "single pivotal experience" his senior year in high school when he wrote a poem: "What I felt while I was writing it was overwhelming. I felt an incredible sense of release. I felt as if the passionate and agonized inner world that I really inhabited was suddenly and precisely given form and objective reality" (143B). Orr's description and reassessment of that pivotal event provide, for me, both the source of my affinity with his work and my disagreement with the range of his aesthetic choices. His initial description-"what I felt when I wrote my first, clumsy poem was that the words were creating a world, not describing a preexisting one" (143B)-opens up to a wide range of possible poetries. His subsequent description-that "poems are discrete artifacts of language that prove someone's

imagination and linguistic gifts have triumphed over disorder in a definitive, shaped way" (144B)-marks what I find to be a constricting (though in Orr's experience, highly beneficial and rich) version of what poems can be.

When Orr enters Hamilton College, he also enters "the dream of lyric poets" (155B), at first, a dream modeled on the work of the young Yeats and Dylan Thomas, but eventually fueled much more decisively by the writing of Georg Trakl with whom Orr "felt an almost shocking sense of kinship" (156B). The concluding sections of the book take Orr through a series of astonishing and horrifying experiences in Mississippi and Alabama during Orr's participation in the Civil Rights Movement as a member of SNCC. Orr's beatings and imprisonment-his close brush with death-and his eventual release and return to rural upstate New York mark the conclusion of the memoir. What my schematic reading of Orr's memoir fails to indicate adequately is the beautiful luminosity of Orr's descriptive writing. When Orr returns to upstate New York, he is in a near break-down state, almost unable to talk and unable to think clearly or consecutively, unable to communicate his experiences. He ends up spending an afternoon in the Adirondacks with Mrs. Irving, the high school English teacher in whose class Orr had his initial experience of the intensity and redemptive nature of writing poetry. They drive out to Bolton's Landing, and Mrs. Irving takes Orr to the property of the sculptor David Smith who had been killed earlier that spring in an automobile accident. They spend the afternoon wandering through Smith's abandoned workshop, "which he had called the Terminal Iron Works. But it was the field itself that was amazing. Smith had filled it with his sculptures, arraying almost three hundred of them in long rows across the field" (206B). Orr and his former teacher ignore the "No Trespassing" signs and enter into that field of astonishing sculpture pieces. Here, Orr finds his enduring inspiration:

Some of the pieces were raw iron spattered with rust from being left open to the elements. Rust, but not blood. These bodies didn't bleed. They had risen as if out of the soil itself like the dragon's teeth in the ancient Greek myth, teeth Cadmus had sown like seed in a field. They'd come up as armed soldiers who fought each other to death. But these statues weren't like Cadmus's dragontooth soldiers; they were soldiers of art. They brought no mayhem; only a longing to rise up and stand inside meaning as a man might stand in armor. There would be no violent struggles here. This was a field of blessing, a field of spiritual power. A field where the mortal and fallen rose up, transformed.

I had made a long journey south to join the army of history. Here in this field, arrayed in long lines, was an army of art. This army was engaged in a war against the nothingness and indifference of the universe. It wasn't the kind of war history fought, where timing was everything and the clocks ran on blood. This was a war outside time. It was a war where you didn't fight, or march, or do violence to anyone.

Against the surrounding chaos and the desolate feel of the dead sculptor's house and padlocked forge, each welded presence seemed to say: this is art's way of fighting-to stand very still. This is art's way of fighting-not to do battle, but to concentrate emphatic being in an object. (206-207B)

Nearly thirty years later, Orr, in Poetry as Survival, reflects on the nature of the lyric

tradition that has sustained him. He does not strain against that received tradition. In fact, his critical writing defines and specifies that tradition, with particular emphasis on Whitman, Dickinson, Keats, Blake, and Trakl, and a more contemporary group that includes Kunitz, Roethke, and Plath. Orr establishes his personal resources and writes what amounts to a kind of hagiography-a compendium of the writing of those poets whose work he has found to be heroic and saving. He emphasizes the poems -particularly their saving modes of making story and order. Orr is remarkably accepting of the innate value of "the personal" in poetry. In a visceral and inspiring manner, he feels (and reports on) his valuing of poetry, particularly the personal lyric as a saving force in one's life. He does not particularly see or feel the sense of necessity of fundamental innovation in the forms or syntax of poetry. What Kathleen Fraser has called "the innovative necessity"4 has never been central to Orr's activity as a poet. Instead, he adds to and extends (but does not break with nor fundamentally alter) an established tradition of the personal lyric.

Orr stakes a claim for the universality of the lyric and the personal lyric, asserting that "lyric poetry is written down or composed in every culture on the planet at this moment, which means something like one thousand different cultures and three thousand different languages. All cultures on the globe have a conception of the personal lyric" (1S). Though he acknowledges that the personal lyric "does not by any means constitute the bulk of the world's lyric poetry legacy" (3S), it is the tradition to which Orr attends, telling the story of his "heroes of the imagination" (177S).

Orr's emphasis falls upon the personal lyric's redemptive function-its ability to foster (individualized) understanding and survival. For Orr, the principles of such poetry-how and why it works -are reasonably straightforward:

This survival begins when we "translate" our crisis into language-where we give it symbolic expression as an unfolding drama of self and the forces that assail it. . . . First, we have shifted the crisis to a bearable distance from us: removed it to the symbolic but vivid world of language. Second, we have actively made rather than passively endured it as lived experience. . . . Broadly speaking, its function is to help us express and regulate our emotional lives, which are confusing and sometimes opaque to us. (4-5S)

Though I have significant differences with Orr's view of poetry-especially his implicit sense of what range of poetry and what forms of poetry are of value-I do find that the large questions that motivate his investigation of poetry are questions that I share: how / why does poetry give me / one hope? In what ways is poetry-the making of it and the intense reading of it-a redemptive act? Or, put even more simply, how does poetry help us? If not precisely in the personally therapeutic mode that Orr puts forward, how then?

In Orr's thinking, the poem-particularly the personal lyric-dramatizes the subduing of disorder by order, by means of story and symbol:

Story, of which personal memories are an excellent example, is one of imagination's most basic ordering powers, a fundamental method of arranging the chaotic material

of our experience into a form of meaning that emphasizes particular characters, specific details and actions-selected for their symbolic significance-and the ways in which these characters act or interact reveal motive and character. What's more, these stories called personal memory are crucial to our sense of self. (19S)

Orr sides with Isak Dinesen's observation that "any sorrow can be borne if it can be made into a story, or if a story can be told about it" (21S). For Orr, the poem is a redemptive, exemplary, and pedagogical triumph over the forces of chaos: "By making such a dramatized, expressive model of its crisis, the self is able to acknowledge the existence, nature, and power of what is destabilizing it, while at the same time asserting its ultimate mastery over the disordering by the power of its linguistic and imaginative orderings" (22S). Orr is aware that "poetic order is not a cookie cutter, and existential disorder is not pastry dough-you can't just press down with a sonnet cookie-cutter in the shape of a ginger-bread man or a star. In lyric poetry, disorder is dynamic" (23S). Orr himself seeks (and praises) a poetry that offers "to restabilize us" (41S).

Of course, different poets will have differing views-passionately held differing views-of how the poem incarnates that dialectical relationship between order and disorder. For Orr, the poem ends up being centered around the pronoun "I"-"a pronoun whose formidable task is to incarnate and dramatize a full range of human feelings, thoughts, memories, and sensations" (37S). An alternative approach would be a poetry that grants a greater participatory existence for the "chaotic" by organizing the poem not around the mono-voicings or narrativizings of "I" but around (and through and by means of) a more multiple, less self-centered play of language itself. In part, such a debate ultimately concerns what constitutes a fit or credible or contemporary "new realism" in poetry-even within the compass of the lyric and lyrical. Orr offers an explanation that projects such different balances as a matter of taste (in our capacities both as reader and as writer):

Some readers have a higher threshold for disorder and need more disordering in the poems they read. Others have a lower threshold and need a larger proportion of order to disorder in the poems that give them pleasure or that resonate meaningfully with their own experiences. The essential point is that for a poem to move us it must bring us near our own threshold. We must feel genuinely threatened or destabilized by the poem's vision of disordering, even as we are simultaneously reassured and convinced by its orderings. . . . In order to write well, a poet needs to go to that place where energy and intensity concentrate, that place just beyond which chaos and randomness reign. (55-56S)

I find Orr's taste and my own to be rather far apart -Orr leaning much more heavily toward the poem's restoration of order (with the poem, for Orr, being a source of restabilizing of the self) and my own leanings being much more in the direction of poems that admit a more thorough mixing of "order" and "disorder." While Orr does acknowledge the value of "disorder" (and warns against simplistic modes of ordering), the range of poetry that he attends to in Poetry as Survival is quite narrow in terms of form. I believe that every poem and passage that he selects throughout this book of essays is a left-justified poem, all of the examples are syntactically regular (that is, the basic unit of the grammatically correct sentence goes

undisturbed), and nearly all of the examples resolve into I-voice, mono-voice, mono-story poems. Rather than feeling "reassured and convinced" by the poem's orderings, I would counter with the value of being exhilarated, challenged, and (perhaps temporarily) discomforted by the poem.

Orr presents an honest phenomenology of his experience as a reader and writer of poetry and reports on what for him is an extreme experience as a (sympathetic) reader: "I've been reading Dickinson's poems for years: I still feel that in the best of her poems there are always lines or images or turns of thought that I can't follow, and yet this in no way diminishes my sense that I have absorbed the energy and significance of the poem. For me, as a reader, the most important thing is to ignore her eccentric punctuation and read her poems aloud, listening for their tone of voice" (173-174S).

My principal differences with Orr are over what the poem might incarnate. Orr values a poetry of the pronoun "I" that dramatizes the stories and crises of the self, and he finds in poetry a resource for the restabilization and survival of that self. I seek instead a poetry that might incarnate the experience of consciousness and that might itself be a mode of (exploratory) thinking. The "new realism" of such a poetry would amount to embodying (in the poem) the multi-faceted experience of being-in-the-world-including the opacity, the intersection of many voices, and the complex dance of order and disorder (or of clarity and confusion) that must be part of any fair representation of the present and of contemporary consciousness. My own preference (and practice) is for a kind of serial heuristics-both a reading and a writing of poetry that assumes the value of exploring different forms as constituting different modes of knowing and different efforts at representation (or "new realism").5

There is a self-protective naivete in Orr's tales of the "heroes of the imagination" (177S). Critical theory and the professional decorum and rhetoric of academic critical writing has not stuck with Orr, though he does quote sporadically from Barthes, Adorno, and Levi-Strauss. He is particularly engaging in his readings of Dickinson, Whitman (as a poet of particular passages and moments), D. H. Lawrence, Keats, Wilfrid Owen, Roethke, Rozewicz, and Kunitz. Orr gives especially good readings of individual poems-among the most impressive being those of Rozewicz's "In the Middle of Life" and Kunitz's "Portrait" and "King of the River."

Orr's book of essays constitutes an anthology of sorts-a personal assembling of the poems he finds to be most essential and nourishing. Orr thinks of these assembled poems and passages as being like stars:

What if we were to say that the lines and images we love are like stars and that we make them into constellations by our own positive acts of imagination? That we create our own personal constellations out of poems and parts of poems we write or read? Such a constellation is an emblem of our individual self blazing in the sky. Creating this constellation, we are creating a picture of our deepest self and its concerns. (205S)

Orr concludes that "this personal constellation of our favorite poems and lines of poems 'governs' our life in the positive sense that it regulates and stabilizes our life.

It even sponsors self-transformation by guiding us toward an idealized self we might aspire to" (206S).

My own emphasis would be on the constellation as a figuring of deepest concerns (rather than as an image of self). Those "deepest concerns" would be not just my concerns, but those of the time, the culture, and of present thinking. Though it is certainly the fashion to adopt a skeptical relationship to the humanistic platitudes of art and poetry as being portals to heightened sensitivity and to personal health and moral instruction, nonetheless, from radically different assumptions and different preferences, poets and readers do, as Orr suggests, over the course of a lifetime love, cherish, and assemble specific poems, poets, passages, and perhaps even sites of consciousness. These constellations are redemptive and magical. Thus, I found myself reading Orr's essays with gratitude-thanking him for his honest persistence, for his instructive love of certain essential poems and poets, disagreeing with his emphasis on order and restabilization, and thanking him for enticing me to think productively again about why I and others continue to spend a lifetime reading, writing, and caring about poetry.

The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems provides a strong section of new poems and a generous, judicious selection of Orr's previous seven books of poetry, including Orr's fine recent collection, Orpheus el Eurydice. The new poems give us a sense of where Orr's poems have arrived. The opening poem, "Heart," is characteristic of Orr's increasingly declarative quality, as well as his poetry's lucidity, visual clarity, and increasingly insistent music of assonance. The lyricism that Orr has steadily devel- oped from his first book (in 1973) to the present, depends on brevity, intensity (especially of the visual image), and on a music of close assonance, as in the opening stanza of "Heart":

Its hinges rustless,

restless; opening

and shutting on trust. (5)

The mixture of assonance and minutely modified sounds of rustless / restless / shutting / trust recurs throughout Orr's writing, with an increased insistence and beauty, as in these lines from the new poems: "Gash in the azure / fabric" (10); "What's touched / is trashed- / ash and blast" (10). The third stanza of "Heart" demonstrates the heightened musicality of Orr's writing:

Doctors listen

to its cryptic

lisp.

From sacred

to scared-a few

beats skipped,

a letter slipped. (5)

From Burning the Empty Nests (1973) to the present, 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, as in the concluding section of "Heart":

Cavity and spasm;

a spark can start

it; parting stop it.

Such a radiant husk

to hive our dust! (5)

Orr's musicality is what I think of as "high bond density": the similar sounds are, usually, bound closely together. If there is a slight defect with this particular mode of musicality, it is that the rhythms tend to be somewhat heavy-footed, the stressed syllables perhaps overly insistent, the declarations of the sentences at times taking on a plodding quality due to a rhythmic sameness.

The new poems in Caged Owl are a strong group. In addition to "Heart," "If There is a God . . . ," a hymn to the havoc of his father's amphetamine addiction, and "Wild Heart" are among the most remarkable of the new poems.

Caged Owl then gives us a chronological run through Orr's previous seven books. In Orr's first book, Burning the Empty Nests (1973), the tendency is for the poem to be dominated by spectacularly precise visual images, or, for the poem to equate with a single image, as in "Washing My Face":

Last night's dreams disappear.

They are like the sink draining:

a transparent rose swallowed by its stem. (57)

These early poems establish a mood, though their informing or initiating events remain obscured. The poems have an insistence, clarity, and an obsessive quality; they have a visual precision that brought considerable attention and praise to Orr's earliest work. At times, with the benefit of thirty years' retrospect and the changing literary climate, these first poems have a hollow or "gee whiz" image-mysticism to them, as in "Manhattan Island Poem":

Thin river woman with a concrete star

wedged in her ear. I wrap

a blue scarf of old movies around my eyes.

At night I am a jar of fireflies dying. (63)

Unlike Orr's more recent poetry, these early image-based poems lack musicality. They rely quite heavily on rather simple sentence constructions unrelieved by the assonance that Orr has worked to develop.

Gathering the Bones Together (1975) brings into focus the scene of trauma that empowers and intensifies the poems. Greg's accidental shooting of his brother, Peter, surfaces in the poems with much greater explicitness than in his first book. The title poem concludes,

I was twelve when I killed him;

I felt my own bones wrench from my body.

Now I am twenty-seven and walk

beside this river, looking for them.

They have become a bridge

that arches toward the other shore. (85)

The Red House (1980) establishes a pastoral intensity as a key element in Orr's writing. The poems are fuller and more sustained. We see a greater sense of childhood wonders, though the deaths and accidents remain actively present too, including the first extended treatment of Orr's family's time in Haiti, culminating in his mother's sudden death. Orr continues to seek stories as a framework that might clarify and order his experiences of tragedy, particularly the stories of Cain, Abraham, and the life of the poet Trakl. But the tragic element of Orr's poetry begins to be balanced by a countervailing present tense domesticity and love, as in the beginning of "After the Guest," dedicated to Peter:

The guest departs;

it was the briefest

of visits. While my wife

sleeps, I stand at the sink

washing dinner plates

that are smooth as the masks

my grief once wore. (136)

Orr's poetry, somewhat tentatively perhaps, but with a declarative strength, begins to become a poetry of blessings, as in the conclusion to "Leaving the Asylum":

I repeat the litany of the poem

that released me.

Hollow tree

though I am, these things I cherish:

the hum of my blood, busily safe

in its hive of being; the delicate

oily kiss my fingertips give

each thing they touch; and desire,

a huge fish I drag with me

through the wilderness:

I love its glint among the dust and stones. (143)

In We Must Make a Kingdom of It (1986) and New & Selected Poems (1988), the lyric poems of tragedy and trauma remain, but Orr's poetry, which becomes more expansive and more developed, increasingly centers itself in domesticity and love, particularly in poems such as "We Must Make a Kingdom of It," "The Voyages," and "The Hand: 'Brightness Falls from the Air.'" Orr begins to achieve mastery over the musicality-particularly what I referred to earlier as a kind of "high bond density"-which he emphasizes more and more in his poetry. In fact, Orr moves slowly toward a poetry of more explicitly conventional rhyme, including end-rhyme, as in "Poem":

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. (153)

Orr's has always been a spiritual poetry, though it expresses a skeptical spirituality, one without churches or institutions, one, in fact, without a clearly present God. Orr, in his lyrical intensity, and in following the work of predecessors such as Keats (with his description of soul-making), Blake, Trakl, and Rilke, has always written what I would call a poetry that is spiritually conversant. He often expresses a longing for

contact with an other world, a world that he reaches for as it teases us with its near-present quality, its quality of being just beyond this world. Earlier, in The Red House (1980), in "Three Songs" Orr concludes with "Song of Thomas, Called The Doubter,'":

Show me, I said, what

my fingers touch is true.

Then a wound appeared in air itself,

like a tear in blue fabric,

and I put my hand through,

into the other world. (131)

But by the time of his poetry of the mid- and late-1980s, Orr locates his experiences of spirit, of resonance, and of intensity in the mysticism of embodiment-insistently in physical experience in this world, as in the opening lines of "November":

Unable to sleep, I spend the predawn hours

browsing. Paul talks, in Corinthians, about

the Lamb of God: unless the dead are raised

there is no Christ, no heaven. In Plato's

Phaedrus, the soul, imprisoned in a body,

painfully grows wings, longs to mount skyward

toward the world of Forms.

But desire's

my god and resides in this world,

floating at night on a sea of ghosts

that rises and falls, sorrowful water

pulled by the moon. (159)

Orr establishes a similar affinity for this world in the Roethke-like "A Song," which begins, "The other world's not for me- / I let my dead stroll there" (178), and in "The Tree," which concludes,

Not eyes

discover it, not even fingers

touching and probing mud, but

mouth and tongue-to taste

this world on lips

where, for that instant, the world lives. (180)

Of note in these volumes are Orr's remarkably extended poems and prose poems about his 1964-65 Civil Rights Movement experiences-events which receive extensive treatment as well at the end of The Blessing.

In City of Salt (1995) Orr continues to return to the scene of his brother's death, particularly in the poems "A Litany" and "A Moment," and to his mother's death in "Everything." Perhaps the finest poem in this book is "Glukupikron," a love poem and meditation on Sappho's created word "which we translate / 'bittersweet' / thereby / reversing the terms / as if we thought pain / came first / and pleasure only later" (198).

In many respects, Orr's greatest accomplishment is the sequence of poems in Orpheus & Eurydice (2001). Orr incorporates the resonance of myth and story he has learned so well, and this sequence displays Orr's most sustained musicality. Most remarkable, though, the framing myth of Orpheus and Eurydice allows Orr to make a complete departure from the recurring autobiographical stories that have been central to his writing.

In the opening poem of the sequence, we learn that this will be a poetry of shifting and interrogating perspectives. Orpheus, and we as readers, may habitually look in the wrong place, failing to connect the underworld to our own interiority:

You were looking in the wrong

world. It was inside

you-entrance

to that cavern

deeper than hell,

more dark and lonely.

Didn't you feel it open

at her first touch? (209)

In poems that alternate voices and perspectives, Orr's most impressive feat is the realization of an independent (and radically other) understanding by Eurydice. She does not lament her own death and descent, instead saying, "When I was alive-only glimpses, / moments of bliss but / always the body resisting, / refusing to let / the soul go" (214). There is a gulf between her experience and Orpheus' lamentation of it:

When I died, all Orpheus heard

was a small, ambiguous cry.

How could he know how free I felt

as I unwound the long bandage

of my skin and stepped out? (214)

Even their understanding of what was actually happening and of the meaning of certain gestures is quite different:

But what she saw

was the usual: a stranger

confused in a new world.

And when she touched him

on the shoulder,

it was nothing

personal, a kindness

he misunderstood.

To guide someone

through the halls of hell

is not the same as love. (216)

The central affirmation of Orpheus & Eurydice, as it is in Orr's memoir, The Blessing, and in the collection of essays, Poetry as Survival, is the story of poetry's magical and redemptive powers. Orpheus sings to Charon:

I thought: What's music

to a brute like this,

and yet the chord I struck

hit him like a blow.

His face softened.

he sat down right there

in the stinking mud,

chin propped on fists, listening. (215)

Or, in "The Ghosts Listen to Orpheus Sing," Orpheus' singing evokes a reciprocal internal singing: "Last of all it was loss / he sang, how like a vine / it climbs the wall, / sends roots and tendrils / inward, / bringing to the heart / of the hardest stone / the deep bursting emptiness of song" (217).

As Orpheus reaches the light on his journey out of the underworld, he makes the mistake of looking back to see Eurydice. In Orr's sequence, though, this looking back results from understandably human concerns and insecurities:

The light was like a wall

and I was afraid.

I turned to her as I had before:

to save myself.

She was something between

the abyss and me,

something my eyes could cling to. (220)

In part, it is the animals-particularly creatures who are embodied but who are not whole-who call forth from Orpheus the powers of his singing, and thus the powers of the lyric:

It was a fox who, having caught

his paw in a trap,

had chewed it off.

Bowing,

he said: "Enough

of maiming and blame.

We want to be lifted up

in song, our lost limbs

restored.

Orpheus,

she was you in another body.

Bright threads bound you together.

Rise now and strike your lyre.

Sing what connects us,

what no tooth can sever." (222)

As Orr's own poetry is increasingly guided by the musically motivated associations of overlapping sounds of "connects us" and "sever," Orpheus will sound a lyric that is soul-making, that creates a complex interiority. In one of the more interesting admissions of Orr's sequence, perhaps Orpheus' singing-perhaps lamentation and perhaps the making of story and lyric-is clarified and made possible by the beloved's absence:

Who knows? Maybe it would be simpler.

When she was alive, her body

confused him; he couldn't think

clearly when she was close. Scent

of her skin made him dizzy.

Now, where she had been: only

a gaping hole in air,

an emptiness he could fill with song. (224)

My one substantial complaint about the selection in The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems is that the Orpheus & Eurydice sequence should have been represented in its entirety, or nearly so. As selected, Orpheus' death and the aftermath of that event do not get included. Perhaps, though, the selection of material will point readers toward the earlier book and the full sequence of poems.

In its original publication, Orr's Orpheus & Eurydice (2001) bears the subtitle A Lyrical Sequence. Orr's thirty-five poem sequence invites comparison to an earlier telling of this story, Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus. These two lyric poem-cycles offer very different emphases and, ultimately, suggest contrasting notions of the function of the lyric. In Sonnets to Orpheus, a series of fifty-five poems that are part of Rilke's astonishing productivity of February 1923 (when he also finished the Duino Elegies), Rilke's emphasis is on the nature of song and of poetry itself, as he attempts to create a poetry that embodies the nature of being. Unlike Orr's emphasis (in Orpheus & Eurydice and elsewhere in his work), Rilke's song is not ultimately about desire: "Song, as you teach it, is not desire, / not suing for something yet in the end attained; / song is existence" (Sonnets to Orpheus, 1.3, ll. 5-7). Nor is Rilke's sonnet-series a poetry of desire, relationships, and story-perspectives. In fact, Rilke's poem-cycle is more decisively pronounced by a voice that is outside the myth-structure itself and outside the voicings of the principal characters. As Adorno suggests about the peculiarly indirect universality of lyric poetry, Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus are a site where one "hears the voice of humankind in the poem's solitude" (Adorno, 38).6 The more general, metaphysically oriented voice of Rilke's poems thinks about the nature of human being, asks, "do you hear the New / droning and throbbing" (I.18, ll.1-2), observes that "all we have gained the machine threatens" (II. 10,l. 1), and concludes, "we yet count among abiding / powers as a use of the gods" (11.27, ll- 13-14). What Orr's writing does share with Rilke's sonnets is an extended meditation on death-its locale, its nature, its imagery-and an affirmation of song and poetry as awakening and incarnating human interiority.

Part of what intrigues me in Orr's poetic career is the persistence and narrowly sustained nature of his writing. He achieved notoriety, praise, and significant attention early in his career. In fact, with his first book, Burning the Empty Nests (1973), his work was already being published by a major New York publishing house, and his writing became recognized as one of the purest instances of American deep image or American surrealist poetry-a style of writing with a currency in American poetry of the 1960s and 1970s. But this surrealist, imagebased poetry also came under sharp criticism. As early as Robert Pinsky's The Situation of American Poetry: Contemporary Poetry and Its Traditions (1976), the kind of writing that Orr was doing began to be subjected to some serious criticisms. It could be argued that with several emerging alternatives-from the more abstract and highly awarded work of John Ashbery, to the early work of the Language poets, to the more discursive poetry of Pinsky himself and cohorts such as Robert Hass, to the feminist poetry of Adrienne Rich and others, to the more narratively based work of Philip Levine and others, to the beginnings of a new formalism, and the emergence of a wide range of ethnic- and sexual-identity-politics poetries-the poetry of the deep image, for many, became passe-a quickly passing period piece.

It is interesting to return to Pinsky's critique in The Situation of American Poetry, in part because he does identify some defects that do apply to Orr's early work, but also because the terms of his critique point toward the specific ways that Orr's poetry has developed. Pinsky directs some of his attention to what he calls the "conventions of wonder," concluding that "emotionally, the question is how much credence we will give, and expect, when a poem expresses the feeling of wonder" (97). Surely, that is a pertinent question for much of Orr's early writing, particularly when the images

seem an end in themselves and the conclusion of many poems is an evocation of wonder.

But Pinsky's more fully developed critique is of an emerging poetic diction susceptible to a too easy appropriation. He calls this "the 'surrealist' diction" and identifies a "a new poetic diction: 'breath,' 'snow/ 'future/ 'blood/ 'silence/ 'eats/ 'water' and most of all 'light'" (162-163). One might have added "stones" and "bones" and "darkness" to the list. Pinsky warns that poets might "strangle their work on gobbets of poetic diction" (163). His more important criticism is that such poetry-often praised for its wild associative leaps-is, in fact, very predictable, due to its reliance not on the discovery of new perceptual pathways but upon a received (and rapidly cliched) diction: "It also must be pointed out that poems which seem wildly unpredictable and resourceful sometimes are bound by a fairly narrow poetic diction, and the view of reality and language that diction implies" (163). Indeed, not all uses of this newly emerging diction are subjected to Pinsky's criticism. The principal problem that he identifies is the ease of appropriation of the most superficial elements of the American surrealist poem: "because the style is so distinctly identifiable, it is liable to be taken, or taken over, as a kind of stylistic lingua franca, divorced from the philosophical questions or personal inclinations which give the style its coherence and integrity" (165).7 From his first book to his second, Orr develops some important resources that allow him to avoid the pitfalls of a received, unthinking, formulaic poetry of the deep image. Orr's strategy does not involve an investigation of underlying philosophical questions; instead, as we see from Gathering the Bones Together (1975) to the present, Orr's use of the poetic diction Pinsky identifies is bound up inextricably with "personal inclinations" and with the development of a gradually emerging musical quality that adds another dimension to the craft of Orr's lyric poetry. For Orr, those "personal inclinations" mean the joining of image to autobiography (and the joining of autobiographical narrative to mythic structures).

Orr advances-implicitly and explicitly in his three new books-a social function for the personal lyric.8 That social function is cast in therapeutic and individualistic terms, with the larger unit of the family beginning to constitute a social aggregate. Part of why Orr's poetry matters, in and of itself and as an instance of re-thinking the nature and function of lyric poetry, is that it asks us to reconsider that complex dialectic of lyric poetry's relationship to poetry's multi-faceted social existence. Adorno, in "On Lyric Poetry and Society" (published in 1957), lays out the dialectical and paradoxical nature of lyric poetry:

The paradox specific to the lyric work, a subjectivity that turns into objectivity, is tied to the priority of linguistic form in the lyric; it is that priority from which the primacy of language in literature in general (even in prose forms) is derived. For language is itself something double. Through its configurations it assimilates itself completely into subjective impulses; one would almost think it had produced them. But at the same time language remains the medium of concepts, remains that which establishes an inescapable relationship to the universal and to society. Hence the highest lyric works are those in which the subject, with no remaining trace of mere matter, sounds forth in language until language itself acquires a voice. The unself-consciousness of the subject submitting itself to language as to something objective, and the immediacy and spontaneity ofthat subject's expression are one and the same: thus

language mediates lyric poetry and society in their innermost core. This is why the lyric reveals itself to be most deeply grounded in society when it does not chime in with society, when it communicates nothing, when, instead, the subject whose expression is successful reaches an accord with language itself, with the inherent tendency of language. (A, 43)

Orr does not, in his poetry, fully submit to language (in the ways imagined by Adorno). I suggest that Orr remains working with and through language on a specific content-on personal tragedy and on recurring stories of loss, survival, and tentative redemption. Orr does, then, feel that he has a story which exists apart from and perhaps even prior to language, and that story (and the telling of it) takes on a higher priority to him than a submission to language per se, though Orr, clearly, in the crafting of his personal lyrics takes an immense interest in the specific ramifications of different modes of telling the story. By contrast, the early work of the Language poets (particularly the early writing of the 1970s and 1980s) marks the construction of a new or analytic lyric which would seem to fit much more closely with Adorno's notion of a submission to the primacy of language by means of a lyricism where the immediate sense of subjectivity is substantially and fundamentally muted.

But Adorno critiques as well the dangers of a potential "idolatry" of language itself:

On the other hand, however, language should also not be absolutized as the voice of Being as opposed to the lyric subject, as many of the current ontological theories of language would have it. The subject, whose expression-as opposed to mere signification of objective contents-is necessary to attain to that level of linguistic objectivity, is not something added to the contents proper to that layer, not something external to it. The moment of unself-consciousness in which the subject submerges itself in language is not a sacrifice of the subject to Being. It is a moment not of violence, nor of violence against the subject, but reconciliation: language itself speaks only when it speaks not as something alien to the subject but as the subject's own voice. When the "I" becomes oblivious to itself in language it is fully present nevertheless; if it were not, language would become a consecrated abracadabra and succumb to reification, as it does in communicative discourse. (A, 43-44)

Adorno is not describing a path or a dilemma of concern in Orr's poetry; he describes what I see to be the central impasse of early Language writing, an impasse that resonates and reverberates into the confused present (as many experimental or innovative poets develop many different approaches to a renewed subjective presence in their writing).9

Whereas Adorno assumes and explores a "contradiction between poetic and communicative language" (A, 44), Orr expresses that contradiction as one principally of degrees, with poetic language as the intensification of communicative language (and with poetic language committed to a renewed quest for greater or absolute honesty). But Orr does not necessarily see the value of a fundamental disturbance within the prevailing syntax and organization -particularly at the level of the sentence-of communicative language. Orr begins Poetry as Survival by lamenting the fact that so many people mistakenly fear poetry: "As a poet, I've always hated the fact that poetry often intimidates people. Many people I know feel that poetry is a

test they can only pass if they are smart enough or sensitive enough, and most fear they will fail" (S, I). For Orr, poetry provides "contact with essential aspects of our own emotional and spiritual lives," and he affirms that what is special about lyric poetry, particularly the personal lyric, is quite the opposite of an "elitist notion of poetry" (S, I). Orr emphasizes the universality of the personal lyric, and in the poetry that he writes, praises, and discusses, he rarely enters into lyric poems that depart from models of prose-like lucidity.

By contrast, Adorno, through poets such as Lorca and Brecht, seeks "a lyric poet who was granted linguistic integrity without having to pay the prices of esotericism" (A, 46). While Orr underscores the relationship of the lyric poem to individual psychology (of the poet and of a more generalized individualism), Adorno concludes "that we are concerned not with the poet as a private person, not with his psychology or his so-called social perspective, but with the poem as a philosophical sundial telling the time of history" (A, 46). The poem as philosophical-historical sundial clearly applies to great European lyric poets such as Rilke and Celan. Admittedly, the poetry of Rilke and Celan clearly does also have a personal dimension, but the voice of the poem is more decidedly directed toward that metaphysical and historical sundial-function. In Orr's work, and the work of many of the poets he addresses in Poetry as Survival, the balance tips more in the direction of individual psychology-an emphasis which Adorno would note casts its own specific, historical shadow on that sundial.

While Adorno does warn against the absolutizing of language as some sort of voice of Being-a warning that may be directed at HeideggerAdorno succumbs nonetheless to the lure of an idealized realm of pure language activity. He posits a lyric poetry "in which language escapes the subjective intention that occasioned the use of the word" (A, 53) and a process by which "the subject has to step outside itself by keeping quiet about itself; it has to make itself a vessel, so to speak, for the idea of a pure language" (A, 52). Indeed, the ideal that he proposes resonates to a considerable degree with several strands of twentieth-century American innovative poetry, from the Objectivists to the Language poets. Adorno, in a phrase that might stand as a definition or central tenet for many contemporary innovative lyricisms, points toward a poetry in which "the melody of the poem's language extends beyond mere signification" (A, 53). In the finest lyric poetry, Adorno suggests that lyrical language would "represent language's intrinsic being as opposed to its service in the realm of ends" and thus represent "the idea of a free humankind" (A, 53).

The suppositions of Orr and Adorno point to a significant split in the function and ideal of the contemporary American lyric. Orr's idealized lyric -principally the personal lyric-sets forth a version of health and value that proceeds on the basis of individually achieved expressions and realizations. By means of sustaining stories-myths, patterns, and images that allow the individual in crisis to renew a sense of meaning and order-the personal lyric that Orr affirms becomes the site of a personally redeeming relationship to language. Thus Orr concludes that "the embodied self that is the dynamic center of the personal lyric is committed to this world, but such a commitment does not deny the importance or reality of the spiritual" (S, 212). Adorno's ideal moves the restorative "health" of the lyric poem in a more metaphysical or collective direction and holds open the promise of a language

art that would embody an unalienated labor and a self-transcendence, even as this oddly musical language achieved an intimate and distinctive historical voice.

[Footnote]NOTES1. All references to Rilke's Sonnet to Orpheus use Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. M. D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton [The Norton Library edition], 1962).2. The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems (Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 2002)-unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Orr's poetry refer to this edition; Poetry as Survival (Athens, Ga.: The University of Georgia Press, 2002)-subsequent citations = S; The Blessing: A Memoir (San Francisco/Tulsa: Council Oak Books, 2002) -subsequent citation = B.3. In an e-mail on September 23, 2002, Orr writes: "I'm excited about Poetry as Survival which should be out next week from Georgia, but it's really the memoir, The Blessing, that has gotten a lot of attention (more than all my other books put together). Since it came out with such a small press, that's quite a miracle."4. See Kathleen Fraser, Translating the Unspeakable: Poetry and the Innovative Necessity (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2000), especially "The Uncontainable," 201-7.5. For a more specific sense of what "serial heuristics" might mean in practice, see my DoubleSpace: Poems 1971-1989 (New York: Segue, 1992), 3 of 10: H's Journal, Negation, and Displayspace (Tucson: Chax Press, 1996), and Days (New Orleans: Lavender Ink, 2002).6. Theodor Adorno, "On Lyric Poetry and Society," trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, in Notes to Literature, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 37-54. Subsequent citations to this essay = Adorno.7. Oddly enough, with minor modifications, a similar concern can be raised for many "experimental" poems and poets of the 19905 and early twenty-first century. Poets who follow, learn from, or derive key principles of their fragmented or disruptive writing from earlier writing (of the 1970s and 1980s) by various Language poets, run similar risks to the "received" surrealists in Pinsky's criticism. That is, severed from the particularly institutional, cultural, and philosophical contexts of the earlier writing-when, indeed, such a writing was indeed transgressive and culturally disruptive (particularly for the institutional literary culture of the time)-much present-day "experimental" writing can be viewed as based on, in Pinsky's words, "a stylistic lingua franca" or an all too easily received syntax and rhetoric (even if such a stylistic identification remains in a minority or non-mainstream status). An excellent collection of essays which argues against such a reading of "second generation" experimentalists is Telling It Slant: Avant-Carde Poetics of the 2990$, ed. Mark Wallace and Steven Marks (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002).8. In this discussion of the social nature of the lyric, and in contrasting the views of Orr and Adorno, I am deliberately not following Orr's own categorical distinctions made in "Appendix B: The Social Lyric and the Personal Lyric" (pages 213-23, Poetry as Survival), where Orr concerns himself with "how much of the poet's subjective self is present in the poem" (214S). For Orr, the category of the "social lyric" has to do with poems in which the poet writes "from a certain class or group and for others in that social class" and the "poet's T does not stand for his or her unique personality but for a self whose attitudes and ideas are derived from the group" (214S). Admittedly, there are many poems written in such a manner. But, as Adorno is acutely aware, there are many other dimensions to a poem's social existence-dimensions other than the group identity of the poet and the social message of the poem. Adorno's broader conception of the social allows us to think, paradoxically and productively, about the social and cultural functions of even the most solitude-affirming lyric poetry.9. See, for example, Marjorie Perloff's "Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject: Susan Howe's Buffalo, Ron Silliman's Albany," Critical Inquiry 25 (Spring 1999): 405-34, and forthcoming in Differentials: Recent Essays on Poetry, Poetics, New Media (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003).

[Author Affiliation]HANK LAZER'S most recent book of poems is Days (Lavender Ink, 2002); Elegies & Vacations (Salt Publishing) is forthcoming. He edits the Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series for the University of Alabama Press