I could almost be satisfied with calling Gregory Orr a great poet. He is the author of eight collections of poetry, including The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems, and the lyric sequence Orpheus and Eurydice. His numerous awards include fellowships from the Guggenhiem Foundation and the NEA, and he served as the Poetry Editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review for many years. Asked about recent inspirations and sources, he owns up to an "eclectic grab-bag of reading. I've always read six books at a time, seldom finishing any. Reckless and restless searching of the sort you'd expect from the short attention-span of a lyric poet."

That "reckless and restless" genius has demanded expression beyond writing poetry. Orr is also a Professor of Literature at the University of Virginia; he was the 2000 Rockefeller Fellow at the Institute of Culture and Violence; he edits Sacred Bearings, A Journal on Violence and Spiritual Life. This spring I had the opportunity to ask him about two of his recent, ambitious projects. Poetry as Survival is a collection of essays on the capacity and dynamic of the personal lyric. The Blessing is wrenching memoir that begins with his traumatic childhood-including his father's self-prescribed amphetamine addiction and, when Orr was only twelve, the accidental shooting death of a younger brother-and asks the provocative question, “Do I dare say my brother's death was a blessing?”

Folio: Poetry as Survival opens with a discussion of how poets are "called" to write-either by an encounter with the art, or by a life experience that necessitates writing. What was your own "calling"?

Gregory Orr: My own calling to art was a negative invitation: the sudden deaths of my brother and mother, the way I was implicated in my brother's death in a hunting accident where I held the gun that killed him, my mother's mysterious, overnight death-both of these happening before I was fourteen, both of them greeted with and surrounded by silence. All these experiences were negative gifts: they destroyed meaning for me and challenged my right to exist (as traumatic violence often does). By destroying meaning, they left me two choices: die or survive by creating/discovering meaning. To me, the discovery of lyric poetry (when I was about 17) was the discovery of meaning-making at its most intimate, primal level: a blank page like the emptiness of existence when there is no meaning and then you put the words on the page: create meaning. Create it in the smallest, most passionate cultural space we know: the space of the personal lyric, a handful of words on a page.

Folio: You praise the ability of poetry, especially the personal lyric, to name and incorporate disorder, serving the writer as a kind of coping mechanism. It would seem that the better one is able to recognize disorder, the stronger the potential for the poem. There is a long tradition-reaching back to Virgil's sequence of the pastoral, the georgic, the epic-of associating poetic development with a chronological, human timeline. Would the ability of the poet to wield the personal lyric change, improve, as they grow older? How might this apply to your own work?

GO: I can't see any real reason why we'd have to associate the project of the personal lyric with a human time-line for several reasons. When I was young, they used to mention lyric poets when they discussed a notion of how certain 'professions' peaked early-in their late adolescence, early twenties-they used theoretical mathematicians and physicists, athletes, and lyric poets. I think we lyric poets have been removed from that dubious list, but who knows? The association might have had to do with intensity of passion, and passion is one of the human forms of disorder. So, when you are young the disordering and vitalizing passions are stronger, and you could argue that the poems are therefore more exciting or whatever. On the other hand, as you get older as a poet, you learn more about what disturbs you in a way that leads to poems, and what was passion in your youth might become theme in your maturity. As long as it's still authentic, still real to you.

My thinking about disorder and order has to do with a feeling for the two forces and their interplay in our consciousness and on the page. And remember that 'disorder' can be vitalizing as well, a positive quality like 'joy' or 'freedom'; likewise, 'order' can be oppressive as it is felt by Blake in the form of state and organized religion; or by Whitman as the constraints of civilization, the tight collar and tie. So, I guess I'd say I don't accept any notions of timeline.

Folio: In Poetry as Survival, you advance the idea of each writer and reader having an intrinsic “threshold,” the balance point between order and disorder that brings them the most pleasure in poetry. Does a workshop environment, with its emphasis on proving accessible to the group rather than the individual, threaten the integrity of the threshold? How can an MFA program nurture-or wear down-such a privatized aesthetic for writing?

GO: What you're really asking, framed in the terms of my thinking, is: Are workshops good or bad for poets? Or at least, that's a good question to ask. And a hard one. After 28 years of teaching, I still go back and forth on the virtues and vices of workshop. Today, I'll say this (tomorrow, maybe something different): what I always worry about is that when a poet brings a poem to a workshop, she/he has brought it to an audience. A responsive audience, perhaps too responsive at times. Has the poet done enough on his or her own to locate the depths of the poem before asking for audience response? Or, put another way: once a poet has shown the poem to twelve other poets, how does he or she retain sufficient ownership of the poem to continue struggling with its issues and deficiencies? How do you take your poem back from the workshop? It has to be your poem. Not a good poem or even a great poem, but your poem first.

To me poetry is both Quest and Craft. The quest aspect: what poetry means to you as an individual who has decided to orient her life in relation to this thing called 'poetry'—no one can really solve that for you. You search for guides and poetic forebears, but it's a personal search and struggle. Workshops necessarily stress craft, they can do only so much in relation to quest. But craft is easier than quest and less lonely. You can learn craft; you can improve, you can utilize your intelligence to master it. Why not call poetry Craft and forget Quest, or give the quest aspect short-shrift? That's the temptation that workshops breed. We know that. I guess the main defense would be to be forewarned. To tell yourself, "yes, this workshop response matters, but what is it that I personally need to learn or understand that poetry is trying to teach me?"

There's a wonderful joke someone showed me recently: an anthology of poems about Emily Dickinson published by University of Iowa Press where someone did a poem of Dickinson's all marked-up with 'sympathetic' and encouraging workshop suggestions. It's hilarious and heart-breaking at the same time. Of course, Emily would have mocked anything that didn't honor her oddness and genius-when Higginson, her mentor saw her first poems and noticed they weren't precisely metrical, she wrote back, “You think my gait 'spasmodic.' I am in danger, sir." The tone of that second sentence is pure mockery, pure confidence that this guy is not up to the level of the stuff she's taking on.

Folio: Although you have addressed your personal tragedies in poetry-I am thinking of the lovely sequence "Gathering the Bones Together," or the blazing prose-poetry of "If there is a God of amphetamines . . ."—The Blessing is an explicit, prolonged tackling of your dramatic childhood and family. What was the catalyst for addressing the topic in prose, at this point in your life and career?

GO: The particular catalyst was my father's impending death from cancer. After my brother's death, when I was twelve, I had hoped I might someday talk with someone about it, someone who knew me and could understand what I felt and experienced. I imagined at first that that would be my mother, but she died two years after my brother and my attempts to speak about the hunting accident couldn't overcome my shame and her reluctance. My father was another choice, but a complicated one. His whole survival in life was predicated on not talking about awful things that had happened, but moving on past them. For him, it wasn't just my brother's and mother's death, but another son who, at the age of three, crawled out of a crib and swallowed some sugar-coated pills that killed him. And then, to make matters worse: when he had been about 11 or 12, he and his best friend had snuck a rifle from his parents' house and gone to a field to shoot it, and somehow my father shot and killed his best friend in that field. This uncanny fact was told to me by my mother the day I killed my brother: revelation and mystery at the same moment. How could such a thing happen? Or happen twice? No one would speak about it, about the friend or even my brother. Everything was silence and concealment and each person retreating into his or her guilt and shame and terror.

After a certain point I knew I needed to speak in order to live. That's when I discovered the release that poetry is. Not that my early poems directly addressed these events-they couldn't, or I couldn't. But poems were a place where I could displace my burden. Periodically, during my life, I tried to talk with my father about these things, but he refused and I feared him or feared hurting him so much that I always desisted. When I learned he was dying, and he made it clear that even then he wouldn't speak of these things with me, I began to fear that I needed to say out as much of my story as I could in order to break the uncanny link between myself and my father. I needed to separate out my story from his as best I could and memoir is a good place to do that. Or it was for me.

Autobiographical prose has this major advantage: its about how things connect up in relation to each other and how the self grows through time, encounters experience, makes choices. Lyric poetry is about intensity and is ideally suited for crises, both joyous and destructive crises. But the unity of lyric doesn't extend beyond these moments. Lyric lacks the scope and range of story. And lyric tends to see through the lens of the self and organizes its dramas around only one or two other characters at a time. Prose thrives on context and social and natural description; thrives on the richness of a cast of characters and how they interact. That sort of thing never worked in the lyrics I know or write.

Folio: What was the drafting process for the book?

GO: I wrote the memoir once. But some editors in New York read it and said: forget the Civil Rights stuff, no one wants that. And forget the poetry stuff. Tell us more squalor from your family. Shame on me, I gave it a try and it was all wrong and even untrue, but they were right in that I hadn't 'understood' my own story yet in a way I could communicate. So, I rewrote it a third time: reclaimed it back toward the first version, but even more so, knowing that the social activism was part of my story, part of the way my life didn't go but could have, and that poetry was what did redeem me. Editors implied: redemption by art-making is not of interest to the average reader; which I find cynical and even untrue. So, the drafting was three versions, four years. And all of it was learning.

Folio: In working in the genre of memoir, did you find yourself having different concerns about maintaining the veracity of the text, versus poetry? Did you consult outside, “objective” resources about your youth?

GO: Here's an anecdote that could cover the veracity question. In an earlier poem, “Litany,” I spoke of a bowl of soup given to me on the day my brother died. The poem has the soup being an alphabet soup and ends with the image/symbol of how the letters “bobbed at random, or lay in the shallow spoon.” The alphabet nature of the soup enacting a randomness that has destroyed meaning, broken words down into letters (all the old alphabet soup ads used to spell things like “Uhmm good!”) and then the inertness of lying in the spoon as if dead. That's how the poem dramatized the meaning of that day, or loss of meaning.

When I wrote the memoir five years later, it was simply true that I had no memory of the kind of soup the woman brought that day. I'd made that up, or my imagination had made that up in the poem to create meaning. On the other hand, in the prose I could tell more about another way that meaning vanished that day: the woman who brought the soup said to me: “Peter, your brother, is in heaven now, sitting with Jesus.” And that earnest but 'glib' attempt at consolation abolished all my conventional religious faith forever-so the truth was still the same, though the facts were different. In poetry, truth may often come as symbol.

Another anecdote, about sources. When I was eighteen, I had worked briefly in Mississippi for the Civil Rights Movement as a volunteer in the summer of 1965. I'd been jailed and beaten in Mississippi, then kidnapped at gunpoint in Alabama and held in solitary in a rural jail for a bit over a week. That political activism was aberrant for an introvert like myself and many of the experiences I had there were violent and traumatic, life-threatening. The upshot was that I knew these things had happened, but I never talked about them and gradually some of the odder facts began to seem as if, perhaps, since I was the only one who knew about them, maybe they hadn't happened in the real world. Specifically, the two vigilantes who kidnapped me outside Selma—one of them, two months after I was there, killed a Rights worker in broad daylight with a shotgun. By then, I was living in New York City, feeling a bit fragile, but functional. One afternoon, I opened the New York Times and saw a photograph of this guy who had held a pistol to my head by a highway not two months before, was the killer. I was totally stunned. Cut to thirty-five years later, when I decide to see if this could possibly be accurate and I'm in a library basement scrolling through an old microfiche of the newspaper from that summer and suddenly, there is the photograph and the story and it's all true, just as remembered. Obviously, it's not always that way. Memory is notoriously unreliable, though traumatic memory less so. Hazy also. The more you work on memoir, the more you remember.

The Blessing was recently released in paperback by Council Oaks Press. Forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press is Orr's poetry collection, Concerning the Book that is the Resurrection of the Body of the Beloved, Which is the World.