Teaching poets is no easy task. For one thing, it demands an especially keen awareness of a student’s feelings—sensitivity was important in creative writing courses long before these days of microaggressions and snowflakes—as well as an air of authority. Even more than in other courses, the instructor must be both caring and critical, diplomatic and discriminating. And students often believe that because art is subjective, anything goes. (Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing poems.) The best teachers will delicately destroy that misconception.
Gregory Orr manages to transfer that balancing act to the page in A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry. Author of a dozen books of poetry, former poetry editor of the esteemed Virginia Quarterly Review, founder of the University of Virginia’s MFA program in writing, and a professor for over 40 years, Orr achieves a tone that is simultaneously experienced and experimental, authoritative and welcoming, unpretentious and unpatronizing. (True, he may be trying too hard with three long quotations from Jay-Z, but readers should always be grateful when a baby boomer writes a book about poetry that mentions Bob Dylan only once.) And although the book presents itself as an introduction, experienced poets will also find in its pages ideas and pronouncements that provide a new perspective on their craft. Unfortunately, Orr’s dominant interest in one type of poetry, the lyric, deprives aspiring poets of important lessons and skills.
Orr explains that poetry entails the gathering of fragmented ideas or experiences and crafting them into something coherent. We all have what he calls “an active ordering power—something in us that not only actively seeks coherence but has the power to produce it.” Yet Orr also encourages poets to flirt with disorder, which he illustrates with the metaphor of a threshold: “that place in poetry where disorder and order meet” or “the place where order passes over into disorder.” A poet’s threshold is the result of individual temperament and experience, and “in order to write well, a poet must locate and write from this threshold.” At the same time, testing and expanding the boundary between order and disorder is crucial to developing creatively.
Orr also presents helpful categories of language based on the different ways poets use words. He identifies naming (words to identify things), singing (words as sound), saying (words to make claims), and imagining (figurative language). These categories are poetry’s basic ingredients, applied in different measures by different poets. Singing appropriately gets the most attention here, as it encompasses the techniques and effects of poetic sound and rhythm. Alas, Orr makes clear in the introduction that he doesn’t have “a lot to say about meter and metrical scansion of poems.” He writes elsewhere, “Scholars and professors sometimes focus a bit too much on meter when they discuss poetry.” In my past life studying and teaching both literature and creative writing, I knew of precisely one professor who could be credibly accused of overemphasizing meter: me. And I am not convinced that meter is any more difficult to teach or comprehend than some of the other sonic elements Orr discusses, such as duration and vowel pitch. Still, despite the omission of meter, Orr’s discussion of singing will encourage young writers to listen to their poems, and that’s a good thing.
Orr is fond of using binaries to illustrate points and even occasionally invites readers to place individual poems on a scale of, for example, narrative and lyric, order and disorder. These oversimplifying scales may tempt readers to quote Robin Williams’s character in Dead Poets Society when he encounters J. Evans Pritchard’s graph of excellence: “Rip it out! Rip!” Nonetheless, the technique helps poets make sense of what they read and what they hope to write. In one particularly sharp chapter, Orr compares two distinct approaches to poetry he calls engagement and ecstasy. The poet of engagement seeks to connect with the world through language that names and a form that narrates. Poets who seek ecstasy wish to escape through lyric and the language of singing and saying. Robert Frost is a poet of engagement; Wallace Stevens is a poet of ecstasy.
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Less helpful is Orr’s view of poetry as a way of dealing with “trauma” and “crisis.” He once told NPR: “I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions and traumatic events that come with being alive.” This emphasis on trauma is understandable. Orr has suffered terrible pain: As a 12-year-old, he killed his brother in a hunting accident; as a young man involved in the civil rights movement, he was arrested and brutally beaten by the police. Approaching poetry as a way of managing trauma has been productive for his own writing; knowing that is helpful for understanding his work.
I’m skeptical, though, that it would be as beneficial for the many aspiring writers who, thank God, have not experienced the trauma he has. Perhaps this is why Orr broadens the meaning of crisis to encompass even “something positive (romantic love, adventure, joy, wonder)”—that is, any powerful emotional moment or experience is a sort of crisis. The downside to this expanded definition is that it increases the possibility of unbearable melodrama from undergraduate poets. And strangely, toward the end of the book, Orr re-narrows his definition by distinguishing crisis from “wonder, love, loss.”
This attention to personal trauma is consistent with Orr’s focus on self-expression at the expense of exploring the beliefs and identities of other people. This is the first poetry guide I’ve read that uses Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments to introduce the concept of empathy. Strangely, though, rather than using Smith’s notion of “sympathetic identification” to encourage poets to expand their sympathies, Orr applies it to the reader’s empathy for a poetic speaker. At one point, Orr recommends that poets “focus attention . . . on some thing other than ourselves—another person, a creature, even a tree”—but the goal of even that exercise is to help writers “become more conscious of our own feelings and attitudes.”
A telling example of Orr’s overemphasis on the poet’s own consciousness comes when he discusses John Keats’s famous description of “poetical Character.” Orr explains that “Keats loved the ability to lose himself in other identities—he called the poet a chameleon.” True enough. Yet whereas Keats used this metaphor to describe a type of poet (not, as Orr implies, all poets), Orr adapts it to encourage us to lose our identities as we read, “to identify with the poem.” This subtle reorientation of Keats’s letter puts the burden of sympathetic imagination on the reader, while the writer has only to attend to self-expression.
An exception to Orr’s urge to look inward occurs toward the end of a chapter on lyric and narrative, when he proclaims that “story gives us an awareness of self and other” and encourages poets to perform a writing exercise in which they “speak from other characters’ viewpoints,” which he calls “a thrilling freedom.” Precisely—which is a good reason young poets should be encouraged to do it more often.
