MAY 14 – JUNE 3, 2012
Residency #145
Application Deadline: February 10, 2012

GREGORY ORR, poet

Considered by many to be a master of short, lyric free verse, Gregory Orr is the author of ten collections of poetry. His most recent volumes include How Beautiful The Beloved, published in 2009, and Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved, published in 2005, both by Copper Canyon Press. His other volumes of poetry include The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems (2002); Orpheus and Eurydice (2001); City of Salt, Finalist for the LA Times Poetry Prize; We Must Make a Kingdom of It; and The Red House.

Orr is also a writer of nonfiction and personal essays. His memoir The Blessing was chosen byPublisher’s Weeklyas one of the fifty best non-fiction books of 2002. His personal essay This I Believe was broadcast on National Public Radio in 2006 and included in the anthology This I Believe (Holt 2007). His essay about working as a teenager for the Civil Rights movement in the Deep South was selected for The Best American Creative Nonfiction, to be published in 2009. His prose book, Poetry as Survival (University of Georgia Press 2002), an extended meditation on the dynamics and function of the personal lyric, was characterized by Adrienne Rich as “a wise and passionate book.” Earlier prose collections include Richer Entanglements: Essays and Notes on Poetry and Poems (University of Michigan), and Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction to the Poetry (Columbia University Press).

Orr has received many awards and fellowships, including an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, and a Rockefeller Fellowship at the Institute for the Study of Culture and Violence.

He teaches at the University of Virginia, where he founded the MFA Program in Writing in 1975, and served from 1978 to 2003 as Poetry Editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives with his wife, the painter Trisha Orr, and their two daughters in Charlottesville, Virginia.
For more information on Gregory Orr, please visit www.blueflowerarts.com/booking/gregory-orr

Residency Statement
In recent years I’ve been drawn toward two notions about lyric. One is that turning world into word and then arraying those words on the page as focused drama has the power to stabilize the self when it encounters disorder in the world or in the self. The second notion is based on Sappho’s fragment #16, where she says “whatever one loves most is beautiful.” I find that the first notion has enormous power to stabilize a self, and that the second brings our self into relation to the things and persons of the world that we most value. In addition, the brevity and succinctness of recent lyrics of mine has brought me into collaboration with a visual artist with whom I’ve explored various interactions of text and image. At the residency, we will meet most afternoons for several hours—talk, work on poems, write our way into new ones. We will evolve a structure of workshops and conversations which is responsive to the needs of the group and its individual members.

Application Requirements
Applicants should submit five to eight sample poems, a resume and a letter of intent.

FULL Scholarships to attend FREE are available for painters and sculptors (through The Joan Mitchell Foundation) and composers (through The Sally Mead Hands Foundation) for ALL accepted artists who submit ACA Financial Aid forms upon acceptance. Limited additional Financial Aid is available for writers through The Pabst Charitable Foundation for the Arts and the Atlantic Center for the Arts Advance an Artist Program.