Two chapters from Poetry as Survival

American Poetry Review, The, May/Jun 2002 by Orr, Gregory

Since, in the hunting accident, I was the child holding the gun that killed my brother, I also acquired an enormous burden of guilt and anguish: a burden that threatened to overwhelm my adolescent ego with despair and worse. My parents were so devastated and upset by my brother's death that they were unable to offer me any consolation for my deed, or even to speak with me about it. At the time of my brother's death, a friend of the family counseled me that my brother's death was all part of God's plan, which was necessarily inscrutable to us on earth. This notion of a divine order that had the power to subsume such violent disorder didn't seem believable to me and failed to help me live through the traumatic crisis that had become my life.

Other people, including my parents, told me my brother's death was "an accident." They were right, of course, at one level. But what they did not seem to realize was that for me the word "accident" was the name of the horror that had happened, not a response to it-not an ordering, not a meaning. Who could live in a world composed of accidents so terrible as to leave your little brother, who was standing beside you one moment, the next moment a lifeless corpse at your feet? Unbearable word, this "accident." Unbearable world.

My twelve-year-old consciousness desperately needed meaning in order to survive what I had done. That day of my brother's death I did find, for myself and by myself, something in the Bible that spoke to my situation: the story of Cain and Abel, the one brother slaying the other in a field. This was not, on the face of it, a very consoling story to identify with, but it helped me survive the earliest part of the trauma, even if it meant that I came to secretly believe that I was Cain. At least Cain lived, I told myself, that Cain continued living after Abel's death was part of the story, part of the story's strange meaning.

At the time of my brother's death, no one proposed philosophical attitudes to me, but had they done so I doubt I would have gained any consolation or understanding from them. In my experience, the conceptualizations philosophy offers are not adequate to the sudden death of a loved one, nor the anguish in families that follows.

I lived for about four years after my brother's death without any hope at all. Nothing that I found in my culture sustained me. Even my relationship with the natural world, that had been so important to me earlier, was not enough to alter my grief, despair and guilt. Then, thanks to Mrs. Irving, the librarian in my small public school, I discovered poetry. I had previously had a vague desire to write, but nothing had brought me to lyric poetry or the writing of it. In the small "honors English" class that Mrs. Irving taught in my senior year, she had us write all kinds of things: stories, sketches, plays, haiku. I wrote a poem one day, and it changed my life. I had a sudden sense that the language in poetry was "magical," unlike language in fiction: that it could create or transform reality rather than simply describe it. That first poem I wrote was a simple, escapist fantasy, but it liberated the enormous energy of my despair and oppression as nothing before had ever done. I felt simultaneously revealed to myself and freed of my self by the images and actions of the poem. I knew from that moment on that all I wanted to do was write poems. I knew that if I was to survive in this life, it would only be through the help of poetry. Mind you, I am not saying my early poems were good, or that I knew anything about the skill of crafting a poem-years of agonized apprenticeship were before me-but the experience of hope and pleasure was revelatory to me then and still underlies my understanding of an essential purpose and meaning of lyric poetry.