April 20, 2012

When I write a poem, I process experience. I take what’s inside me—the raw, chaotic material of feeling or memory—and translate it into words and then shape those words into the rhythmical language we call a poem. This process brings me a kind of wild joy. Before I was powerless and passive in the face of my confusion, but now I am active: the powerful shaper of my experience. I am transforming it into a lucid meaning.

Because poems are meanings, even the saddest poem I write is proof that I want to survive. And therefore it represents an affirmation of life in all its complexities and contradictions.

— Gregory Orr, from “The Making of Poems,” as heard on NPR’s All Things Considered, February 20, 2006. via apoetreflects

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