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Gregory Orr is a poet and a teacher on how language can become a tool for caring what feels unbearable.

When he was 12 on a first hunting trip with his father, he accidentally shot and killed his younger

brother. Yet he has rested a lifetime of gentle, healing, life-giving words from one of the most

terrible traumas imaginable. And right now, we're all carrying some magnitude of grief in our bodies.

We ordinary just people just in our daily lives we experience enormous amounts of disorder and

confusion. It's inside us, it's in our past, it's in the unknowable future. And we just navigate

our lives with this kind of interplay of disorder and order. And then what poetry says to us is

turn your confusion, turn your world into words. Take it outside yourself into language.

Orrry says, I'm going to meet you halfway. You just bring me your chaos. I'll bring you all sorts of ordering

principles. I'm Christa Tippett and this is on Being.

Gregory Orr is the author of over a dozen books of poetry and prose. He is a poet in the lyric

tradition, the poetry of emotions, often in the voice of individual experience, which also lends

itself to song. I met him at the 2018 Geraldine R. Dodd, poetry festival in Newark, New Jersey.

I'm thinking as I was getting ready to speak with you that about how human beings become wise,

sometimes by discovering things no one had ever known before. And sometimes we become wise

by remembering and rediscovering things that people knew forever once and then we forgot.

And I'm aware in the circles in which I move, this really unexpected movement of our time,

often led by young people, by millennials, who are claiming grief and loss and death as human

experiences. And there are things called death cafes. And the dinner party, which is a movement,

...