poet Gregory Orr | Alison McGhee

Poem of the Week, by Gregory Orr

Book party! I rarely do book events and I would love to see you at the book party for my brand-new novel, Weird Sad and Silent, in the world as of next Tuesday. Please come to the launch party at Next Chapter Booksellers in St. Paul on Tuesday, May 27, at 6 pm. I’ll read a little, we’ll talk, we’ll celebrate, and there might even be some tiny gifts for you. Click here for all the details.

A few days ago I was driving down Lake Street singing along to Can’t Get Enough by Depeche Mode at high volume. At a long red light I glanced over and saw a woman with earbuds dancing as she waited for the bus. She looked so happy and free. Her moves synced up exactly to the beat of Can’t Get Enough, one of those weird serendipitous things.

The other day a friend told me she felt guilty about feeling any moment of happiness amidst the nonstop horrors of this administration, and I heard myself tell her that if we can’t feel joy then they’ve won. Which is true. So I went straight out and bought myself some disco lights, and now you’re all invited to my house for a dance party.

To Be Alive, by Gregory Orr

To be alive: not just the carcass
but the spark.
That’s crudely put, but. . .

If we’re not supposed to dance,
why all this music?

For more information about Gregory Orr, please check out his website.
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Gregory Orr

Posted on January 30, 2021 by alisonmcghee

My poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

I’m no dancer but I love to dance anyway. So many memories of dancing. A ballet studio on the second floor of a frame house: First position. Second position. Plie. Arabesque. Releve. The Alibi: a bar in Vermont, my best friend and I waiting in the entryway every weekend until the cover dropped to half price. The tiny dance floor where every song, in my memory, is by the Police.

A swing dance party in Maine: me a newbie unable to follow the tight rhythms until a dark-eyed man curled my fingers around the tips of his: Resist me. Follow me, and at the same time resist me. A friend’s wedding: rainy night under a big tent. Boards laid across mud. The band strikes up and a laughing man holds out his hand: Come on, Alison, let’s go. Mud-soaked red shoes: one heel broken by the end of the night.

It’s been a while since things didn’t feel so messed up, politics and the planet melting down and movements bad and good rising up simultaneously, a future in which so much feels so uncertain. Been a while since I danced things out late at night in the living room, or thought of this poem.

To Be Alive, by Gregory Orr

To be alive: not just the carcass
but the spark.
That’s crudely put, but. . .

If we’re not supposed to dance,
why all this music?

For more information about Gregory Orr, please check out his website.
alisonmcghee.com

Poem of the Week, by Gregory Orr

Posted on November 9, 2019 by alisonmcghee

Certain moments are burned into your brain and heart, moments that even as they happened you knew would haunt you forever, like the way your little boy nodded and kept nodding, that one afternoon on the couch. Looking back now, through the tunnel of time, there are passages so rough that you narrowed time down to half-hour segments in order to make it through. Had to trust that somehow the invisible ship would carry you from one invisible shore and deposit you on another. That you would find yourself again.

You do find yourself again, over and over, but you’re not the same person you were before. Each time, there has been a long season of necessary silence, and even if you look the same, you aren’t. Maybe we don’t heal so much as shift, and yield, and absorb in a way that lets us keep living with all the everythings that happen in a life.

Aftermath Sonnet, by Gregory Orr

Letting my tongue sleep,
and my heart go numb.

Sensing that speech
too soon,
after such a wound,
would only be
a different bleeding.

Even needing to leave
the page blank.
Long season
of silence—
trusting that under

its bandage of snow,
the field of me is healing.

For more information about Gregory Orr, please click here.

For more information about Gregory Orr, please https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gregory-orr.