Friday's PBS Newshour featured a segment with the poet Gregory Orr, who discussed the accidental shooting by a nine-year-old girl--with an Uzi submachine gun--of her instructor at an Arizona gun range August 25. He wasn't there to talk about the root causes of the tragedy (political, sociological, cultural), but rather its aftermath and potential effect on the child at the center of it. When he was twelve, Orr himself accidentally killed his younger brother in a hunting accident, an incident he documented in his 2002 memoir The Blessing and which has figured prominently in his poetry over the course of a dozen or so collections, having in large part led him to writing in the first place, in which he has since found solace. "Because poems are meanings," he has said, "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."
On Newshour, Orr reads his poem "A Litany" (go to the 38-minute-mark in the video below), which deals explicitly with the day he and his father and three brothers went out hunting. It opens with Orr's recalling "the dark stain seeping" across his brother's parka hood and includes the image of the deer "we had killed just before I shot my brother" hanging near the barn, as seen by Orr from the bedroom he'd retreated to on returning home. It's a haunting reading, the look in Orr's eyes and the sound of his voice adding something more to what is already pretty powerful on the page.
Orr, when asked, also talks about what should and shouldn't be done for children who have witnessed or been the cause of a death, warning specifically against "premature consolation," or the tendency of well-meaning adults to tell a child that it was "all a part of God's plan"--words that he, as a twelve-year-old, found "more terrifying" than reassuring. He had written more at length about this a week earlier in the New York Times:
[W]hen I try to think of what I might say to that girl, I think also of the danger of words used as premature consolation and explanation. I lost a (naïve and conventional) religious faith the day of my brother’s death, because a well-meaning adult assured me that my dead brother was already, at that very moment, sitting down in heaven to feast with Jesus. How could I tell her that my brother was still near me, still horribly close to me — that every time I squeezed shut my eyes to keep out the world, I saw him lying lifeless at my feet?
But even worse, Orr says, is not to speak of it at all: "Silence quickly transforms guilt into shame, and shame builds walls of isolation that can be almost impossible to breach." That, he has said, is what happened inside his own family. He offers very basic counsel: "Hold the child, and make her feel safe." And that simplicity of gesture, of giving oneself to another, seems in keeping with what Orr has suggested might be the larger purpose of the kind of lonely work he has dedicated himself to:
[T]he lyric (poem or memoir) is committed to the notion that the self telling and dramatizing its own truth can be an important human act. Not just for the self but for others also. My teacher Stanley Kunitz has a line where he speaks about “the voice of the solitary who makes others less alone.” That’s a social contribution out of a situation of lyric solitude.
