English majors, unite. The Virginia Festival of the Book starts tomorrow and runs until Sunday evening. There will be over 200 programs taking over Charlottesville during this five-day event, featuring countless accomplished participants. The centerpiece event of the festival takes place on Thursday at 7 p.m. in Culbreth Theatre: Stanley Kunitz, U.S. poet laureate, will read with Gregory Orr, one of the University's own teaching poets.
All festival readings are free, but arrive early for this one because seats will fill up quickly.
Kunitz and Orr have shared an ongoing friendship focused around poetry, but Thursday will mark the first time these two poets and friends read together. It will be a landmark event for the poets' audience but also for the poets themselves.
"I've introduced him, and he's introduced me for readings," Orr says. "I've interviewed him on TV, done this and that. But this is the first thing that we've read together. That's very cool by me. I'm really happy about that. I feel pretty lucky that he's even coming down. I mean, it's a favor. Not a favor exactly, but he didn't have to come here."
Orr first met Kunitz during his first year in Columbia University's Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. Kunitz was one of Orr's professors and soon became a mentor as well. At that time, Kunitz had reached the age of 65. He was just about to publish a book called The Testing-Tree, a collection of poems that proved to be a turning point in Kunitz's poetry.
The Testing-Tree "was an incredibly important book for him and also for me," remarks Orr. "He was publishing for the first time a book of poems that addressed his own personal childhood experience, both trauma and suffering in that childhood and the ways that a fascination of poetry could transform that suffering."
Before The Testing-Tree, Kunitz had written more obscure, impersonal poetry. It was the new shift to personal experience that held resonance with Orr.
Kunitz and Orr have both overcome tragic childhoods; their separate but similar histories brought them together as poets trying to find ways to convert those tragedies into language.
While Kunitz was still inside his mother's womb, his father committed suicide. From then on, Kunitz's mother would not allow his father's name to be mentioned. And from his birth to her death, Kunitz never saw his mother smile. Such devastating issues - his mother's isolation from him and his continuing search for a father figure - are brought up for the first time in The Testing-Tree.
Orr had a traumatic childhood as well. At 12 years old, he accidentally killed his younger brother in a hunting incident. The accident was never discussed. And as if this didn't wreak enough havoc upon his young emotions, his mother died very suddenly shortly after his brother's death.
Through Kunitz's work, Orr saw a way to create something beautiful out of his overwhelming experiences as a child. In retrospect, he says, Kunitz "set an example for me about what poetry is."
Even after Orr finished the M.F.A. program at Columbia, he prolonged his relationship with Kunitz by continuing to show him his work.
"I would go to New York and show him my poems, and he would talk to me, give me advice," Orr says. "We kept that up for years and years, then eventually somebody approached me and said, 'We're writing this series of books about contemporary poets, introductions to their work - would you write one on Stanley Kunitz?' I really didn't want to write a critical book; I never planned to do it. But it was for me a chance to sort of thank him."
With much thanks going to Kunitz for his influence, Orr has since published six collections of poetry, his latest being Orpheus & Eurydice, a series of lyric poems based on the Greek myth of the same name.
"On their wedding day, [Eurydice] gets bitten by a snake and dies - that's the end of the story of passionate love," he says. "But in lust you go down to hell to try to bring the person back, and in doing that you are turning to the powers of magical language and poetry to try to reach what's been lost - to try to change reality. All of those things are very interesting to me."
It is a heartbreaking myth, one that has echoed several events in Orr's life.
"It's about various things," he explains. "It's about love and loss and writing poems to release the rage. It's not from any specific autobiographical context; it's from a whole layer. Six years ago, I was very ill. I had encephalitis; I couldn't understand language. I was basically brain-dead for three months, and that was like being in hell. So that was part of the story."
In most of Orr's poetry, themes of love, loss and death swim to the surface. Somehow, he is able to treat them with rage and tenderness simultaneously.
"I think that's why Stanley [Kunitz] and I connected up," he says. "It's not just the suffering, but how suffered a person really is. My father used to always say, 'Get over it.' But you know, I killed my brother. And no one ever talked about it. It's like, 'I want to get over it, I really do, but it's not that simple.' Stanley had that same experience, that in his 64th year he could still feel shame. And it's true. Every time I remember it, I almost blush. It's like shame is on your body. It's that strong. It just doesn't go away."
Kunitz has aged since writing his breathtaking, momentous poem "The Portrait." In fact, he clocks in at 95 years old, quite an accomplishment. Orr says, laughing, "He's an unbelievably tough bird. He may look a little frail, but let me tell you, this guy's tough. He's 95. Not many people get that far. You're looking at someone who, for a guy, is actually 20 years out past the legal limit."
Lately Kunitz has been taking it easy, limiting his readings to one, possibly two a week. This may be one of the last times Charlottesville makes it into his rounds. On Thursday night, Kunitz and Orr will read together for the first time, providing what might be your last chance to witness such an event.
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