UVA poetry professor hosts summer workshops
BY MARLI GUZZETTA INDEPENDENT ARTS EDITOR
There are poets who wear their erudition like tweed armor against the world, and then there are poets like Gregory Orr, the NEA and Guggenheim Fellowship recipient and University of Virginia Creative Writing professor who trails down the Nantucket sidewalks in sandals and a shirt with the sleeves rolled.

UVA graduate poetry professor is widely and regularly published in the best literary journals. This summer, he offers poetry workshops for Nantucketers.

Orr has been vacationing on Nantucket since 1985, but this summer is the first that he will break out of his role as a civilian on vacation and offer poetry classes on July 23, 25, 27 and 30 (2 p.m. - 4 p.m.). As a preview, Bookworks is hosting a free reading with Orr on Tuesday, June 17, 8:30 p.m., at the TWN Mainstage in the basement of the Methodist Church, 2 Centre St.

"I've always thought that poetry should be more represented than it is on Nantucket in the summer, compared to other art forms, so I thought I'd take a try," said Orr, who believes that poetry, at its most elemental, inolves "a playfulness - a looseness and excitement - wth language addressed to the most serious aspects of being a person: emotions, love and loss ... It's both a place of positive and negative disorder."

As an instructor, Orr has decades of experience helping writers identify the right kind of disorder in poetry, as opposed to supporting a near-mathematical perfection in verse.

"I think everyone has an impulse to write a poem, and most everybody has," Orr said. "What I feel is that that impulse to write a poem is an authentic human impulse and that it's our birthright."

The birthright, however, has been "alienated from us," Orr said.

"We feel intimidated or suspicious of poetry, where in fact it is one of the most natural impulses we have when faced with strong natural experiences."

Through his workshop, Orr hopes to return to people this experience. The workshop will focus on writing exercises meant to generate poems in the workshop - so there's no need to do any homework - and discussion.

Orr is charging $400 for the four-class commitment, which will include 30-minute individual conferences. Though the classes are meant to be small, Orr isn't capping their enrollment. He plans to allow students to attend at-will.

A period of four days may seem like a too-short amount of time, but Orr maintains that a student of poetry can grow significantly in a four-session class.

"What you hope to do in a situation like this is present students with a number of different ideas and perceptions, with ways of thinking about writing, and then they'll absorb them. It's my job to make the presentation emphatic and dramatic enough that they'll be able to hold onto them and take these ideas with them. And I think I can do that," said Orr. "In poetry, in a short period of time, you can save a writer

years of wandering around in the wilderness." I

Interested parties should contact Orr at gso@virginia. edu or call 228-9982.