Press for Beautiful & Pointless
"One of the major misconceptions about poetry is the idea that it involves a kind of unhindered expression of one’s inner feelings."
—Interview with Jonathan Bastian on Aspen Public Radio’s Page by Page
"As readers of poetry, the way that we think about the art form does relate to the way that we think about the love we bear for our family members and friends."
—Conversation with Willard Spiegelman, Charles Douthat and Mark Oppenheimer
on Connecticut Public Broadcasting’s Paper Trails
“[Poetry] is an art form, and people like for it to be treated as an art form, and not as something that is essentially just a box of Kleenex.”
—Interview with Jim Fleming on NPR’s To the Best of Our Knowledge
—New York magazine’s Approval Matrix
“Well, actually, I came to poetry by mistake, as I think many people do.”
—Interview with Jane Clayson for NPR’s On Point
“If you imagine a Martian coming down and listening to OutKast, the Martian is going to be totally perplexed. Unless OutKast has more experience in outer space than I think they do.”
—Interview with Gregg LaGambina in The Onion A.V. Club
"It’s not so much that poems are confusing, it’s that we don’t really have any of the signals in the landscape that would let us know what’s going on. And so what the book is trying to do is provide a sense of the basic contours of the landscape of modern poetry."
—Interview on WPR’s Veronica Reuckert Show
“I think a better way to approach the question ‘why bother?’ is not to answer it” but rather just to say that if you do bother, it can be worthwhile.”
—Interview with Linda Wertheimer on NPR’s All Things Considered
"It comes from writing for the Times, and the Times’ very large, very strange audience. That has made me especially sensitive to how, as a poetry critic, a lot of the things you say not only aren’t understood but aren’t understood almost in the way that you wouldn’t understand a Martian talking"
—Interview by Laura Miller at Salon.com
"Orr’s pronouncements on new poetry books are heard far and wide. In his debut, he talks to both poetry readers and poets, hoping to help them get along better, while also doing a bit of anthropology on the social world of contemporary poetry"
—Craig Morgan Teicher, 'Poetry Profiled 2011' at Publishers Weekly
"A good review is a persuasive judgment entertainingly delivered. Criticism itself is a broader category, and includes exploratory essays, polemics, advocacy, whither-the-poets-of-yesteryears and so forth. Poetry has plenty of critics, but fewer reviewers than it probably deserves."
—Interview by Sina Queyras at Lemon Hound
"I stare intently at the screen, after having spent days reading some poor poet's life work. Then I remember something I have to do elsewhere in the house/down the street/in a Home Depot/deep in a jungle on the Osa Peninsula. Finally, shortly before the piece is due, I return from wherever I’ve been and write the whole thing in a furious burst."
—Interview by George Murray at Open Book Toronto
