Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life? Mary Oliver
For this week’s “Poetic Spirits,” I’ve chosen a poet of the middle ground; literally between the manmade and the natural world – the intersection of the unfathomable and the mundane. Today’s Poetic Spirit is Mary Oliver. What? You have never heard of or read, Ms Oliver!? Impossible! Impossible, that is, for readers of Wannaskan Almanac’s every-other-Monday posts. Okay. That’s my mini-micro rant. I’m just concerned that anyone may have missed Ms. Oliver along the way. If you read this post, you will have made her acquaintance.
Many agree that she is near the top of the most-admired American poets. I’ve included more poems than usual because 1) she is among my top-five, favorite poets, and 2) she has a way of speaking profound truths in straightforward language, and 3) she uses the natural world to tell us her stories, lessons, and startling thoughts. Speaking of “startling,” read on and see the prizes she has under her poetic belt, and be impressed.
Mary Jane Oliver (September 10, 1935 – January 17, 2019) won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, along with other prestigious recognitions. As I said, her work is inspired by nature rather than the human world. This remained true throughout her work; however later in her writing career, she did explore the interior life of human consciousness, albeit with its limitations. Her major source of inspiration and insight came from her lifelong passion for solitary walks in the wild. Her poetry conveys sincere wonder about nonhuman, sentient beings, about the environments they live in, and the landscapes conveyed in deceptively simple language, language that frequently surprises and offers delight that seems warm and personal. Her themes are personal yet lofty, earthy yet celestial, and intimate yet universal.
The work of Mary Oliver may not have received as much attention from critics as she deserves, yet some claim that she was the bestselling poet in the United States at the time of her death in 2019. And what about all those top-level prizes?
MARY OLIVER’S POEMS
Let’s begin with Oliver’s poem about this month.
When the blackberries hang
swollen in the woods, in the brambles
nobody owns, I spend
all day among the high
branches, reaching
my ripped arms, thinking
of nothing, cramming
the black honey of summer
into my mouth; all day my body
accepts what it is. In the dark
creeks that run by there is
this thick paw of my life darting among
the black bells, the leaves; there is
this happy tongue.
Many claim that “The Journey” is arguably Oliver’s best poem. It is certainly her most famous.
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voice behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life that you could save.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Canada Geese by Mackenzie Thorpe
Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly
they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,
dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,
then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can't imagine
how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,
this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;
I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard. I want
to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
Oliver often asks questions of her readers. She whispers to us.
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Do stones feel?
Do stones feel?
Do they love their life?
Or does their patience drown out everything else?
When I walk on the beach I gather a few
white ones, dark ones, the multiple colors.
Don’t worry, I say, I'll bring you back, and I do.
Is the tree as it rises delighted with its many
branches,
each one like a poem?
Are the clouds glad to unburden their bundles of rain?
Most of the world says no, no, it’s not possible.
I refuse to think to such a conclusion.
‘Too terrible it would be, to be wrong.
Background
Mary Oliver was born to Edward William and Helen M. (Vlasak) Oliver on September 10, 1935, in Maple Heights, Ohio, a semi-rural suburb of Cleveland. Her father was a social studies teacher and an athletics coach in the Cleveland public schools. As a child, she spent a great deal of time outside where she enjoyed going on long walks or reading. Like many children of what Oliver called dysfunctional families, a major reason for her retreat into nature was due to the turmoil inside the family home. Not insignificantly, she was sexually abused.
From her youth, Oliver had a deep attraction to things of the natural vs. manmade. She saw the world through a lens of nature and her poetry is permeated by this theme more than any other. Poems like “Wild Geese” exemplify the importance of nature as teacher. She could have said that her foundations lay, not in a social milieu, but rather in the tracks on the ground beneath her feet, the winged ones overhead, and the encounters with the residents of the natural world.
Mary Oliver was an “indefatigable guide to the natural world,” wrote Maxine Kumin in the Women’s Review of Books. Kumin observed that Oliver was attracted “particularly to [the natural world’s] lesser-known aspects.” Kumin went on to say that Oliver’s poetry “focused on the quiet of occurrences of nature: industrious hummingbirds, egrets, motionless ponds, ‘lean owls / hunkering with their lamp-eyes.’” Kumin also noted that Oliver “stands quite comfortably on the margins of things, on the line between earth and sky, the thin membrane that separates human from what we loosely call animal.”
As a young poet, Oliver was deeply influenced by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and for a short period she lived in Millay’s residence. There she helped Edna’s sister, Norma, make sense and order out of Edna’s papers. Oliver was almost secretive about her personal life, but during the Millay period, Oliver met her long-time partner, Molly Malone Cook. The couple moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and the surrounding Cape Cod landscape has had a marked influence on Oliver’s work.
Oliver’s poetry won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and a Lannan Literary Award for lifetime achievement. Her work received early praise and attention; American Primitive (1983), her fifth book, won the Pulitzer Prize. According to Bruce Bennetin (New York Times Book Review), American Primitive, “insists on the primacy of the physical.” New and Selected Poems (1992) won the National Book Award. Oliver wrote prose and poetry, and she regularly published a new work on average every two years.
Dream Work (1986) takes a deep dive into her beloved natural world in an effort to “understand both the wonder and the pain of nature.” In a Los Angeles Times Book Review (Ostriker) claimed that Oliver was “among the few American poets who can describe and transmit ecstasy, while retaining a practical awareness of the world as one of predators and prey.” This translates to profile Oliver as a poet and a deeply observant artist who could go back and forth between the sublime celestial and the ground of the world’s constant suffering.
Clearly, Oliver’s work in her earlier poetic career is almost always oriented toward nature. In the beginning, she did not often examine the inner life and she eschewed writing about the personal. In later works, this viewpoint changed dramatically wherein she focused on her own life relentlessly. She came to treasure the amazement of both inner and outer worlds. Her poem “When Death Comes” from New and Selected Poems exemplifies this: “When it’s over, I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.”
Her affinity for the natural world was overall her most consistent theme throughout her productive years. Later works take another frequent theme: the places where the natural and the human worlds meet. In this meeting, she also is not afraid of testing the limits of consciousness.
Her last books included A Thousand Mornings (2012), Dog Songs (2013), Blue Horses (2014), Felicity (2015), Upstream: Selected Essays (2016), and Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (2017). Oliver lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Hobe Sound, Florida, until her death in early 2019. She was 83.
EXPLORATIONS
Exploration 1: Do you think any artist can convey the intersection of the natural and the manmade worlds? Do any of Oliver’s poems selected for this post do so?
Exploration 2: What do you think of Oliver’s winning the Pulitzer Prize? In your opinion, did she deserve it? Don’t let your inner critic be shy. Before deciding, you may have to read more of her work and compare/contrast her with other poets who have won the prize.
Exploration 3: After reading Mary Oliver, how does Maya Angelou’s poem, “Phenomenal Woman” strike you?
Comments
Post a Comment