Ordinary Heroes: The Poet – Mary Oliver
Don’t Hesitate
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it.
There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind.
And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left.
Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world.
It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins.
Anyway, that’s often the case.
Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty.
Joy is not made to be a crumb.
Introduction
Our “battle” is not with climate change. Our “battle” is not even with ecological overshoot and collapse. Our “battle” is within our own souls. Are we focused only on ourselves? Only on humanity? Or are we awake to the reality that we are but one thread in the tapestry of living beings? When will we live within our limits so other life, and humanity, can thrive? Or will we will continue to destroy the very world that allows us to exist.
I was introduced to the poems of Mary Oliver by my daughter when she was studying Environmental Science. Her words resonated with me right away as she is able to put into words feelings and perceptions I have within me but cannot express. Her poems are very healing when life overwhelms you. One could say her message is simple: Life is fantastic, although very harsh, for this very harshness gives life the beauty and joy that gives life meaning and worth living to its fullest. Yes, death comes to all, but the transitory nature of life is the very thing that forces you to live fully each day. So, dear reader, I hope that the poet within you is inspired and that you can be healed by learning of the life and work of Mary Oliver.
From Poetry Foundation
Mary Oliver was an “indefatigable guide to the natural world,” wrote Maxine Kumin in the Women’s Review of Books, “particularly to its lesser-known aspects.” 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.” Oliver’s poetry won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and a Lannan Literary Award for lifetime achievement. Reviewing Dream Work (1986) for the Nation, critic Alicia Ostriker numbered Oliver among America’s finest poets, as “visionary as [Ralph Waldo] Emerson.”
Mary Oliver [1935 – 2019] was born and raised in Maple Hills Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. She would retreat from a difficult home to the nearby woods, where she would build huts of sticks and grass and write poems. She attended both Ohio State University and Vassar College, but did not receive a degree from either institution. As a young poet, Oliver was deeply influenced by Edna St. Vincent Millay and briefly lived in Millay’s home, helping Norma Millay organize her sister’s papers. Oliver is notoriously reticent about her private life, but it was during this period that she 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. Known for its clear and poignant observations and evocative use of the natural world, Oliver’s poetry is firmly rooted in place and the Romantic nature tradition. Her work received early critical attention; American Primitive (1983), her fifth book, won the Pulitzer Prize. According to Bruce Bennetin the New York Times Book Review, American Primitive, “insists on the primacy of the physical.” Bennet commended Oliver’s “distinctive voice and vision” and asserted that the “collection contains a number of powerful, substantial works.” Holly Prado of the Los Angeles Times Book Review also applauded Oliver’s original voice, writing that American Primitive “touches a vitality in the familiar that invests it with a fresh intensity.”
Dream Work (1986) continues Oliver’s search to “understand both the wonder and pain of nature” according to Prado in a later review for the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Ostriker considered Oliver “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.” For Ostriker, Dream Work is ultimately a volume in which Oliver moves “from the natural world and its desires, the ‘heaven of appetite’ … into the world of historical and personal suffering. … She confronts as well, steadily,” Ostriker continued, “what she cannot change.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mary-oliver
Wild Geese
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.
Here is a 2nd perspective that will perhaps give you more insight on the HEALING power of her poetry; she was sexually abused as a child. This fact makes it obvious that her poetry is her way of healing herself – and you. This did not make her bitter or cause her to see herself as a victim; quite the contrary. Her life’s journey was to celebrate life and find as much beauty in it as possible, all the while recognizing that life is also painful and full of tears.
by Nadia Colburn, PhD
Mary Oliver, who died recently at 83, lit the way forward for me when I doubted that I could ever move past suffering into survival, let alone beauty and joy. In 2011, I was a poet who had stopped writing poetry. Although writing had long been a trusted friend, holding my hand as I remembered being sexually abused as a child, writing also seemed to hold me in place, to mire me in pain.
Much of the poetry I had once loved now seemed to mirror back to me violence and suffering. I didn’t want to be the cliché of the unhappy poet, or worse. Two of my poet friends, both also graduates of my PhD program, had recently committed suicide. I often thought back to Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, two mother poets who had famously committed suicide. I couldn’t help but wonder if poetry was doing us more harm than good.
I was a mother of two young kids when memories of a babysitter abusing me came flooding back. If for a while writing poetry allowed me to express my feelings, I soon worried that the form was holding me in my pain with no way out. I decided to move away from poetry, to write non-fiction instead.
Then I read the 2011 interview with Maria Shriver in O Magazine, in which Mary Oliver said that she’d been sexually abused as a child. and also that it was the first time she’d said that aloud in an interview: “When you’re sexually abused, there’s a lot of damage—that’s the first time I’ve ever said that out loud.”
Her admission didn’t fit with the picture I had of Oliver as a “happy” and “easy, accessible poet.” In my poetry circles no one, including me, had taken her seriously. Her celebrations of nature felt too light. In our early twenties, we felt we had to suffer. But what if we’d misread her—and in misreading had not only missed the wisdom and weight of daily existence but also our ability to come to greater happiness through poetry? What if, instead of not being considered “serious,” at least by those in academic programs like mine, Oliver had another model for poetry, one that provided a path out from suffering?
I bought one of her books, then another, and then another. I read them, slowly at first, and then voraciously.
Although Oliver is roughly the same generation as Plath and Sexton (just 3 and 7 years younger), her poetry followed a different path. Her poems are, above all, celebrations: “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.” she wrote in “When Death Comes.”
That celebration, years after I had discounted her poems, now seemed hard won.
Even if Oliver hadn’t shared in interviews before that she’d been sexually abused as a child, the abuse was right there in her poems, if you looked. The abuse shows up most clearly in Dream Work, the book she wrote after winning the Pulitzer Prize. Dream Work is largely about the devastation of Native American people and culture, and perhaps it was only with the authority gained by winning the country’s biggest poetry prize, and by looking deeply at the suffering and injustice of the place where she lived, that Oliver was able to start to look at and write about her own childhood abuse. https://www.themanifeststation.net/2019/08/07/trauma-mary-oliver-and-me-how-poetry-saved-my-life/
So, dear friend, when life is hard, as it is sure to be at one point, remember how Mary Oliver was able to transmute her pain into the beauty of words and share her healing powers with the world – and do the same in your very own, unique, way.
I first stumbled into Mary Oliver’s visionary impact of Nature’s wonder and power infusing ALL aspects of life while, like you, reading O magazine in a dentist’s office, her poem, The Grasshopper.
What a strange place for us to have connected.
At that moment, I too moved in my mind to lie with her in that grass where she detailed so remarkably the life force and beauty in this delicate creature washing its face by raising its delicate arms. I found it dificult to contain my emotions as I sat surrounded by strangers in that waiting room performing their compulsorily addictive multi hourly liasons with their phones.
Would anyone else in this room were they to have come upon this Grasshopper have become startled by its beauty?
Or by the contrast the poem presented of what we treat as important and as trivial?
Much of modern Life’s sadness lies in our Lack of Observance of the natural wonders and intricate, delicate beauty that surround us. Instead we have been corporately lead to technology – which while both miraculous and helpful – distract and dehumanize us from regarding the wholeness and inter dependence of the world we live in but do not recognize and thus, from which we receive no nurture.
Continuing to download movies and games rather than learning to identify the planets or constellations on a clear night significantly determines our relationship to this miraculous planet we have the privilege to inhabit. We can feel lost when we don’t explore our native paths.
Seek out online a reading of some of Mary Oliver’s poetry to bridge this divide across which her insight can lead you.
Grasshoppers thrive partly on eating (my treasured rose) leaves where their mandibles chew out large, jagged bites. Until I read Mary Oliver, this insect food preference foolishly infuritated me whie I tried to relocate them. Today I share these rose miracles with them gently nudging them also to sample a variety of other leaves.
Viewpoint broadening really does matter! Our species’ power more often than not disables our willingness to lessen control which we need better to calibrate for other species.
That Mary Oliver has died is even more reason for earthlings to benefit from her gentle wisdom.
Why did I locate you under CACOR, Canada Club of Rome, which I am reading to understand their role and motives?
Ottawa, Canada
response to last question: I wrote this article about mary oliver for the CACOR website as I believe connecting with creation is essential to “solving” our disastrous destruction of the natural world.