Mary Oliver 1935-2019

The New Yorker,
January 19, 2019

I'm definitely more into prose and less into poems. However, in the course of academic studies, poems had to be appreciated, and some poets, I actually enjoy their words, and more so, their thoughts. Sonnets are highly irritating, as are iambic pentameters, and sestinas and villanelles (although Dylan Thomas isn't too bad). Epigrams, haikus and limericks are fun, perfect for my attention span.

Mary Oliver (1935-2019) is a contemporary poet whose works I really enjoy. Bears, owls, porcupines, insects, reptiles, hermit crabs, humpback whales, et cetera. Many of her poems were borne out inspiration gleaned from long nature walks and a love of the natural world. She draws on the beauty of mountains and lakes in her hometown of Ohio and her later home in New England. Her poems are friendly, with none of those grandiose words and rhythm that I'm averse to. Through her writing, she has managed to reach out to many who would otherwise have little to do with the entire idea of literary poems.

Oliver told NPR that simplicity was important to her. "Poetry, to be understood, must be clear," she said. "It mustn't be fancy. I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now, they sort of tap dance through it. I always feel that whatever isn't necessary should not be in the poem." 

~ NPR, January 17, 2019

She's been writing for many years, and she has the most delightful volume in 'The Truro Bear and Other Adventures: Poems and Essays' (2008). Within it, is a poem titled 'The Truro Bear', and I love how she imagined (or likely saw) a solitary bear wandering the woods "I think of the blueberry fields, the blackberry tangles,/ the cranberry bogs" and how it has to "be clever, be lucky, move quietly/ through the woods for years, learning to stay away/ from roads and houses." That is so sad. Through this short poems, so much is said. Urbanization has encroached on the homes of the animals and redefined boundaries of the natural world and human settlements.

The poet values her privacy, and while she teaches, she leads a quiet life, preferring to express her emotions through her writing. I feel a little sad to know that her world as a little girl was not the same as the world now. Climate change is here and it has changed the landscape for the worse. In an article for The New Yorker published January 19, 2019, 'Mary Oliver's Deep, Direct Love for the World', Stephanie Burt wrote

Oliver was not primarily known as a lesbian poet, nor as one who had found human love early—found it, moreover, long before contemporary gay liberation, long before it could be publicly consecrated or declared. But she did those things, too. Oliver shared her Provincetown life for decades with the photographer Molly Malone Cook, who informed some poems but became unmistakable, unavoidable, to many of Oliver’s readers only after Cook’s death, in 2005.

Mary Oliver has written many poems that appeal to different people. I don't need my poetry obscure and I don't need them to be too clever. I need them to be stirring and heartfelt. There has got to be a connection, regardless. My all-time favorite poems of hers is 'Wild Geese' (1986),

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.