“When you write a poem, you write it for anybody and everybody.” — Mary Oliver

Poet Mary Oliver, who died in 2019, was born on this day.

Her work is woven into the fabric of my life. I know I am not alone in this.

When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

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.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

It’s a weird thing. Mary Oliver is as successful a poet as you can get. Her stuff is “excerpted” through Pinterest, through Instagram … and if I hadn’t been into her already, and into her for years (I encountered her work via The New Yorker back in the 1990s) I might have been turned off by this. You know, the Oprah-fication quote-worthy cross-stitch feeling of it. Like, if it’s THIS popular, it’s probably not all that good. But her stuff strikes a chord. I’m sure you’ve all probably read her poem “Wild Geese” – that’s the one that starts with the line “You do not have to be good.” It’s everywhere.

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.

But … just because something is everywhere doesn’t mean it’s not good. She wasn’t ignored critically, although there was a certain hesitation, it seemed, to really “count” her as a heavy-hitter. She won the Pulitzer, her books were literal best-sellers, etc. She was a well-loved contemporary poet, a Robert Frost of our time (except her outlook on life was essentially positive, while his was essentially negative). But – a strike against her in these very ideological times – her poems are not “topical.” You read her stuff and you get the feeling she spent the majority of her time taking long walks. She wrote poems about the ocean, or sunflowers, or whelks. This isn’t seen as “important.” It’s old-fashioned, in other words, she was a lady poet writing about flowers. I don’t AGREE with this assessment. I just mean that that’s the assessment that was out there. This New Yorker article is really intereseting about Mary Oliver’s detractors as well as her fans.

If you love Mary Oliver, as I do, you love her passionately.

There’s always a moment when her poems flash into transcendence, into uplift, like when a gliding swan suddenly rears back stretching out its wings.

Whelks

Here are the perfect
fans of the scallops,
quahogs, and weedy mussels
still holding their orange fruit —
and here are the whelks —
whirlwinds,
each the size of a fist,
but always cracked and broken —
clearly they have been traveling
under the sky-blue waves
for a long time.
All my life
I have been restless —
I have felt there is something
more wonderful than gloss —
than wholeness —
than staying at home.
I have not been sure what it is.
But every morning on the wide shore
I pass what is perfect and shining
to look for the whelks, whose edges
have rubbed so long against the world
they have snapped and crumbled —
they have almost vanished,
with the last relinquishing
of their unrepeatable energy,
back into everything else.
When I find one
I hold it in my hand,
I look out over that shaking fire,
I shut my eyes. Not often,
but now and again there’s a moment
when the heart cries aloud:
yes, I am willing to be
that wild darkness,
that long, blue body of light.

She has put voice to things I haven’t been able to even properly FEEL because the experience of whatever it is is so confusing, or it goes so deep you resist looking at it. You resist facing something. She writes about death, and loss, and grief. Traumatic experiences. But she does so in a way that gives those feelings a container, a space where the words can form and you, the reader, can look at it and say, “Oh. Yes. That is how I feel.” It’s healing. There aren’t too many poets who have written poems that I cling to in tough times. Off the top of my head I can think of only three, Yeats, Auden and Mary Oliver. Each of these poets have written poems I have memorized, not from trying to memorize the poem, but from sheer repetition.

I have written often about my relationship with Auden’s “The More Loving One”, a relationship which stretches back to high school when I first encountered the poem. IMary Oliver’s “In Blackwater Woods” is another poem like that. It holds a special place in my heart. It has provided something for me, something I have NEEDED, something I keep forgetting … for some reason, my brain will not retain the necessary information and I need to keep learning it.

My Dad was not familiar with Mary Oliver’s work and so one day I recited “In Blackwater Woods” for him. I knew it by heart. In the last 2 stanzas, I heard him exhale – a whoosh of breath – and he said, “Boy, that’s a great poem.” If you knew Dad, you would know his reaction was a big deal.

Years later, when we stood in a small fragile grieving group to bury his ashes, we each said something beforehand. I read this poem. The connective tissue between reciting it for him and then reading it out loud in the vast absence he left behind was so strong I thought I might not be able to get through it. I also had no idea when I first recited it to him that it would end up being about my own feelings of loss when he left us.

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

This is what poets can do, at their most transparent. They are muses, vessels, amplifiers, clarifiers. They speak when we cannot. Their ability to put experience into words helps create a container for our lives, for our understanding of our lives.

Mary Oliver did that for me, more than any other living poet.

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2 Responses to “When you write a poem, you write it for anybody and everybody.” — Mary Oliver

  1. Clary says:

    Oh, dear. How sad it’s to say goodbye to one’s father. But surrounded by such words, it gives you a kind of contentment. Hugs.
    I love her When Death Comes, fortunately I’ve been absent from Oprah and every other written banalilites around Mary Oliver, so the poem speaks directly to me.
    The last picture you put shows her strength and fragility at the same time.

    • sheila says:

      When Death Comes is so amazing.

      // fortunately I’ve been absent from Oprah and every other written banalilites around Mary Oliver //

      Yes, it’s strange how … being popular means the critics or whoever dismiss you. I don’t know. Robert Frost was popular. Mark Twain was popular!

      There was a very good New Yorker article about what critics miss about Mary Oliver – I’ll see if I can track it down.

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