Discovering Mary Oliver in the middle of a pandemic
A case to tempt you to fall in love with her poetry
I discovered Mary Oliver’s work as an epigraph to Cheryl Strayed’s popular memoir, “Wild” in 2017:
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”
It is the final couplet of “The Summer Day,” Oliver’s most famous poem. I remember feeling a sense of motivation reading it given I was making a run for a career in social impact. It was something I never aimed for. Anything and everything in that moment I required to strengthen my resolve. Her words served as a perfect balm.
As of today, the couplet serves as a celebration of the choice I made five years ago!
I had bookmarked her name to read later on. As fate had it, I never came around to it. Until Champaca’s book subscription box introduced her collection of prose, “Upstream” in 2021.
I found myself captured into her world. Her words offered me a space to reflect and yet move along the woods she adored.
Oliver was born in Ohio. She lived in Provincetown, Mass., from the 1960s until the death of her partner in 2005. She eventually moved to southern Florida until her death in 2019. Coming from a troubled childhood, she sought solace in nature. The bulk of her work focuses on the sights and sounds of whatever was in her backyard, or in the nearby parks: the deer, the birds, the grass, the water, the trees, the light, and the darkness.
The attention with which she describes these little things serves as a different definition of love. For instance, her poem “Swan”:
Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air –
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music — like the rain pelting the trees — like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds –
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?
She showcases the swan as a shapeshifter. It becomes soft and lovely like flowers or unpleasant and relentless like a waterfall. She underlines the theme that change is eternal in our lives and challenges the reader: what form are you going to choose?
Her unique usage of “you” and “I” in her poems make them accessible and prompts to read them cover to cover. Something most critics have criticized her work for. Even I remember my English Lit teacher from Grade 8 citing the usage of ‘I’ as more of ego. Something an editor once told Oliver too.
While I made my way through “Upstream” and other Oliver’s works, I found the usage of “I” more and more humane. It made me join the experience and feel it like I would any other day. The only difference is it is she who experienced it. But it is me who bear witness to it. My favorite from the lot has to be this one:
Ain’t that a wonderful way to view the books on our shelves?
I find her writing very grounding. The way she tackles the depth of human emotions — love and death, loneliness and isolation — is a beauty. One of Oliver’s poems “Wild Geese”, described by Krista Tippett, founder of The On Being Project (another project dear to my heart), as a “poem that has saved lives”. It begins:
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.
This poem further goes on to serve as a reminder to yourself that you have nothing to prove. As the geese take to flight in the poem, she invites the reader to fly with them — away from the grief and isolation you must be feeling.
As we find ourselves isolating (minus the unlock that seems to pick up pace now), her writing opens a door to the outside world that you might have termed as “normal” or “mundane”. She invites us to listen in and take pleasure in fragile moments. And find our own little joy.
Her writing also covers an in-depth understanding of predator and prey, as shown in “Upstream”. She writes about a time she followed turtles to the beach and watched them lay their eggs and bury them there; for a while, she almost ritualistically observed them as they made these journeys, and one night, she goes back to where she knows this one turtle has buried its eggs, she takes some and scrambles them for her dinner. She describes eating them with reverence and devotion.
I found myself at a loss when I read the passage. I re-read it a couple of times till I basked in the glory with which she described that unique relation of predator and prey.
The lovely thing about her work is that it is bite-sized and you can consume it with ease especially if you have shortened attention spans (not meant to hurt any feelings, but in the age of 15/30/60 seconds reels how can I not comment on it!).
Every day whenever I am lost (or the world gets too much around me), I find myself reading a poem from her most referred work, “Devotions”. I am glad in the grey of lockdown 2.0, I found the voice of Mary Oliver.
PS. If my words were not convincing enough, hear Krista in a rare conversation with Oliver here.
Why rare?
Oliver was a very private person. She cared for neither the praise she received (includes a certain Pulitzer Prize) nor her harshest critics (offering a lesson in managing criticism with grace). She spent most of her time “listening in” to what nature has to offer or “in conversation” with her female partner of 40 years. Yup, she was queer.
P.PS. Looking to access her work? Poetry Foundation has a great repository for reading. Hope you enjoy it as much as I do!
