Mary Oliver

Lived 1935-2019. She was born in Ohio. Her first book came out in 1963. She worked for the estate of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Her wife Molly Malone Cook of 40 years died of cancer in 2005. Born in Ohio, she lived in Provincetown RI, and Florida, among other places. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for American Primitive, which seems to be a collection because the copyright has 6 dates. It's her 5th book.

The Fawn

Sunday morning and mellow as precious metal

The church bells rang, but I went

To the woods instead.

A fawn, too new

For fear, rose from the grass

And stood with its spots blazing,

And knowing no way but words,

No trick but music,

I sang to him.

He listened.

His small hooves struck the grass.

Oh what is holiness?

The fawn came closer,

Walked to my hands, to my knees.

I did not touch him.

I only sang, and when the doe came back

Calling out to him dolefully

And he turned and followed her into the trees,

Still I sang,

Not knowing how to end such a joyful text,

Until far off the bells once more tipped and tumbled

And rang through the morning, announcing

The going forth of the blessed.

                    -- Mary Oliver from Twelve Moons (1979)

This poem feels Transcendental to me because she's not going to church, she is finding the sacred in nature. 

Above From Blue Horses (2014)

Above and below from Felicity (2015)

Above and below from A Thousand Mornings (2012)

From Twelve Moons (1979), her 4th book.

So I'm reading all her slim volumes from the library. I check out her omnibus, and it felt overwhelming, too big. It's quite fun and I'm really enjoying it, but there's a sad little bit today:

4. Of The Father

He wanted a body

  so he took mine.

Some wounds never vanish.

Yet little by little

I learn to love my life.

Though sometimes I had to run hard--

  especially from melancholy--

not to be held back.

(p. 40-1 A Thousand Mornings)

Links:

Wikipedia entry on Mary Oliver

Maria Shriver Interviews the Famously Private Poet Mary Oliver 

"Maria Shriver: What about a favorite poet? 

Mary Oliver: I suppose it would have to be Whitman, unless it's Rumi or Hafiz. And I do love Emerson's poetry. And of course I named my dog Percy after Shelley. And how could anybody not love Keats."

page 2

page 3

On Being Podcast with Mary Oliver

Appreciation post

Wild Geese (read by Tom Hiddleston) on YouTube

The Pond

I've posted photos of her poems before.

Marginalia: Mary Oliver on Time, Concentration, the Artist’s Task, and the Central Commitment of the Creative Life

Other thoughts: I'm reading Baudelaire, and of course whatever other poems you're reading throw light on the other poet you're reading. "He coined the term modernity (modernité) to designate the fleeting experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility of artistic expression to capture that experience." He is considered the first modernist. Oliver caught the fleeting experience of going for a walk in nature. Baudelaire talks about a drunkenness about living, and Oliver tries to have intense experiences through her art as well.  

“Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually. Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken. And it sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green side of a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you, ask of the wind, or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock, of whatever flies, or sighs, or rocks, or sings, or speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave, star, bird, clock, will answer you; "It is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken, if you would not be martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will."

“I love thee, infamous city! Harlots and Hunted have pleasures of their own to give, The vulgar herd can never understand.”

Poems:

Pink Moon--The Pond

You think it will never happen again.

Then, one night in April,

the tribes wake trilling.

You walk down to the shore.

Your coming stills them,

but little by little the silence lifts

until song is everywhere

and your soul rises from your bones

and strides out over the water.

It is a crazy thing to do –

for no one can live like that,

floating around in the darkness

over the gauzy water.

Left on the shore your bones

keep shouting come back!

But your soul won’t listen;

in the distance it is sparkling

like hot wires. So,

like a good friend,

you decide to follow.

You step off the shore

and plummet to your knees –

you slog forward to your thighs

and sink to your cheekbones –

and now you are caught

by the cold chains of the water –

you are vanishing while around you

the frogs continue to sing, driving

their music upward through your own throat,

not even noticing

you are someone else.

And that’s when it happens –

you see everything

through their eyes,

their joy, their necessity;

you wear their webbed fingers;

your throat swells.

And thats when you know

you will live whether you will or not,

one way or another,

because everything is everything else,

one long muscle.

It’s no more mysterious than that.

So you relax, you don’t fight it anymore,

the darkness coming down

called water,

called spring,

called the green leaf, called

a woman’s body

as it turns into mud and leaves,

as it beats in its cage of water,

as it turns like a lonely spindle

in the moonlight, as it says

yes.

8/15/23. I've read 4 of her books, have 2 on my pile, and have about 34 books left to read.