A tribute posted in Garrison Keillor’s “The Writers’ Almanac”:
It’s the birthday of the late poet Mary Oliver, born in Maple Heights, Ohio (1935).
From the time she was young, she knew that writers didn’t make very much money, so she sat down and made a list of all the things in life she would never be able to have — a nice car, fancy clothes, and eating out at expensive restaurants were all on the list. But young Mary decided she wanted to be a poet anyway.
Oliver went to college, but dropped out. She made a pilgrimage to visit Edna St. Vincent Millay’s 800-acre estate in Austerlitz, New York. The poet had been dead for several years, but Millay’s sister Norma lived there along with her husband. Mary Oliver and Norma hit it off, and Oliver lived there for years, helping out on the estate, keeping Norma company, and working on her own writing. In 1958, a woman named Molly Malone Cook came to visit Norma while Oliver was there, and the two fell in love. A few years later, they moved together to Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Oliver said: “I was very careful never to take an interesting job. Not an interesting one. I took lots of jobs. But if you have an interesting job you get interested in it. I also began in those years to keep early hours. […] If anybody has a job and starts at 9, there’s no reason why they can’t get up at 4:30 or five and write for a couple of hours, and give their employers their second-best effort of the day — which is what I did.”
She published five books of poetry, and still almost no one had heard of her. She doesn’t remember ever having given a reading before 1984, which is the year that she was doing dishes one evening when the phone rang and it was someone calling to tell her that her most recent book, American Primitive (1983), had won the Pulitzer Prize. Suddenly, she was famous. She didn’t really like the fame — she didn’t give many interviews, didn’t want to be in the news. When editors called their house for Oliver, Cook would answer, announce that she was going to get Oliver, fake footsteps, and then get back on the phone and pretend to be the poet — all so that Oliver didn’t have to talk on the phone to strangers, something she did not enjoy. Cook was a photographer, and she was also Oliver’s literary agent. They stayed together for more than 40 years, until Cook’s death in 2005. Oliver passed away in 2019.
She said: “I’ve always wanted to write poems and nothing else. There were times over the years when life was not easy, but if you’re working a few hours a day and you’ve got a good book to read, and you can go outside to the beach and dig for clams, you’re okay.”
What will you do with your one wild and precious life?
–Mary Oliver
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Losing her was a blow.
And Millay. Oh my heart! These were brilliant women, both!!! Geniuses.
http://www.phys.unm.edu/~tw/fas/yits/archive/oliver_wildgeese.html
Good afternoon Diane and everyone. I love Mary Oliver. Here’s one of my favorites.
Poem (the spirit likes to dress up)
The spirit
likes to dress up like this:
ten fingers,
ten toes,
shoulders, and all the rest
at night
in the black branches,
in the morning
in the blue branches
of the world.
It could float, of course,
but would rather
plumb rough matter.
Airy and shapeless thing,
it needs
the metaphor of the body,
lime and appetite,
the oceanic fluids;
it needs the body’s world,
instinct
and imagination
and the dark hug of time,
sweetness
and tangibility,
to be understood,
to be more than pure light
that burns
where no one is –
so it enters us –
in the morning
shines from brute comfort
like a stitch of lightning;
and at night
lights up the deep and wondrous
drownings of the body
like a star.
What a beautifully shaped poem. It’s like the best songs, that build to full meaning. The last two stanzas are exquisite, yet could not exist without what went before.
“If anybody has a job and starts at 9, there’s no reason why they can’t get up at 4:30 or five and write for a couple of hours”
I think this is one of the signs of a writing addict.
Back when I was still teaching and was younger (30s to early 50s), I got up at 3:00 AM (M to F) to write for a couple of hours before I left for work. My first class started at 8:00 AM and I arrived at least an hour early.
OMG I did the same thing in my 30’s. How wonderful was that. Your post reminded me, and of some of the poetry I wrote then. I wrote lots more later at any old hour, but the confidence and freeom came from those early-morning hours of regular work.
That is gorgeous. “The Uses of Sorrow.” My journal entry this morning was looking for that. [It has been just over 10 years since I lost my eldest son.] I see I must read Mary Oliver.
Oh my. I hadn’t thought of it like that. I did not know your son, but I shed a tear for him just now. I’m so sorry for your loss. It is a gift though, too, isn’t it? I hope so.
Oh my.
Thanks LCT. He was a wonderful gift. The box of darkness, the loss, is some kind of terrible gift I’m always trying to figure out. At a minimum it expands empathy for others.
Serendipity is a wonderful thing (if it is a thing). Yesterday I chose to post her poem Wild Geese as a reminder to my friends to be kind to themselves as we celebrated a mental health day we have here called – RUOK? Here is the poem read by Mary. https://onbeing.org/poetry/wild-geese/
How beautiful.
I was blockedrom hearing it there, but here she is reading it on youtube: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lv_4xmh_WtE
Very special link. I will keep it. Thanks