poet of the month
(next month's featured poet will be Les Murray. Send in your favourite poems by Les Murray.)
MARY OLIVER
"But also I say this: that light
is an invitation to happiness,
and that happiness,
when it's done right,
is a kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive."
Born 1935 Ohio, USA. Poet and essayist. Winner of the 1984 Pulitzer Prize and 1992 National Book Award. Oliver's poetry focuses on the natural world. The apparent absence of human subjects is misleading. An intense and precise concern with the interplay of human consciousness and nature is central to her work.
Coming soon - search our online anthology for Mary Oliver poems
poem of the day
STARS
Here in my head, language
keeps making its tiny noises.
How can I hope to be friends
with the hard white stars
whose flaring and hissing are not speech
but a pure radiance?
How can I hope to be friends
with the yawning spaces between them
where nothing, ever, is spoken?
Tonight, at the edge of the field,
I stood very still, and looked up,
and tried to be empty of words.
What joy was it, that almost found me?
What amiable peace?
Then it was over, the wind
roused up in the oak trees behind me
and I fell back, easily.
Earth has a hundred thousand pure contraltos –
even the distant night bird
as it talks threat, as it talks love
over the cold, black fields.
Once, deep in the woods,
I found the white skull of a bear
and it was utterly silent –
and once a river otter, in a steel trap,
and it too was utterly silent.
What can we do
but keep on breathing in and out,
modest and willing, and in our places?
Listen, listen, I’m forever saying.
Listen to the river, to the hawk, to the hoof,
to the mockingbird, to the jack-in-the-pulpit –
then I come up with a few words, like a gift.
Even as now.
Even as the darkness has remained the pure, deep darkness.
Even as the stars have twirled a little, while I stood here,
looking up,
one hot sentence after another.
on poetry
'A mind that is lively and inquiring, compassionate, curious, angry, full of feeling, is a mind full of possible poetry. Poetry is a life-cherishing force. And it requires a vision - a faith, to use an old-fashioned term. Yes, indeed. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.'
'It is not poetry's fault that it has so small an audience, so liitle effect upon the frightened, money-loving world. Poetry, after all, is not a miracle. It is an effort to formalize (ritualize) individual moments into a music that all can use. It is the song of our species.
''In order to become a lover of poetry...it is necessary, first, to love a poem. Then, a few poems. Not from the idea of olives do we come at last to savor that Mediterranean fruit, but from one bite, and then another bite, until the assurance of felicity is bound to the category - to the concept of the fruit itself, in all its instances.. ..We learn by putting the olive into our mouths. We learn by putting the actual poem into our mouths.'
on hearing poetry
'There was Poe, whose swarmy meter and alliteration spilled me into a waking dream.'
'(Whitman) the masterly public poet, whose diction of leaping iambs, of common speech, was made lustrous in line after line...'
'A poem on the page speaks to the listening mind.'
'Language is rich and malleable. It is a living, vibrant material, and every part of a poem works in conjunction with every other part - the content, the pace, the diction, the rhythm, the tone - as well as the very sliding, floating, thumping, rappiong sounds of it.'
on her vocation
' I decided very early that I wanted to write. But I didn't think of it as a career. I didn't think of it as a profession....It was the most exciting thing, the most powerful thing, the most wonderful thing to do with my life..I just kept sharpening the pencils.'
'How wonderful! I speak of the soul and seven people rise from their chairs and leave the room, seven others lean forward to listen. I speak of the body, the spirit, the mockingbird, the hollyhock, leaves opening in the rain, music, faith, angels seen at dusk - and seven more people leave the room and are seen running down the road. Seven more stay where they are but make murmurous disruptive sounds. Another seven hang their heads, feigning disinterest though their hearts are open, their hope is high that they will hear the word even again. The word is already, for them, the song in the forest. They know already how everything is better - the dark trees less terrible, the ocean less hungry - when it comes forth, and looks around with its crisp and lovely eye, and begins to sing.'
'I did not think of language as the means to self-description. I thought of it as the door - a thousand opening dooors! - past myself. I thought of it as a means to notice, to contemplate, to praise, and, thus, to come into power.'
on craft and tradition
'Poems speak of the mortal condition; in poems we muse (as we say) about the tragic and glorious issues of our fragile and brief lives : our pasions, our dreams, our failures. Our wonderings about heaven and hell - these too are in poems. Life, death ; mystery, and meaning. Five hundred years and more of such labor, such choice thought within choice expression, lies within the realm of metrical poetry. Without it, one is uneducated, and one is mentally poor.'
'I worked privately.... My school was the great poets : I read, and I read, and I read. I imitated - shamelessly, fearlessly. I was endlessly discontent. I looked at words and couldn't believe the largesse of their sound - the whole structure of stops and sibilants... All such mechanics have always fascinated me!'
'I read my books with diligence, and mounting skills and gathering certainty. I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life.'
'It is craft after all, that carries an individual's ideas to the far edge of familiar territory.'
'In schools, students are urged to follow their own unpatterned expressions, and little if any memorization of metrical poems is now required. As a result...readers of Milton, of Shakespeare, of Wordsworth, of Wilfred Owen, even of Frost, come to the poems, frankly, with tin ears. They cannot scan. They don't know an iamb from an anapest. They read for comprehension and hear little if anything of the interwoven pleasures of the sound and pattern of the poem....Not knowing how to listen, they read the poem but they do not hear it sing, or slide or slow down, or crush with the heel of sound, or leap off the line, or hurry, or sob, or refuse to move from the self-pride of the calm pentameter no matter what fire is rustling through it...I wrote this book to help readers of metrical poems enter the thudding deeps and the rippling shallows of sound-pleasure and rhythm- pleasure... so that their response to the poems becomes not only comprehension, but comprehension accompanied by a felt experience.'
'You would learn very liitle in this world if you were not allowed to imitate.'
'Students who consider it necessary to keep abreast of current publications will never have time to become acquainted with the voices of the past. Believe me, and don't try...You imagine you should surround yourself with the modern only. It is an error. The truly contemporary creative force is something that is built out of the past....To be contemporary is to rise through the stack of the past, like the fire through the mountain.'
on method
'I like to say that I write poems for a stranger who will be born in some distant country hundreds of years from now...everything necessary must be on the page. I must make a complete poem - a river-swimming poem, a mountain-climbing poem. Not my poem, if it's well done, but a deeply breathing, bounding, self-sufficient poem. Like a traveller in an uncertain land, it needs to carry with it all that it must have to sustain its own life - and not a lot of extra weight, either.'
'In my own work, I usually revise through forty or fifty drafts of a poem before I begin to feel content with it...Have some lines come to you...nearly perfect..? That's luck. that's grace. But this is the usual way : hard work, hard work, hard work. This is the way it is done.'
on nature
'I think as an ecologist. But I feel as a member of a great family - one that includes the elephant and the wheat stalk as well as the schoolteacher and the industrialist. This is not a mental condition, but a spiritual condition. Poetry is a product of our history, and our history is inseparable from the natural world. Now, of course, in the hives and dungeons of the cities, poetry cannot console, it carries no weight, for the pact between the natural world and the individual has been broken. There is no more working for harvest - only hunting, for profit. Lives are no longer exercises in pleasure and valor, but only the means to the amassment of worldly goods. If poetry is ever to become meaningful to such persons, they must take the first step - away from their materially bound and self-interested lives, towards the trees, and the waterfall. It is not poetry's fault that it has so small an audience, so little effect upon the frightened, money-loving world. Poetry, after all, is not a miracle. It is an effort to formalize (ritualize) individual moments and the transcending effects of these moments into a music that all can use. It is the song of our species.'
on herself
'I do feel that knowledge about the writer can be invasive. At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all. the women's movement - I di not join that either. I applaud it, and I guess I may even be part of it. I don't see it working very well in poetry.'
'I believe everything has a soul'.
'I quickly found for myself....the natural world, and the world of writing : literature. These were the gates through which I vanished from a difficult place. In the first of these - the natural world - I felt at ease; nature was full of beauty and interest and mystery, also good and bad luck, but never misuse. The second world - the world of literaturte - offered me, besides the pleasures of form, the sustentation of empathy (the first step of what Keats called negative capability) and I ran for it. I relaxed in it. I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything - other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion - that standing within this otherness - the beauty and mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books - can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.'
on work
'..in stories and poems I found passion unfettered, and healthy. Not that such feelings were always or even commonly found in their clearest, most delectable states in all the books I read. Not at all! I saw what skill was needed, and persistence - how one must bend one's spine, like a hoop, over the page - the long labor. I saw the difference between doing nothing, or doing a little, and the redemptive act of true effort. Reading, then writing, then desiring to write well, shaped in me that most joyful of circumstances - a passion for work.'
publications
POETRY
No Voyage and Other Poems
The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems
Twelve Moons
American Primitive
DreamWork
House of Light
White Pine
West Wind
The Leaf and the Cloud
What Do We Know
Owls and Other Fantasies
Why I Wake Early
PROSE
A Poetry Handbook
Blue Pastures
Rules for the Dance
Winter Hours
Long Life
links
from the site of The American Academy of Poets, brief biography
from the Modern American Poetry site, an essay by Janet McNew (1989) on Oliver as a Romantic nature poet
interview by Steven Ratiner
voices raised against Mary Oliver include a critical essay and book review