America’s Poet of the Quite Places—Mary Oliver

 

                                    Mary Oliver in 1964.

Mary Oliver, who was born this day on September 10, 1935 in Maple Heights, Ohio, a semi-rural suburb of Cleveland, was the rare contemporary American poet who was both widely read and critically acclaimed.  She was the bestselling American poet whose books are still bought and read by people who do not read poetry.  But she has also won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, numerous other honors, and academic recognition despite never completing a bachelor’s degree.

Her work celebrates and explores nature, often as an empowering force of the feminine.  She has mastered, if she did not invent, feminist neo-transcendentalism—which I have no idea is a real school but should be.  If it has not been described that way elsewhere, I congratulate myself on coining a useful phrase.

The semi-mystical, but plain spoken confabulation of nature with the divine feminine, has not pleased everyone.  Oliver has her critics, particularly among certain feminists who disparage her refusal to be an overtly lesbian writer or to explicitly enter political and social criticism.  Avant-garde circles disparage her refusal to come to grips with gritty modern reality and accuse her of a certain Romantic escapism.

All of this bothered the intensely private Oliver not at all.  She blithely continued to pursue the work of a lifetime in conformity to her own vision.  And millions are glad she did.

Among her foremost fans are Unitarian Universalists.  May Sarton may have been declared “our poet” forty years ago or more, but many more U.U.s read Oliver.  Many probably assume that she is one of us, which she is not.  But the identification is understandable because the UUA’s Beacon Press has been the publisher of her most successful collections and her poems are excerpted several times as readings in the familiar gray hymnal Singing the Living Tradition.  I know many ministers keep her volumes in arm’s reach of their desks and her poems often illustrate sermons.

As a child Oliver enjoyed exploring the creeks and woodlots of her neighborhood.  Her father, a high school English teacher in Cleveland, encouraged her bookish interests and her beginning explorations of poetry at the age of 14.

Edna St. Vincent Millay at her home in Austerlitz, New York.  Young Mary Oliver spent formative years living there with the late poet's sister and helping to organize her papers

At 17 Oliver made a pilgrimage to the home of a hero, Edna St. Vincent Millay in upstate Austerlitz, New York where she made friends with the late poet’s sister Norma.  For the next seven years she lived on and off with Norma as a combination companion and an assistant in organizing Edna’s papers.  Thus, the leading female poet of the first half of the 20th Century and the closing years and dawn of a new century were linked both spiritually and physically.

After leaving Austerlitz, Oliver attended both Ohio State University and Vassar College in the 1950’s, but never graduated.  She began publishing her poems in the usual little magazines and literary journals and was slowly building a reputation.

Mary Oliver, right, with her life partner Molly Malone Cook.

Late in the decade Oliver met photographer Molly Malone Cook on a visit back to the Millay home.  The two became an inseparable couple.  Cook became Oliver’s literary agent and documented her and their life together with her photographs.  The couple lived mainly, with a few diversions to college towns where Oliver was called to teach despite her lack of academic credentials, in Provincetown, Massachusetts on Cape Cod for forty years until Cooks death in 2005.  Oliver continued to live there and draw inspiration from the sand, sea, and sky until retiring to Florida.

Oliver established herself as a poet to be reckoned with in 1963 with the publication of her first collection, No Voyage, and Other Poems at the age of 28.  She has had a productive career since then.  Among her major works are The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems in 1972;  American Primitive in 1983, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; House of Light  in 1990 which won the Christopher Award and the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award; New and Selected Poems  in 1992, which won the National Book Award; Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems  in 1999; a book-length poem, The Leaf and the Cloud in 2000; Why I Wake Early  in 2004; Thirst in 2006; Swan: Poems and Prose Poems in 2010; A Thousand Mornings  in 2012; Dog Songs in 2013; and Blue Horses in 2014.

                                Oliver's award winning collection, American Primitive.

Despite her lack of academic credentials, Oliver had a successful second career as a teacher.  She  taught at Case Western Reserve in her home state of Ohio; been poet in residence at both Bucknell University and Sweet Briar College, and spent nearly ten years at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont.  She quietly mentored young writers, especially women, and published two admired non-fiction books about the art of verse, A Poetry Handbook and Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse.

Oliver seldom granted interviews or encouraged biographical exploration of her life.  She preferred to let her poetry speak for itself.  And so it does, in the great tradition of her most significant influences, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and the woman some say she most resembled, the isolated and private Emily Dickinson.  

She died of lymphoma on November 17, 2019 at age 83 at her Hobe Sound, Florida home. 

 

Heron Rises From The Dark, Summer Pond

So heavy
is the long-necked, long-bodied heron,
always it is a surprise
when her smoke-colored wings

open
and she turns
from the thick water,
from the black sticks

of the summer pond,
and slowly
rises into the air
and is gone.

Then, not for the first or the last time,
I take the deep breath
of happiness, and I think
how unlikely it is

that death is a hole in the ground,
how improbable
that ascension is not possible,
though everything seems so inert, so nailed

back into itself—
the muskrat and his lumpy lodge,
the turtle,
the fallen gate.

And especially it is wonderful
that the summers are long
and the ponds so dark and so many,
and therefore it isn’t a miracle

but the common thing,
this decision,
this trailing of the long legs in the water,
this opening up of the heavy body

into a new life: see how the sudden
gray-blue sheets of her wings
strive toward the wind; see how the clasp of nothing
takes her in.

 

—Mary Oliver

 

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.

 

—Mary Oliver

 

 

 

Two Man and Two Mothers Verse by W.S. Merwin and Wesley McNair—National Poetry Month 2022

                        A mother at the wash basin.

Today we share two verses by master American poets.  Each of them begins with a glimpse at a mother. One is remembered by a child grown up and the other shares an intimate moment with an adult son.

W.S. Merwin.

W.S. Merwin was born in New York City on September 30, 1927. He grew up in Union City, New Jersey, and lived there until 1936, when his family moved to Scranton, Pennsylvania. As a child, he was enamored of the natural world, sometimes finding himself talking to the large tree in his back yard. He was also fascinated with things that he saw as links to the past, like a building behind his home that had once been a coach house.  At the age of five he started writing hymns for his father, a Presbyterian minister.

Merwin wrote more than fifty books of poetry and prose, and many works of translation.  During the 1960s anti-war movement, his unique craft was characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration. In the 1980s and 1990s, his writing was influenced by an interest in Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology. Living in a rural part of Maui, Hawaii, he wrote prolifically and was dedicated to the restoration of the island’s rainforests.  He was one of the few late 20th Century and early 21st Century poets to fill two large volumes in the Library of America great authors series.

Merwin received many honors, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1971 and 2009; the National Book Award for Poetry in 2005, and the Tanning Prize—one of the highest honors of the Academy of American Poets—as well as the Golden Wreath of the Struga Poetry Evenings. In 2010, the Library of Congress named him the 17th United States Poet Laureate.

He died in his sleep at his Maui home on March 15, 2019 at the age of 91.

                                    This poem came from Merwin's 2014 poetry collection The Moon Before Morning. 

Mr Daley

Mr Daley could whistle between his teeth

but just the one phrase over and over

it was in the good old summertime

and it made my mother sniff and shake her head

as he pushed the big wooden spoon around

and around the pot of flour paste he was mixing

on the old coal range in the back kitchen

near the laundry tubs that smelled of laundry tubs

as the flour paste smelled of flour paste

and Mr Daley smelled of Mr Daley

in a stale shirt he was old in his fifties

with a hump between his shoulders and it was

still summertime and he would carry the pot

up the back stairs to the heat of the attic

where he had already carried the truckload

of mattress cartons one at a time

got for nothing from the Furniture Store

& Funeral Parlor on South Main Street

and he had nailed them up under the attic beams

and then would paper them end to end with old

church bulletins as insulation

because the house was so cold in winter

he kept laughing to himself about something

while he worked and whistled they said he was not

like his daughter Isabel whom they admired

who worked in Thomas’s Piano Store

that would burn down one winter with icicles

forming from the jets of the fire hoses

and the flames racing up inside the rooms until

the top floors stacked high with pianos

crashed slowly together through icicles

and piano chords chiming in chorus

while I stood watching from across the street

on the stone steps of the Methodist church

remembering Mr Daley whistling

between his teeth in the good old summertime

 

—W.S. Merwin

                             Wesley McNair.

Wesley McNair was born in New Hampshire in 1941who went on to earn his undergraduate degree from Keene State College and has earned two advanced degrees from Middlebury College—an MA in English, and an M.Litt. in American literature. He has also studied American literature, art, and history at Dartmouth College, on a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. In 2018 he was professor emeritus and writer in residence at the University of Maine at Farmington.  He has lived in Mercer, Maine for many years.

He is often considered a New England regionalist who often deals with “the struggles of the economic misfits of his native New England, often with humor and through the use of telling details.”   In his memoir The Words I Chose, McNair referred to the region of his poetry as “a place of farmers under threat, ethnic shop workers, traders, and misfits at the margins” in which he explored “their American dreams, failures, self-doubts, and restlessness.” He added to these themes, love and its absence, loss and disability, and the precarious bonds of family and community.  The peccadillos and conflicts of his own extended family.

McNair has authored 10 volumes of poetry, most recently, Lovers of the Lost: New & Selected Poems in 2010, The Lost Child: Ozark Poems 2014), The Unfastening in 2017, and Dwellers in the House of the Lord in 2020. He has also written three books of prose, including his memoir in 2013. In addition, he has edited several anthologies of Maine writing, and served as a guest editor in poetry for the 2010 Pushcart Prize Annual.  From 2011 to 2016 he served as the Poet Laureate of Maine and 2015 was the recipient of the PEN New England Award for Literary Excellence in Poetry, for The Lost Child: Ozark Poems, which included this poem.

Making Things Clean

One would hardly recognize him like this,

the high-school shop teacher, glasses off,

bent over the kitchen sink. Nearby,

house dresses and underpants flutter

in the window of the Maytag he bought

for his mother. Its groaning is the only

sound while she washes his hair,

lifting the trembling water in her hands

as she has always done, working foam up

from his gray locks like the lightest

batter she ever made. Soon enough,

glasses back on, he will stand

before students who mock his dullness;

soon, putting up clothes, she’ll feel

the ache of a body surrendering to age.

A little longer let him close his eyes

against soap by her apron, let her move

her fingers slowly, slowly in this way

the two of them have found to be together,

this transfiguring moment in the world’s

old work of making things clean.

 

—Wesley McNair

 

Forrest Gander—Pulitzer Prize Poet of 2019

Forrest Gander photo by Gage Skidmore.

Every year the cultural mavens who hand out Pulitzer Prizes reveal their list of honorees in April.  That gives me guaranteed fodder for a post on the winner of the Poetry Prize.  But I have an embarrassing admission to make—most years the winners, no matter how celebrated in poetry circles, not only take me by surprise but I have never even heard of them.  Despite enjoying reading and writing verse, I am not in the loop—outside of both academia and hipper poetry slam culture.  I don’t subscribe to or read the little literary magazines or even venerated Poetry which would surely enlighten me.  

I stumble on most of the contemporary poets I post about in this  National Poetry Month series on the internet or am tipped off by folks much more knowledgeable than me.  You can plainly see that I am something of a fraud and blowhard. 

This year’s Pulitzer poet, Forrest Gander was typically unknown to me.  Ever useful Wikipedia informs me that... 

He was born in the Mojave Desert in 1956 as James Forrest Cockerille III, Forrest Gander grew up in Virginia where he and his two sisters were raised by their single mother, an elementary school teacher. The four shared a two-room apartment in Annandale.  His estranged father ran The Mod Scene, a bar on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. With his mother and sisters, Gander began to travel extensively on summer road trips around the United States. The traveling, which never stopped, came to inform his interest in landscapes, languages, and cultures.  Forrest and his two sisters, Karin and Lisa, were adopted by Walter J. Gander soon after his  marriage to their mother, the former Ruth Clare Cockerille.

Gander earned college degrees in geology, a subject referenced frequently in both his poems and essays, and in English literature. His work has been linked to Ecopoetics and ecology.  A writer in multiple genres, Gander is noted for his many collaborations with other artists. 

He is a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and the recipient of fellowships from the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, The Whiting Foundation, and the Howard Foundation. In 2017, he was elected as a Chancellor to the Academy of American Poets.

He taught at Providence College and at Harvard University before becoming the Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literatures at Brown University in Rhode Island.

Gander's late wife, the poet C.D. Wright/

Gander was married to the late poet C.D. Wright. Together they raised a son, the artist-craftsman Brecht Wright Gander. He lives now in Petaluma, California with ceramic artist Ashwini Bhat.

He has written books of highly praised poetry including Be With, for which he was honored with the Pulitzer.  He has also written two novels, numerous essays, been a translator if works in Spanish, French, and Japanese, edited anthologies, and collaborated on special projects with fine artists and crafts persons.  

So I’m impressed—he seems to be mix of a latter day roving Beat like Jack Kerouac, and a modern Eco poet with a dose of multi-cultural influences thrown in.

Gander is so hip that he co-authored a poem with Beyoncé about her daughter Blue Ivy and God called Bey the Light.

The Moment When Your Name is Pronounced

This high up, the face
eroding; the red cedar slopes
over. An accident chooses a stranger.
Each rain unplugs roots
which thin out like a hand.
Above the river, heat
lightning flicks silently
and the sound holds, coiled in air.
Some nights you are here
dangling a Valpolicella bottle,
staring down at the flat water
that slides by with its mouth full of starlight.
It is always quiet
when we finish the wine.
While you were a living man
how many pictures were done
of you. Serious as an angel,
lacing up your boots. Ice
blows into my fields.

—Forrest Gander

From Rush to the Lake, 1988

The Iteration

From the grooved highway at sixty-five,
a hum rises. Except intimacy

there is nada. That
was a scissortail the woman says.

The boy in the back seat stops
blowing his Coke bottle

as they pass
the mowing machines. Spiked

lobelia, crown vetch, trumpet vine
under the blades of the Ditch-witch tremble.

What is the true jelly of an animal?
asks the boy, tonguing his tooth

on its last string. The woman
turns her face smiling.

The skyline jumps over the moon.
The man drives with his finger

inside her. Years
of together. The theories

were unfit to live on.
Only dust was given duration.

They know that
they are naked. 

—Forrest Gander

Gander's Pulitzer Prize winning collection Be With, W.W. Norton & Co., 2018

The Sounding

What closes and then
luminous? What opens
and then dark? And into
what do you stumble
but this violet
extinction? With
froth on your lips.
8:16 a.m. The morning’s
sleepy face

rolls its million
eyes. Migrating flocks
of your likesame species
incandesce
into transparency.
A birdwatcher lifts

her binoculars. The con-
tinuous with or without
your words
situates you here
(here (here)) even while
you knuckle your eyes
in disbelief. Those

voices you love (human
and not), can you
hear their echoes
hissing away like
fiery scale
from an ingot hammered
on some
blacksmith’s anvil?
And behind those
voices, what is that
blowing
the valves of your ears open
as black rain,
not in torrents, but
ceaselessly comes
unchecked out of everywhere
with nothing
to slacken it.

—Forrest Gander
From Be With, 2018