Obit: Poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019)

Subject: Obit: Poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019)
From: Joe Offer
Date: 17 Jan 19 - 06:17 PM

Thought-provoking poet Mary Oliver (September 10, 1935 – January 17, 2019) died of lymphoma today. May she rest in peace.

I guess her 2013 Dog Songs was my favorite collection of Mary Oliver poems.

NPR Obituary:

Much-loved poet Mary Oliver died Thursday of lymphoma, at her home in Florida. She was 83. Oliver won many awards for her poems, which often explore the link between nature and the spiritual world; she also won a legion of loyal readers who found both solace and joy in her work.

Oliver got a lot of her ideas for poems during long walks — a habit she developed as a kid growing up in rural Ohio. It was not a happy childhood: She said she was sexually abused and suffered from parental neglect. But as she told NPR in 2012, she found refuge in two great passions that lasted her entire life.

She said, "The two things I loved from a very early age were the natural world and dead poets, [who] were my pals when I was a kid."

Poetry

'A Thousand Mornings' With Poet Mary Oliver

"Mary Oliver Issues A Full-Throated Spiritual Autobiography In 'Upstream'" />

Book Reviews

Mary Oliver Issues A Full-Throated Spiritual Autobiography In 'Upstream'

Oliver published her first collection, No Voyage and Other Poems, in her late 20s. She went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. But writer Ruth Franklin believes such recognition probably wasn't that important to Oliver. "I always had a sense of her as somebody who was just interested in following her own path, both spiritually and poetically," she says.

In a New Yorker article about Oliver's 2017 book, Devotions, Franklin wrote that Oliver wasn't always appreciated by critics, but she was still one of the country's most popular poets. And there's a reason for that.

"Mary Oliver isn't a difficult poet," Franklin says. "Her work is incredibly accessible, and I think that's what makes her so beloved by so many people. It doesn't feel like you have to take a seminar in order to understand Mary Oliver's poetry. She's speaking directly to you as a human being."

Oliver told NPR that simplicity was important to her. "Poetry, to be understood, must be clear," she said. "It mustn't be fancy. I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now, they sort of tap dance through it. I always feel that whatever isn't necessary should not be in the poem."

Oliver lived for many years in Provincetown, Mass., with the love of her life, the photographer Molly Malone Cook. There, she continued her habit of taking long walks, which often inspired poems. She wrote about one such walk in her poem "The Summer Day":

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Many of Oliver's poems are a joyful celebration of nature, but she also wrote about the abuse she suffered as a child and her first brush with death from lung cancer. Ruth Franklin says her work is infused with a deep spirituality. "The way she writes these poems that feel like prayers, she channels the voice of somebody who it seems might possibly have access to God. I think her work does give a sense of someone who is in tune with the deepest mysteries of the universe."

In her poem "When Death Comes," Oliver wrote this about the inevitable: "When it's over, I want to say all my life/ I was a bride married to amazement."

Tom Cole edited this story for broadcast, and Nicole Cohen adapted it for the Web.

Subject: RE: Obit: Poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019)
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 17 Jan 19 - 06:45 PM

New York Times obituary.

Subject: RE: Obit: Poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019)
From: Jeri
Date: 17 Jan 19 - 06:51 PM

The teacher/leader of one yoga class I go to read this to us.

The Journey
Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voice behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life that you could save.

Subject: RE: Obit: Poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019)
From: keberoxu
Date: 17 Jan 19 - 08:04 PM

This poetry takes my breath away.
Sounds like she did what she came to earth to do.
May she rest easy.

Subject: Poem: I Worried (Mary Oliver)
From: Joe Offer
Date: 17 Jan 19 - 08:16 PM

I WORRIED
(Mary Oliver)

I worried a lot.
Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall
I correct it?

Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?

Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows
can do it and I am, well,
hopeless.

Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,
am I going to get rheumatism,
lockjaw, dementia?

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.

Subject: RE: Obit: Poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019)
From: GUEST,paperback
Date: 20 Jan 19 - 08:06 PM

Mary Oliver was born on September 10, 1935, in Maple Heights, Ohio. As a teenager, she lived briefly in the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay in Austerlitz, New York, where she helped Millay's family sort through the papers the poet left behind.

In the mid-1950s, Oliver attended both Ohio State University and Vassar College, though she did not receive a degree.

Her first collection of poems, No Voyage, and Other Poems, was published in 1963. She went on to publish more than fifteen collections of poetry, including Blue Horses (Penguin Press, 2014); A Thousand Mornings (Penguin Press, 2012); Swan: Poems and Prose Poems (Beacon Press, 2010); Red Bird (2008); Thirst (2006); Why I Wake Early (2004); Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays (2003); Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (Mariner Books, 1999); West Wind (1997); White Pine (1994); New and Selected Poems (1992), which won the National Book Award; House of Light (1990), which won the Christopher Award and the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award; and American Primitive (1983), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize.

The first part of her book-length poem The Leaf and the Cloud (Da Capo Press, 2000) was selected for inclusion in The Best American Poetry 1999 and the second part, "Work," was selected for The Best American Poetry 2000. Her books of prose include Long Life: Essays and Other Writings (2004); Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse (Mariner Books, 1998); Blue Pastures (1995); and A Poetry Handbook (1994).

Oliver, who cited Walt Whitman as an influence, is best known for her awe-filled, often hopeful, reflections on and observations of nature. "Mary Oliver's poetry is an excellent antidote for the excesses of civilization," wrote one reviewer for the Harvard Review, "for too much flurry and inattention, and the baroque conventions of our social and professional lives. She is a poet of wisdom and generosity whose vision allows us to look intimately at a world not of our making."

Her honors include an American Academy of Arts & Letters Award, a Lannan Literary Award, the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize and Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Oliver held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College until 2001. She lived for over forty years in Provincetown, Massachusetts, with her partner Molly Malone Cook, a photographer and gallery owner. After Cook's death in 2005, Oliver later moved to the southeastern coast of Florida. Oliver died of cancer at the age of eighty-three in Hobe Sound, Florida, on January 17, 2019.


https://m.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/mary-oliver

Subject: RE: Obit: Poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019)
From: GUEST
Date: 20 Jan 19 - 08:10 PM

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.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Wild Geese

Subject: RE: Obit: Poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019)
From: keberoxu
Date: 20 Jan 19 - 08:21 PM

Now, this is a wonderful bit of synchronicity. Although Mary Oliver's poems are known to me -- not enough of them, though --

I had no knowledge of the Edna St. Vincent Millay connection.
And then Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese" is posted to this thread.
See if you can work out why I respond, with this.

WILD SWANS
Edna St. Vincent Millay

I looked in my heart while the wild swans went over,
And what did I see I had not seen before?

Only a question less or a question more;
Nothing to match the flight of wild birds flying.

Tiresome heart, forever living and dying,
House without air, I leave you and I lock your door.

Wild swans, come over the town, come over
The town again, trailing your legs and crying!

-- by Edna St. Vincent Millay, from Second April, third edition, New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1921, page 112.

Subject: RE: Obit: Poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019)
From: GUEST,paperback
Date: 20 Jan 19 - 08:46 PM

Out of respect?