William Logan got it right: Oliver wrote poetry for people who don't like poetry. Simple words for simple minds. Noted for her conversational style, she was as fraudulent a poet who ever lived. Poetry is not conversation.
1
Never will forget the thrill as a young teenage girl reading my first Mary Oliver poem. Strawberry Moon, about Elizabeth Fortune who has a tryst, a baby, and is banished to the attic for it...while he lives free with his wife.
From Strawberry Moon
I asked my mother:
what happened to the man? She answered:
Nothing.
They had three children.
He worked in the boatyard.
I asked my mother, did they ever meet again?
No, she said, though sometimes he would come to the house to visit.
Elizabeth, of course, stayed upstairs.
Now the women are gathering
in smoke-filled rooms,
rough as politicians,
scrappy as club fighters.
And should anyone be surprised
if sometimes, when the white moon rises,
women want to lash out
with a cutting edge?
----
Her poems have helped me through my life, the death of people and pets that I loved...heaven is lucky to have her. We are lucky to have her poetry. Blessings on you, Mary Oliver.
89
Mary Oliver,
We were blessed by your radiance.
Deep peace on your journey.
53
It’s bizarre to me that this obit devotes three whole paragraphs to criticism of Oliver’s work. Unless someone committed truly reprehensible actions in their lifetime, or sparked controversy beyond “wrote poetry that some people thought was boring,” an obit is not the right place for artistic criticism. That space would have been better used to discuss Oliver’s relationship with Molly Malone Cook, who earns only a passing mention here despite being one of Oliver’s most significant relationships and creative collaborators.
161
Thank you Mary Oliver for not being distracted from who you were and are. Thank you for writing such pure, true poetry especially for now and for years to come. Thank you too for reminding us we live in the world of nature so important, so keenly important.
42
A friend told me of a poet, Mary Oliver, whose work reminded her of mine. That was a great compliment. Perhaps I can attempt to reach her utter spirituality.
13
I realize that when I read "Upstream", her final new volume, before the collection "Devotions", I read "Upstream "3/4 of the way through and could never bear to finish it, afraid as I was that it might be her last volume.....
Now, maybe I will have the courage to finish reading that fine volume of poetry and prose....and let myself cry.
27
Oh, Mary Oliver! You have left your body, that precious body that loved this world so very much and helped us to do so also.
How can I help but quote your own words in the last part of one of my very favorite poems of yours,
"White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field" :
"...so I thought
maybe death
isn't darkness, after all,
but so much light
wrapping itself around us --
as soft as feathers ---
that we are instantly weary
of looking and looking, and shut our eyes,
not without amazement, and let ourselves be carried,
as through the translucence of mica,
to the river
that is without the least dapple or shadow ---
that is nothing but light ---scalding, aortal light ---
in which we are washed and washed
out of our bones.
Thank you for letting us know how that deep mystery unfolds and now, for you! so much love, Mary!
76
mary oliver was a very, very good poet. i sympathize with those who did not appreciate her work.
as someone who wrote a thesis on the poems of william butler yeats and considers w.s. merwin one of our greatest poets, i learned to appreciate oliver's work during the past 30 years: complicated simplicity.
her poems helped motivate many people to read and write poetry and to look more carefully at the world around them.
56
@james ponsoldt
She never wrote a poem as good as "The Wild Swans at Coole," "A Prayer for My Daughter," or "The Double Vision of Michael Robartes." And at least four score and seven more.
6
I'm disappointed by this rather ungenerous obituary which allots way too much space to her critics (and who hasn't had them?) and almost none to her beautiful and deep love of a lifetime, Molly Malone Cook. I am, sadly, certain that in an obituary about a straight (and male?) poet of equal or even lesser stature much more would have been said about the richness of the poet's personal life (just as the complexity of Oliver's poetry has been largely glossed over in this piece, which feels, frankly, like it was written by someone who had little patience for Oliver's work to begin with). It is heartening, however, to read the many moving tributes in this comments section and elsewhere.
114
I don't think this obituary captures the love people have for her work, the multitude of writers influenced by her or her contributions to advocacy and exploration of the natural world through written word. There is something too....dismissive in its references to "selling work strongly" or being liked by celebrities or how the critics felt about her. None of those things captures the work, her writing, as it should. She was private but not so much so that she did not share how she negotiated making a living out of writing, which she has written about, which is to say there is very little about the actual poet in this piece. Another commenter said this is a beautiful tribute, but I respectfully disagree.
98
@Lucy Amen. I think because she was private, "critics" didn't really know her. Those who adored her read her poetry until it was the lifeblood that ran through their veins. The very thing she has been accused of, of not being "in her poems" is what several prominate critics did, judged her work from afar, not really being "in it". Mary was an observer of life, through the lens of nature, its nuances, it rhythms. Every good poet makes choices about each word, each line, each poem, as if they were the creator, hanging flesh on bones, putting a heart into it, until it gets up off the page and walks. Her voice, her keen, nonjudgmental eye that watched in wonder at the seasons and rhythms and smells all around her reminds me of Aldus Leopold's Sand County Almanac. Her poems are words of life, dancing and thrumming on the page and into our hearts. RIP.
41
I always loved her poems. They read them a lot at Buddhist sits; and I also love Edna St. Vincent Millay. How interesting to learn that they worked together. Set “Wild Geese” to music once.
11
@Charlotte
I also love Edna Millay. Oliver is said to be influenced by her, but I can't see the influence at all. Oliver never wrote a poem as lovely as the lyrics of Millay. And she isn't even a mote in Emily Dickinson's eye.
What a really snippy and petty view of a wonderful and inspiring poet. Turning on a poet and belittling her work seems to be a popular pastime among poets who don’t reach these levels of accomplishment.
82
Mary Oliver's poem, "The Wild Geese" kept me from killing myself during a deep depression in 1997. I still carry an extremely tattered copy of it, carefully folded up like a talisman in my wallet even though I know it by heart.
During the depths of my depression I must have repeated "The Wild Geese" to myself 20 times a day. I figured that as long as I knew it to be true, I would stick around to be alive - even if I didn't know why to bother.
I wish I had had the chance to meet Ms. Oliver and thank her for saving my life.
140
@papercarver
There are many, many things that make life worth living. Bertrand Russell said that the only reason he didn't kill himself is because he wanted to learn more mathematics.
9
Perhaps the critics who dismissed Mary Oliver were simply not capable of feeling the amazement that comes from the natural world, or they were annoyed that they lacked Ms Oliver's deft way with words describing it. As for me - below is what I want read at my deathbed - assuming I don't die from food poisoning during Trump's shutdown:
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
53
@common sense advocate
As I said, not a mote in Emily Dickinson's eye. Dickinson has no equals and few peers.
I was about three weeks sober, dead cold to the world and everything in it. I wasn't sure I even wanted to live. A friend handed me a book of Mary Oliver poems and the first line of hers I ever read was " Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" I wept like a baby, steadied myself, and started down the long walk toward home. I trust she has already jotted down her first impressions of the other side and raised questions only the spirit world can answer.
103
Why is there nothing at all in this obituary about her personal life? If she had been married to a man I bet it would have been included. Seems very discriminatory to keep her very long devoted lesbian relationship out of the story.
45
Do you love this world?
Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?
Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden,
and softly,
and exclaiming of their dearness,
fill your arms with the white and pink flowers,
with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,
their eagerness
to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are
nothing, forever
—Mary Oliver from Peonies
May she Rest In Peace. Feeling sad but grateful for her wild, trembling, lush and wise words that will certainly outlast her critics and help nurture new generations of poets and poetry lovers.
55
Mary Oliver, like Agnes Martin, was devoted to contemplation and had the eloquent generosity to share the mysteries and wonder with us.
23
“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?”
Responses: Naught else. Yes, and yes. Something. That carries a bit of your words whatever it is.
19
Oh you poor critics
Who have not the depth to see
The wonders of simple words in verse.
Thank you for your wise words, Ms Oliver, and let us all remember to make America poetic again.
65
Interestingly all the critics, David Orr, James Dickey, Stephen Burt, are all white men.
47
Oh, God. And Mary Oliver was a white woman.
Please.
5
@B.
And William Logan, who dismissed her as sentimental. Didn't Yeats say that sentimentality is the art of deceiving yourself?
1
Ah, the critics! Whose heads are too often sadly inverted.
Let them diss poetry that makes people stop...and think....and feel...and reflect. It won¡t gain them the widespread appreciation that Ms. Oliver enjoyed.
Fortunate are we who, while sad at the loss of a lovely writer, nonetheless have a substantial body of MO's work to savor.
46
"Do not follow in the footsteps of the poet masters. Seek what they sought."
-- Basho (1644-1694)
42
@Adam Phillips
The masters are Milton, Shakespeare, and Spencer. Shelly, Byron, and Keats. Frost, Yeats, and Claude McKay. Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, and Elizabeth Barrett-Browning. The greats are great for a reason. Ignore them at your peril.
1
I understand Mary Oliver attended college, but never graduated. How similar to the tech giants who founded big name companies dropped out. Steve Jobs comes to mind as an observer of details who created by gleaning details of his tech environment.
So much more delicate to say she attended rather than dropped out. Somehow creativity is born of curiosity, not bred.
24
I agree regarding use of wording for leaving college but to be fair what I read said she “took no degree”. Perhaps its been updated. Being sensitive in how we talk about people that attended college but for whatever reason did not obtain a degree in these times of increasing college debt and when the ability to attend often dependents on being born with above average intelligence thus scholarships or born into affluence. Many people don’t obtain a degree through no fault of their own and shouldn’t be labeled as quitters from the get go as the term ‘dropping out’ infers.
13
a rare beautiful spirit, I am grateful for her great legacy of poems and a life well lived
22
What else can I do other than to celebrate you? You wonderful woman, so brave, wild, and present to yourself, others, and the world.
You may have been a famous poet beloved by many, but firstly you were my companion who kept me company on the loveliest of days and also the hardest.
Forgive my tears, there only here because I love you dear friend.
Bon voyage!
46
I am one of those clerics who used Mary Oliver's poetry in funeral services, sermons, workshops and pastoral counseling. Her poetry was both profound and accessible. I'm so grateful for her life and her amazing work.
69
Thank you. I read “When death Comes” @ the end of eulogizing my mother. It was difficult to talk about her but it was important to me, to tell her story without me in it. It felt good because of how much I wished to share my love for Mary Oliver with my family.
14
I must admit that I am not the world's biggest poetry fan, but Mary Oliver's work and life moves me profoundly. Just reading the snippets in this obit and the comments made the tears fall. RIP, Ms. Oliver.
35
Thanks to this marvelous poet, I am fully embracing, and loving, my one wild and precious life.
34
Oliver reaches deep down into the archetypal heart where images and feelings are one. This is why the poems seem so (deceptively) simple and also why they touch us.
It is the exact opposite of much contemporary poetry (and painting) which is about emotional dysfunction, academic overcleverness, and showing off.
36
Her words have been inspiring me for decades and can teach us all how to live. The poems are full of wisdom, joy, deeply observing, reverence and relating to the natural world, loneliness, everyday life, and gratitude.
A passage from In Blackwater Woods is
To live in this world
you must be able to do three things:
to love what is mortal;to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
59
The critics do not deserve any space in the title of this article. I discovered Mary Oliver fairly recently, as I was feeling some despair over the state of my country. Her words are healing. She was a wonder.
81
My students loved her work and so do I. What a great soul.
19
I keep "New and Selected Poems" at my bedside. Other books come & go, but that one, that one stays right there, within easy reach.
28
It’s too bad the Times had to waste grief-space or evocation-space quoting the jealous remarks of (male) poet-critics. Read the poems, quote the poems. Lucid joy and anguish as her gift to us, as it was the gift of her friends Whitman and Dickinson.
63
@Gregory Orr
Compared to Whitman, Dickinson lived in a different world entirely.
Mary Oliver’s gorgeous poems are both soul-stirring and life-altering. I’ve taken inspiration and comfort in her writing for years, and will continue to do so. Sadly, the poet may be gone, but her vision and spirit will echo across time. Thank you, Mary Oliver, with deepest gratitude...
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.
~ In Blackwater Woods, Mary Oliver
38
The world just lost one of the most profound prose geniuses.
I implore anyone who loves the written word to read
a Mary Oliver poem.
From Mary Oliver's "When Death Comes":
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
22
Can't believe there are only 9 comments for Mary, including the horrified one -- the subject of which rather horrified me, too, to be perfectly honest. Still, Mary left some beautiful, powerful work. "Wild Geese" has rescued me more than twice ...
20
Rest in peace, Mary. Your work never fails to inspire readers and writers. Critics' opinions ultimately don't matter (many of them are afraid to write creatively themselves). "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" Your life is an example of positive influence.
24
Last night I dreamed I had just tied a trout fly and dangled it languidly on a short piece of monofilament....a hummingbird flew by and snatched the fly and despite my frantic attempt to dislodge the hook, the hummingbird died in the palm of my hand.
When I woke to learn that Mary Oliver had passed away, I no longer had to tease out the meaning of the dream...
29
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
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 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.
98
@Sally, Wild Geese has been my favorite poem for a couple of decades now. Thanks for including it here.
12
Lovely poet. I always found she had that way of expressing the radiant spirituality of truly experiencing ordinary life like Robert Frost and Rilke did. Or a beautiful Japanese haiku.
24
There is a sacred dark and luminous beauty that radiates throughout her poems. It is like touching a lover and being pulled in my the deep and profound gift life opens up to each of us. Mary is a kind of a sage or sacred being who channeled the mystery and heart beat of life more than most of the other poets. She opens up in me so much and gives so much more than words can say.
Bless her spirit.
25
What a beautiful tribute, and a joyous rare interview which made me laugh out loud.
6
I came to Mary Oliver only recently and it was through her essays in her latest book "Upstream". At a difficult time in my life her words, essays and poems, were like lamps in a dark night showing me the way out of sadness and back to full engagement with this wonderful world. What a gift she had and what a gift she left for us all.
69
Mary's death yesterday provided a strange personal experience for me. I must confess that with all else that is going on in the world I didn't know who she was; now I do.
But this was my strange experience. I has an item on my things-to-do list for several days. It was to track down a quote and get it exactly right. The quote was, "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
Of course, now I can check that off. I have tracked it down. That's the quote, exactly, and Mary was the author. So she is gone, but for us, let's figure out what we plan to do with our wild and precious lives.
113
@Jerry Schulz ~
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
This may be my all time favorite line of poetry. The first time I read it, it moved me to tears. It is the last line of "The Summer Day". Here are some lines preceding it to add more context:
"....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?"
Rest in ecstatic peace Mary Oliver.
116
@Jerry Schulz I too spent time looking for that quote. I knew of her and had even copied down other quotes, but this article and others inspired me to go out and get some of her essays and poetry. I feel like I’ve discovered a glorious secret.
20
@Jerry Schulz - thank you!! I had no idea that quote came from Mary Oliver but I've always loved it!
7
Nothing in these lines is political, prosaic, dogmatic, trendy, self-promoting, self-pitying, or didactic. Which earns her the admiration of poetry readers, real ones, if not a few hissy and trendy critics. Poetry is dying, but Mary Oliver will live on.
68
@Carling Poetry ain't dying!
9
@Carling
Much judgment there. "Hissy and trendy." Broad brush, indeed.
3
Her words touched my soul. I treasure her poems. Thank you Ms. Oliver for your beautiful pondering's and observations, may you rest in eternal wonder and peace.
73
I cried when i heard on Public Television that she had died - she touched every part of my heart and soul and I treasure her work - I shall re read UPSTREAM today and celebrate her life...peace Ms Mary, and thank you.
13
To say that Mary Oliver's poetry was about her close observation of the natural world is to miss a great deal of the point. She dove into life and death through the metaphor of nature; she relished the beauty of decay and how it reminded us to live. She wrote about sex, love, and visionary experiences all within the life cycles of thistles and sea creatures. She is my daily companion and will always be alive in my mornings.
150
@Mia Ortman
your comment gives me goosebumps, it's so touching.
She really did impact millions with her lyrical ode to
life, thought, humanity, the natural world.
27
Rest in peace, Mary Oliver. You helped me feel more gratitude to the world.
58
She speaks to me and I will seek out more of her poetry. I find the criticism of her work to be elitist; almost as though they dislike it simply because it is popular.
80
@Eva Lee
there's a critic literally for any and every piece of work.
Who cares, right? We're at an advantage for embracing and feeling close to her prose.
11
I found this article by Ms. Fox to be condescending and disrespectful.
13
I liked her poems; my cousin who lives is Massachusetts first told me about her. I recently went through her book, Dog Songs, copied some of the ones I liked and gave them to a good friend who had just bought a puppy Golden Retriever. I am sorry she did not live longer but glad I was able to read some of her poetry.
15