Mary Oliver, peripatetic poet

Listening to the World

Cousin Mary was a peripatetic of the woods, a poet of the wild not unlike Wordsworth or Thoreau. Her rare interview with Krista Tippett in 2015 included the following exchange, which encourages us all to get up out of our chairs and from behind our desks to go and "listen to the world"... she agrees, "it is solved by walking." [P.S.-Check out the latest episode of "Fresh Air" to hear a contemporary novelist talking about walking, French flaneurs, and related matters.]

MS. TIPPETT:...you spent a lot of your time walking around the woods in Ohio.

MS. OLIVER: Yes, I did, and I think it saved my life. To this day, I don’t care for the enclosure of buildings. It was a very bad childhood for everybody, every member of the household, not just myself, I think. And I escaped it, barely, with years of trouble. But I did find the entire world in looking for something. But I got saved by poetry. And I got saved by the beauty of the world.

MS. TIPPETT: Yeah. And there’s such a convergence of those things then, it seems, all the way through in your life as a poet.

MS. OLIVER: Yes, it is a convergence. And I have a little difficulty now having lived for fifty years in a small town in the North. I’m trying very hard to love the mangroves. [laughs] It takes a while.

MS. TIPPETT: Well, I know. And I have to say, you and your poetry, for me, are so closely identified with Provincetown and that part of the world and that kind of dramatic weather — that kind of shore. And so when I had this amazing opportunity to come visit you — and I said, “Oh great, we’re going to Cape Cod!... No, we’re going to Florida.” [laughs]

MS. OLIVER: Yes, I just sold my condo to a very dear friend this summer. And I bought a little house down here, which needs very serious reconstruction. So, I’m not in it yet. But sometimes it’s time for the change.

MS. TIPPETT: Yeah, though, for all those years, for decades of your writing, this picture was there of you. This pleasure of walking and writing and, I don’t know, standing with your notebook and actually writing while you’re walking. [laughs]

MS. OLIVER: Yes. That’s how I did it.

MS. TIPPETT: And it is. And it seems like such a gift that you found that way to be a writer and to have that daily — have a ritual of writing.

MS. OLIVER: Well, as I say, I don’t like buildings. The only record I broke in school was truancy. I went to the woods a lot with books. Whitman in the knapsack. But I also liked motion. So I just began with these little notebooks and scribbled things as they came to me and then worked them into poems later. And always I wanted the “I.” Many of the poems are “I did this. I did this. I saw this.” I wanted the “I” to be the possible reader, rather than about myself. It was about an experience that happened to be mine but could well have been anybody else’s. That was my feeling about the “I.” I have been criticized by one editor who felt that “I” would be felt as ego. And I thought, no, well, I’m going to risk it and see. And I think it worked. It enjoined the reader into the experience of the poem. I became the kind of person who did the walking and the scribbling but shared it if they wanted it.

MS. TIPPETT: And you also use this word — there’s this place where you’re talking about writing while walking, you know, listening deeply. And I love this, “listening convivially.”

MS. OLIVER: [laughs] Yes. Yeah.

MS. TIPPETT: And listening, really, to the world.

MS. OLIVER: Listening to the world. Well, I did that and I still do it.

MS. TIPPETT: I was going to ask you if you thought you could have been a poet in an age when you probably would have grown up writing on computers.

MS. OLIVER: Oh, now? I very much advise writers not to use a computer.

MS. TIPPETT: But it seems to me that more than the computer being the problem, the sitting at a desk would be a problem.

MS. OLIVER: That’s a problem. Lots of things are problems. As I talk about it in The Poetry Handbook, discipline is very important. The habit — I think we’re creative all day long. And we have to have an appointment to have that work out on the page. Because the creative part of us gets tired of waiting or just gets tired. It’s helped a lot of students, young poets doing that, to have that meeting with that part of oneself because there are, of course, other parts of life. I used to say I gave my — when I had jobs, which wasn’t that often, but I’d say I give my very best second, second class labor to...

MS. TIPPETT: ...to the job.

MS. OLIVER: ...because I’d get up at five, and by nine I’d already had my say...

On Being

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Maria Popova on Mary Oliver...

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

Brainpickings.org

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?

—Mary Oliver