The American poet Mary Oliver was born on this day in 1935. For those of us with some numerical difficulties, she is eighty-one years old.
She was born in Maple Heights, a suburb of Cleveland. Oliver is said to have started writing poetry at fourteen. She went on to study at Ohio State and Vassar, but left without a degree. Her passion was writing. She was twenty-eight when her first collection of poems, No voyage and Other Poems was published to critical acclaim. Her fifth collection American Primative was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. And her New and Selected Poems won the National Book Award.
Oliver and her partner the photographer Molly Malone Cook lived largely in Provincetown, Massachusetts for some forty years, continuing there until Cook’s death in 2005. After which Oliver relocated to Florida.
Oliver is often compared to Emily Dickinson. Reading her we can see why. And of course, there’s much more to her than that similarity of sparse spirit. The article about Oliver in Wikipedia summarizes how “Her poetry combines dark introspection with joyous release. Although she has been criticized for writing poetry that assumes a dangerously close relationship of women with nature, she finds the self is only strengthened through an immersion with nature. Oliver is also known for her unadorned language and accessible themes. The Harvard Review describes her work as an antidote to ‘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.’”
Oliver has been particularly fashionable within my Unitarian Universalist circles. And so, of course, in good time there have been those who have criticized her work. Several of these criticisms describe her focus as too small and inoffensive. While others criticized her close identification of women and nature as, well, too close. I would only agree that perhaps too many of our preachers seem to think she and maybe Rumi are the only poets we are allowed to quote.
That said, me, I’ve found her a deeply important voice pointing to many truths that mark the best of our contemporary Western spiritualities. I think of her as a true heir to the Transcendentalists, carrying forward the best of that mixed bag, offering a subtle yet compelling nature mysticism.
And with that I gift you all with this, the tag end of Mary Oliver’s In Blackwater Woods.
It is not too much to say it is close to the sum total of my spiritual life. Just about all of it. Nearly the whole thing.
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.
Thank you, Mary! You’ve given voice to my heart.
And, okay, just one more of her many small and wise gifts to us…
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