by Mary Oliver
Dawn over the salt marsh: her ars poetica as a triptych, Wild Geese in flight, an attention practice to go and do, Blackwater Pond to disturb, a field index of her creatures, a prayer built from ordinary things, Percy and the dog songs, the one wild and precious question, the essential poems, her craft lectures, the two rare interviews, and the whole shelf in order.
tags: mary-oliver, poetry, attention, nature, provincetown, devotion, wild-geese, blackwater, dogs, prayer
American poet · the bard of Provincetown
1935 – 2019
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 1984 · National Book Award, 1992
She walked the Provincetown woods at first light with a notebook in her pocket — and, having once been caught out without one, kept pencils hidden in the trees along her route, so she would never again be without a way to write down the world.
Her ars poetica
Not to the screen, not to the self — to the goldenrod, the pond, the one thing in front of you. Attention, she said, is the beginning of devotion.
Let the world more or less kill you with delight. The grasshopper washing her face, the light on the water — astonishment is not naive; it is the most honest response there is.
Then carry it back and set it down in plain words, so someone else, somewhere, lonely, might look up. The poem is the telling.
— from “Sometimes,” in Red Bird (2008)
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
· · ·
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.
— from Dream Work (1986). read the whole poem ›
The practice
Attention, she wrote, is the beginning of devotion. It is also a muscle. Draw a small discipline and go do it — today, outside, for real.
A practice is waiting in the grass.
Blackwater Pond
She drank from this pond every morning for years. Disturb the surface; see what rises.
still water
lines from across her work · excerpts
A field index
The same creatures return through fifty years of poems — not as symbols, she insisted, but as themselves, looked at hard enough to become luminous.
Harsh and exciting overhead — the announcement, twice a year, that you belong to the family of things whether or not you feel it.
A blue preacher, motionless at the pond edge, teaching the long patience that attention requires.
The other face of the tender world — beautiful and merciless at once. She never let the prettiness hide the talon.
A question wearing feathers: did you see it, drifting all afternoon, and did it change the way you live?
The one who flung herself out of the grass, washed her face with her forearms, and made the whole summer day worth the asking.
Hunger in autumn, eating the sweetness of the world without apology — a kind of holy appetite.
A green light stitching the air, proof that delight can be both furious and weightless.
Cool fire in the grass — not a thing to fear so much as a length of the same astonishment.
The ones who watch you from the wood-edge, then turn and go easy back into the green, reminding you the world does not need you to be its center.
Pond lilies, goldenrod, the morning grass — she gave plants the same regard as prophets, the door to the woods being the door to the temple.
Praying
For Mary Oliver, prayer was not elaborate and not a contest. It was attention to the ordinary, patched into a few plain words. Choose what is in front of you.
Pick a few ordinary things, and watch a prayer assemble itself.
— after “Praying,” from Thirst (2006)
Dog Songs · 2013
Late in life she gave a whole book to the dogs she loved — Percy above all, a small curly thing named for the poet Shelley, who ate a page of Emerson and once, mid-prayer, climbed into her lap. The dog poems are pure, unembarrassed joy.
Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased.
A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing.
— from Dog Songs (2013)
The question
— the closing lines of “The Summer Day,” from House of Light (1990)
A reader’s anthology
Openings and closings, held a moment apart. The poem is the country between.
Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light…
…to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn…
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
read the whole poem ›One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began…
…determined to save the only life you could save.
When I am among the trees… they give off such hints of gladness.
…you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.
Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight…
…the prayers that are made out of grass?
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it.
Don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
For years, every morning, I drank from Blackwater Pond.
…put your lips to the world. And live your life.
Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
read the whole poem ›You do not have to be good.
…over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
read the whole poem ›On the craft
She held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington until 2001, but rarely lectured from a podium. The teaching is in the handbooks, the essays, and a few recordings she made because she would not often read aloud.
The craft books & essays
Her primer on the craft — sound, the line, meter, diction, imagery, revision. The gift may be innate, she insists, but the craft must be learned, mostly by reading great poems closely. “Every adjective and adverb is worth five cents. Every verb is worth fifty cents.”
↗ the bookA handbook for writing and reading metrical verse — scansion, meter, rhyme, the traditional forms — with fifty of the best metrical poems in English as worked examples. The companion in formal dress to the Handbook.
↗ read it (Internet Archive)Four books of essays that are really one long meditation on attention. “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” “For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.”
Hear her
Krista Tippett’s conversation with her at 79 — one of the very few she ever gave. Full audio and transcript.
↗ listen / readForty poems in her own voice — the recording she made because she so rarely read in public.
↗ the recordingA short film of the poem read by Oliver herself (many uploads are not actually her — this one is).
↗ watchThe rare interviews
Mary Oliver almost never sat for interviews; she valued her privacy and her four decades with the photographer Molly Malone Cook, and preferred her writing to answer for her. These two are the famous exceptions.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
complete · from Thirst (2006) (In my sleep I dreamed this poem.)
The shelf, in order
Born Maple Heights, Ohio, 1935. Forty years in Provincetown with Molly Malone Cook. Died 2019, in Florida. In between, this.
Poetry
Prose & craft
✦ memory · ☽ night · ∞ loops · ❧ margins · ◆ proof
a personal library in perpetual arrangement · MMXXVI