Mary Oliver's Devotion to Wonder

"For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry." - Oliver

Hello, friends,

I hope you are well! It’s been a good March here so far. We returned to classes this week from an all-too-short Spring Break. I can’t complain, though, as the end of break signals the last leg of the school year and less than two months until summer. Plus we’re covering Frankenstein in my Intro to Lit class, which always leads to lively discussions.

Teaching literature is a privilege I don’t take lightly. Who else gets to read and share great texts for a living? What a gift. That’s certainly a big part of the motivation behind this newsletter—to commend to you the treasures I’ve found in this endeavor. Such is the case with the subject of this week’s installment.

Oliver’s Prayerful Poems

Mary Oliver, Facebook Fan Page photo

Mary Oliver (1935-2019)¹ is one for whom poetry seems almost effortless. It’s not just that she published over 20 collections in her lifetime, a prodigious achievement by any standard. She also wrote poems so vulnerable and transparent that her poetic craft might understandably be overshadowed by the reader’s experience, like a literary sleight of hand.

Simple Yet Deep

“Don’t Hesitate” is good example. Its conversational style, simple structure, and prosaic word choice add up to a poem that wears its message on its sleeve.² In fact, the takeaway is explicitly stated at the start:

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it....

The speaker continues in this vein, with an unadorned directness and admirable sincerity.³ The challenge Oliver extends readers is urgent, and her appeal is thus equally insistent, not couched in riddles available only to those who can crack the code.

Rather, the critical message she offers is readily accessible to all: we must embrace any joy that comes our way because it is a rare and precious thing in a world contaminated by grief:

... There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.

Yet joy is not merely refuge in a dark world, Oliver insists. To the contrary, it is antidote to that darkness, a light that drives the darkness out:

Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world....

And importantly, such joy is often immediately at hand, if we but have eyes to see it:

... It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the
case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty....  

Where poetry often revels in ambiguity or figures of speech, this poem includes only the slightest intimation—coming at the end and presented as contrast: “Joy is not made to be a crumb.” There’s nothing fancy to Oliver’s language. No intricate linguistic puzzle to solve.⁴ Plain as it is, Oliver's style matches her intent: to show readers the beauty and profundity of ordinary things, including everyday words.

Meditative Grace

Oliver’s accessibility is a boon for many of her fans who don’t much count themselves poetry aficionados. The hospitable and generous quality of an Oliver poem has brought many a reader into the literary fold. Critics, however, sometimes deemed her accessibility a deficiency. Poetry of merit must challenge readers. It must demand something from them, so the logic goes.

Helene Atwan, Oliver’s editor at Beacon Press, discusses this in a wonderful panel discussion that Mass Poetry hosted after the poet’s death in 2019. You can find the conversation here:

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Even so, the demand Oliver makes on readers transcends the intellectual. It penetrates the heart and makes a weighty claim on readers’ time and affections. Pay attention, Oliver says over and over in poem after poem. It’s that easy and that hard.

Oliver herself was an observer, taking daily walks through her beloved Provincetown, Massachusetts, and its surrounding nature. Her poems were the fruit of these regular jaunts, intentionally so, as she explained in an interview: “I do have a little notebook, and Provincetown is where I live really privately, and where I walk a lot. When things are going well, you know, the walk does not get rapid or get anywhere; I finally just stop, and write. That's a successful walk!”⁵

Oliver’s beautiful poem, “Breakage,” both illustrates and champions this approach to the natural world as full of secrets waiting to be discovered by someone who will but take the time and effort to do so:

I go down to the edge of the sea.
How everything shines in the morning light!
The cusp of the whelk,
the broken cupboard of the clam,
the opened, blue mussels,
moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—
and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,
dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.
It's like a schoolhouse
of little words,
thousands of words.
First you figure out what each one means by itself,
the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop
       full of moonlight.

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

The speaker, like Oliver herself, is attentive and expectant, knowing that patient careful watching will yield great reward. Nothing less, in fact, than “the whole story.” It’s this approach that marks Oliver’s poetry as one of sincere wonderment and profound connection with her environment.

A Singular Voice

“Breakage” shows, too, that Oliver won’t let us confuse her attention to nature with sentimentality. The moving images she presents are in fact carnage from a bird feeding frenzy: “nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split, / dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks.” Poet and UMass instructor, Krysten Hill, insists that Oliver’s images are grounded in realism, reflecting the diversity and struggles of the natural world.⁶

In other words, Oliver would just as soon write about water moccasins as hummingbirds. It would be dishonest to do otherwise. We would cut ourselves off from clues about our existence and the meaning behind our lives, as Oliver explains in an interview with Maria Shriver: “You have to be in the world to understand what the spiritual is about, and you have to be spiritual in order to truly be able to accept what the world is about.”

Although Oliver’s spirituality was not tied to a given religion,⁷she maintained a commendable receptivity to the divine and encouraged in her readers that same openness, as in her quintessential poem, “The Summer Day.”

“Who made the world?,” she begins. “Who made the swan, and the black bear? / Who made the grasshopper?” Then with signature flair, Oliver demonstrates how the act of attention can elevate even the basest of creatures:

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.

Through that act of communion with a fellow creature, Oliver reminds us, we, too, can be elevated: “I don't know exactly what a prayer is. / I do know how to pay attention, ... / how to be idle and blessed.”

What a waste, some might say, to spend time in the dirt contemplating a bug. But Oliver anticipates and waves away this potential criticism: “Tell me, what else should I have done? / Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?” And just as quickly, she turns the question back on the reader:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Oliver is pressing us once again to consider what’s truly valuable. What could be worth the investment of our days, our energy, our resources, our very selves? The answer, we find, is embedded in the question. Life itself, Oliver contends, in all its wildness and preciousness, in all its ephemerality, deserves our attention. And if the poems Oliver left behind are any indication, we could do a whole lot worse than to follow her lead.

Miscellany

Recently my friend Gina Dalfonzo announced publication plans for a new book, The Screen and the Mirror, which will explore how great films help us better know and understand ourselves.⁸

I’m excited to share that this book is the first installment in the Pop Culture and the Sacred series that David and I are editing for Cascade Books. What better way to kick off the series than with Gina’s volume? She’s a fantastic writer with a good mind and beautiful heart. Her work promises to be a strong contribution to and guidance for Christian cultural engagement.

Our goal with the series is precisely in this vein: to use pop culture artifacts, such as films and TV shows, as a springboard to explore philosophical and theological, literary and ethical themes. It will be a bridge-building project, breaking down misconceptions about both the church and the culture and allowing for more and better exchanges of ideas. There will be more news to come on this score, and we look forward to working with Gina as she develops her book.

Thanks, everyone. I hope it’s starting to feel a bit like spring where you are. Easter’s just around the corner! Talk to you soon!

Marybeth

1. For more on Oliver, including many examples of her poetry, see this article from Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mary-oliver.

2. Simple yet deep was a mantra, too, for Fred Rogers of Mister Rogers fame. He often recited a variation of the following quote: “I feel so strongly that deep and simple is far more essential than shallow and complex,” and one of his favorite books was Bo Lozoff’s Deep & Simple. He would purchase the book in bulk and give them out frequently.

3. Oliver’s poem brings to mind Kurt Vonnegut’s admonition in the same spirit: “And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.”

4. Though I submit “Don’t Hesitate” is more intentionally crafted than it at first appears. The repetition of “plenty” to describe first destruction and later joy’s blessings emphasizes the counterweight of grace available in the face of loss. And there is accumulating hope embedded in the poem’s rhetorical response to life’s admitted challenges. “Still,” “perhaps,” “sometimes,” “something,” “anything,” “anyway,” “whatever”: these words intimate a possibility that might be realized if it is noticed and cultivated.

5. Renee Olander, “An Interview with Mary Oliver,” Association of Writers and Writing Programs, September 1994, https://www.awpwriter.org/magazine_media/writers_chronicle_view/2370/an_interview_with_mary_oliver.

6. See the Mass Poetry tribute to Oliver, linked in the video above.

7. Toward the end of her life, Oliver turned toward more explicitly Christian themes and vocabulary in her poetry, though she never publicly identified with the faith. Debra Dean Murphy, “Why We Need Mary Oliver’s Poems,” The Christian Century, April 26, 2017, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/critical-essay/why-we-need-mary-oliver-s-poems.

8. Gina is keeping the full list of films under wraps, but has disclosed that among the films covered are In the Heat of the Night, The Godfather, and Knives Out.