Out Spotlight

Today's Out Spotlight is among America's finest poets, writing about nature and the intersection with human beings she has been compared to Emerson, Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay. A Pulitzer Prize winner she has also received the National Book Award and a Lannan Literary Award. Today's Out Spotlight is Mary Oliver.

Mary Oliver was born to Edward William and Helen M. V. Oliver on September 10, 1935, in Maple Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. Her father was a social studies teacher and coached in the Cleveland public school system. Oliver began writing poetry at the age of 14, and at 17 visited the home of the late Pulitzer Prize winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, in Austerlitz in upper New York state. She attended both Ohio State University and Vassar College, but did not receive a degree from either. As a young poet, she was deeply influenced by Millay and briefly lived in Millay’s home, helping Norma Millay organize her sister’s papers.

She and Norma became friends and Oliver “more or less lived there for the next six or seven years, running around the 800 acres like a child, helping Norma, or at least being company to her” and helping with organizing the late poet's papers. On a return visit to Millay's home in the late '50s, Oliver met photographer Molly Malone Cook, who would become Oliver's partner for over forty years.

In Our World she writes of the moment they met
“I took one look and fell, hook and tumble."

Oliver and Cook, her literary agent as well, made their home together, mostly in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where they lived until Cook's death in 2005.
She recalled "I too fell in love with the town, that marvelous convergence of land and water; Mediterranean light; fishermen who made their living by hard and difficult work from frighteningly small boats; and, both residents and sometime visitors, the many artists and writers.[...] M. and I decided to stay.” The Cape Cod landscape has had a marked influence on Oliver’s work ever since. Known for its clear and poignant observations and evocative use of the natural world, her poetry is firmly rooted in place and the Romantic nature tradition.

Greatly valuing her personal privacy, she has given very few interviews, saying she prefers for her writing to speak for itself.

Her poetry is grounded in memories of Ohio and her adopted home of New England. Influenced by both Whitman and Thoreau, Oliver is known for her clear and poignant observances of the natural world. Her creativity is stirred by nature, and an avid walker, often pursues inspiration on foot. Her poems are filled with imagery from her daily walks near her home: shore birds, water snakes, the phases of the moon and humpback whales. In Long life she says "[I] go off to my woods, my ponds, my sun-filled harbor, no more than a blue comma on the map of the world but, to me, the emblem of everything.”

She commented in a rare interview “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!” She said that she once found walking herself in the woods with no pen and went later hid pencils in the trees so she would never be stuck in that place again. She often carries a 3-by-5-inch hand-sewn notebook for recording impressions and phrases. Maxine Kumin called Oliver "a patroller of wetlands in the same way that Thoreau was an inspector of snowstorms."

Her first collection of poems, Voyage, and Other Poems, was published in 1963, when she was 28.

During the early 1980s, she taught at Case Western Reserve University.
Her fifth collection of poetry, American Primitive (1983), won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984.

Dream Work in 1986 continued Oliver’s search to “understand both the wonder and pain of nature”. For some critics, Dream Work is ultimately a volume in which Oliver moves “from the natural world and its desires, the ‘heaven of appetite’...into the world of historical and personal suffering...She confronts as well, steadily," “what she cannot change.”

Oliver became Poet In Residence at Bucknell University (1986) and the Margaret Banister Writer in Residence at Sweet Briar College (1991), then moved to Bennington, Vermont, where she held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching until 2001.

She has also won the Christopher Award and the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award for her piece House of Light (1990) and New and Selected Poems (1992), won the National Book Award.

The transition from engaging the natural world to engaging more personal realms is evident in New and Selected Poems That volume contained poems from eight of Oliver’s previous volumes as well as previously unpublished, newer work. Oliver’s earliest poems are almost always oriented towards nature, but seldom examine the self and are almost never personal. In contrast,in her later works, she appears frequently. New York Times critics noted “this self-consciousness is a rich and graceful addition.” Oliver summed up her desire for amazement in her poem “When Death Comes” from New and Selected poems:

“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.”

She continued her celebration of the nature with such collections Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (1999), Why I Wake Early (2004), and New and Selected Poems, Volume 2 (2004). Critics have compared her work to that of great American lyric poets and celebrators of nature, including Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Muir, and Walt Whitman. She has also been compared to Emily Dickinson, with whom she shares an affinity for solitude and interior monologues. 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 has continued to write publishing a new collection every year or two. Her main themes continue to be the intersection between the human and the natural world, as well as the limits of human consciousness and language in articulating such a meeting.

Recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, in addition to her Pulitzer and the National Book Award, she has also won the American Academy of Arts & Letters Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize and Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for her work.

She continues to live in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

"Wild Geese"
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.

From "The Journey",
"You strode deeper and deeper into the world,
determined to do the only thing you could do,
determined to save the only life you could save.”