Remembering a Poet

Before the storm hits, both here in the Midwest and in Washington (though it seems like foul weather is now the norm in Washington) take a deep breath and consider poetry.  One of America’s wonderful poets died yesterday, Mary Oliver.  She was 83.  She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for a collection of poems called American Primitive.  New and Selected Poems earned her a National Book Award in 1992.  Even with those accomplishments, she achieved only modest fame.  Because she was a poet.  Few poets achieve wide readership let alone notoriety.  It’s the quietest of the writing genres, the most obscure.  If you don’t know her don’t feel bad.  Most of us don’t.  She lived a quiet life in Ohio, where she immersed herself in nature most days of her life.

I came to Mary Oliver late, through a group of friends that meet monthly to read and listen, or just to listen, to poems; their own or other people’s poetry they admire.  We take turns reading, and then we comment or remark about each poem.  Had it not been for these friends I might not have encountered Mary Oliver.  We should not discount the riches that others give us.

A friend read her poem “Of the Empire” and I knew I was hooked.  Mary Oliver said what I felt but could not express.  When writers do that, when we feel that personal connection, we don’t forget them.  See if this poem speaks to you.

Of the Empire

We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

I am guessing Mary Oliver considered life far from a commodity.  The word that describes her view of life is probably “sacred.”  She wrote of the commonest forms in nature as is they were glorious.  Her writing found a way to make them glorious.

I like the way she finds metaphors in nature for her most hard to convey thoughts, the kind of thoughts most keep to themselves because words to express them escape us.  

                                        Knife

Something
just now
moved through my heart
like the thinnest of blades
as that red-tail pumped
once with its great wings
and flew above the gray, cracked
rock wall.
It wasn't
about the bird, it was
something about the way
stone stays
mute and put, whatever
goes flashing by.
Sometimes,
when I sit like this, quiet,
all the dreams of my blood
and all outrageous divisions of time
seem ready to leave,
to slide out of me.
Then, I imagine, I would never move.
By now
the hawk has flown five miles
at least,
dazzling whoever else has happened
to look up.
I was dazzled. But that
wasn't the knife.
It was the sheer, dense wall
of blind stone
without a pinch of hope
or a single unfulfilled desire
sponging up and reflecting,
so brilliantly,
as it has for centuries,
the sun's fire.

That’s what you have in store if you order a book of Mary Oliver’s poems.  She won’t be forgotten for a long time.  And that rock wall is no doubt still there, probably somewhere in Ohio.