I used to teach Mary Oliver’s poems–a slim volume, Dream Work, so many years ago now that I don’t remember the exact course. What I do remember are the poems and the students’ responses to them. Those memories came to mind recently with the news of Oliver’s death, as did the image of Brueghel’s “The Fall of Icarus.”
Foolish Icarus does not listen to his father. His hubris pushes him to fly too close to the sun. His wings melt, and he plummets to his death.
Or is the story of Icarus quite different?
Brilliant Icarus follows his imagination and takes flight with the grace of an enormous Blue Heron. Maybe the narrative depends on the poet’s gender. Certainly, what Auden notices in “Musee des Beaux Arts,” in addition to the “dreadful martyrdom” of Icarus, is the conscious irony of Brueghel’s painterly composition: “how everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster” of Icarus’ death. Everyone in the painting’s foreground is too intent on the mundane to notice the loss.
As for Oliver, have we actually noted her passing? Have we, as writers of prose and poetry, accounted for the weight of our collective loss? Of course, for a poet of her rank, a writer who earned the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, The New York Times ran an obituary, written by Margalit Fox, that respectfully navigates Oliver’s achievements, as well as the critical reception of her poems. “Her poems, which are built of unadorned language and accessible imagery, have a pedagogical, almost homiletic quality. It was this, combined with their relative brevity, that seemed to endear her work to a broad public…” writes Fox.
I thought about the young woman who approached me after class. We had been discussing “Rage,” the fifth poem in Dream Work. The student was weeping because Oliver had put into words the experience of incest–had given her access, a different path into the experience:
But you were also the red song
in the night,
stumbling through the house
to the child’s bed,
to the damp rose of her body,
leaving your bitter taste.
And forever those nights snarl
the delicate machinery of the days.
Is this the “pedagogical, almost homiletic quality” of Oliver’s poems? Oliver has taken on a subject that requires enormous courage and (psychic, physical) stamina to articulate, one that remains marginalized, maybe because it so often happens to little girls. She has also dared to articulate her rage, which is not an emotion generally allowed for women.
To be clear, I have no argument with Fox’s obituary of Oliver. In fact, I draw directly from Fox’s quotations of specific reviews and so remain much indebted to her. In fact, I see the obituary as a gift, an insight into what it is like for women writers to pursue doggedly the arc of their intellect and creativity, to fly as high as their talents take them. Fox’s description of the critical reception of Oliver’s poems brings into the foreground our very recent social history.
Think of Brueghel populating the foreground of his painting with, in Auden’s words, the “position” of human suffering: how “…even the dreadful martyrdom [of Icarus] must run its course / Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot / Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse / Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.” Fox provides a list of some of those itchy behinds that produced the “mixed” reception of Oliver’s work, critics who “were put off by the surface simplicity of her poems and, in later years, by her populist reach.”
Specifically, Fox quotes James Dickey’s 1965 review of “No Voyage”: “[Oliver] is good, but predictably good.” She also quotes David Orr, who in 2011 described Oliver as a poet “about whose poetry one can only say that no animals appear to have been harmed in the making of it.” There is something about these comments that galls; that echoes Horace Walpole calling Mary Wollstonecraft a “hyena,” a creature then believed to change sex with every new moon, because she dared do a man’s job, writing. I have to wonder how these critics would have responded to the “Preface” to “Lyrical Ballads,” the poetic manifesto of Wordsworth and Coleridge, a call for poetry as “a selection of the language really spoken by men” (1802).
I recall my students, stunned by language that appears so simple but evokes a complex nexus of ideas about the intersection of self and world. I think about the story Oliver’s poems often tell about what it means to heal by passing through the wound; how the courage to do so heals ourselves and the world, one person at a time. Dream Work, like other collections of her poems, has a trajectory, a plot that maps a heroic journey–both internal (through the wound) and external (through the mutilated world). Take a look at the claim Oliver makes in “Dogfish,” the first poem in Dream Work:
Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.
And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.
As a poet Oliver does exactly that: “stay in / this world” despite its complexities, its demand to “swim through the fires.” Here is Icarus the Romantic hero who follows his imagination and takes flight against all odds. Oliver is, after all, part of a much longer Romantic tradition (British and American) of Nature poets. The “mixed” reviews point to an exclusion of her position in poetic history and a refusal to accept her focus, her ken as a writer.
Before Oliver locates home in the very last poem in Dream Work, she arrives in Loxahatchie, Florida, and experiences the sense of being both as ancient as the waters and as new as an infant. In “At Loxahatchie” time collapses. The nameless flowers and shrubs around her call for her birth and she knows
whatever my place in this garden
it was not to be what I had always been—
the gardener.
Everywhere the reptiles thrashed
while birds exploded into heavenly
hymns of rough songs and the vultures
drifted like black angels and clearly nothing
needed to be saved.
Despite the illusion of absolute control associated with toxic masculinity, what is heroic and powerful here is defined as a relinquishment of control, a sense of a greater wisdom that resides outside of ourselves.
Dream Work was published in 1986. By the time Oliver writes “When I Am Among the Trees,” which appears in Thirst in 2006, the trees “give off such hints of gladness”
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
What an insurgent, revolutionary thought for our times: not Theodore Roosevelt’s imperial foreign policy, to which we remain enthralled: “speak softly and carry a big stick, you will go far,” but “walk slowly,… bow often.”
How dare Oliver fly so close to the sun? How dare she insist on another, very different path through the world?
As writers, it matters that we shift our attention from foreground to background, that we note her passing, as well as her argument about our relationship to the world around us. The humility to bow and listen has become too rare.
Has the work of Mary Oliver touched you? Share your thoughts and/or your chosen outtakes of her writing in comments.
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About Elizabeth Huergo
Elizabeth Huergo was born in Havana and immigrated to the United States at an early age as a political refugee. A published poet and story writer, she lives in Virginia. The Death of Fidel Perez is her first novel. You can learn more about Elizabeth on her website, and by following her on Twitter.
Elizabeth, profound thanks for this essay and for your invitation to comment. I was fortunate to hear Oliver read several years ago and ask her to sign my copies of her books.
“Wild Geese” has sustained me often as a person and as a writer. It begins “You do not have to be good” (how many of us need to keep hearing that?) and ends thus:
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.
I echo Anna’s thanks. To write prose, we must let poetry like Mary Oliver’s speak to us. Her voice was a gift to all of us.
Same for me–thanks for talking about this. I get so tired of having some writers and their work so easily dismissed, or the effect and influence of certain work minimized. I’ve known a couple of people whose path into any reading poetry at all started with Oliver.
Thank you so much for writing this, Elizabeth. You are kinder in your assessment than I am regarding the eulogy Fox (to me, an apt surname) wrote for Mary Oliver.
To my ears, admittedly tainted by fierce and bristling loyalty to a poet we will not see the likes of again, Fox damned by faint praise. I heard jealousy and resentment in her words. After reading them, I was left with a profound sense of disappointment. Pedagogic, indeed!
That doesn’t make me right, of course. We don’t see the world as it is; we see ourselves as we are, in all our biases. But I thought it worth sharing, along with my thanks to you, again, for your gentler heart.
Elizabeth, thank you for this beautifully written piece, a great tribute to Mary Oliver. I discovered her through a friend and enjoyed her book of essays, UPSTREAM, as well as her poetry. Her connection to our world, to every aspect of vine and water, sky and cloud revealed a delicate yet intense understanding of what it means to truly live. Maybe some readers will settle on the easier statements, but they are still profound and will echo for a long time. TELL ME WHAT IT IS YOU PLAN TO DO WITH YOUR ONE WILD AND PRECIOUS LIFE.
What a gift this morning! I always appreciate your posts, Liz.
I have taught Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts” but somehow never any poems by Oliver. I came to her work later in life, and now I’m wondering why that is. I do not recall ever being introduced to her in college or graduate school.
And without being too “pedagogical” (ha!), I think we as a species need to hear Oliver’s message about the blessings of a more open and less arrogant way of relating to the world.
Thank you for this eleoquent and fitting tribute to the astonishing Mary Oliver whose poems, I’ve always thought, fire neurons in the reader’s brain of not just recognition but possibility. I was sorry that Fox included Dickey’s and Orr’s dismissals of her brilliant work, too, but appreciated it as a reminder of Oliver’s sublime, fundamentally-female understanding of the world, and the blindness of these male critics to her profound expression of it. I trust history will recognize her appropriately.
Thank you for the kindness, balance and intelligence in your words, Liz. This comment is offered to some of those who responded. Mary Oliver helped reconnect us or keep us connected to to our essential selves and those who reject her insights do so at their peril. For many, acceptance is a frightening prospect, while for those victims who have been on the short side of history there is justifiable anger and resentment. In the process of reawakening the feminine, however, it seems clear to me that we must invite others who still see the supremacy of the masculine as their salvation, to a more balanced way. When we condemn those who see things from the steely, male perspective only, we not only take on the masculine ourselves, we force them into an entrenched defense and defeat our own purpose. The task for us who seek integration within ourselves is to work toward that end. Neither masculine or feminine stands well alone.
What a lovely review! Thank you! I use Oliver’s poems to set the tone for the writing workshops I facilitate using the Amherst Writers’ method for writing with others. Her poems calm us. With that we’re reminded to search our souls as to what is really important. Her poetry is a gift from Source.
Hi Liz–
Thanks much for speaking the truth.
Cheers,
“To act in a way that is both sexist and racist, to maintain one’s class privilege, it is only necessary to act in the customary, ordinary, usual, even polite manner.”
—Joanna Russ, HOW TO SUPPRESS WOMEN’S WRITING
This book was just reissued last year, and is not only still harrowingly pertinent but is also marvellous for anyone looking to understand their own inklings regarding this kind of issue. Life-changing and such a fun read!
Loved this article. Brides of amazement unite!
I’m sorry to say that I’m not terribly familiar with Mary Oliver — most of the lines people shared in memoriam were familiar to me, but not necessarily as belonging to her — and I feel I should remedy that. Especially after your heartfelt tribute here. Thank you for bringing more of her beautiful words, her remarkable talent, into my realm.
Sorry I am so late posting to this, but THANK YOU for all the things you said about Mary Oliver’s poetry. Once again, here is an artist that many of us will remember for the rest of our lives, whose poetry will gain with age because it is so much better than the dense stuff no one else can understand, but who was dismissed BECAUSE her poetry was accessible.
I loved her stuff most because it was accessible, because when she wrote about seeing foxes, I knew what she meant. I had felt that, too, seeing something shy and wild. Your post has made me want to get a copy of Dream Work and begin again on Mary Oliver. Her work is a study is the depth and artistry of simplicity.
Mary, Mary what a gift to this world. Whom do I know that had remained as true to the urges of their inner awareness as this woman; as faithful to her sense of why she was here, and then had such a complete understanding of how to make that appear in and as a poem, such that you’d suck your breath in and hear yourself whisper, “Oh god, thank you.” No one now alive that I know. I realized the day would come when she’d be gone from this earth. I just didn’t want it to be in my lifetime.