Wednesday, June 5, 2019

Reconsidering Mary Oliver's Poetry: Part I

So already, I don't adore Mary Oliver's poetry--except when I love it.

But right now, I'm questioning my skepticism--and printing up the article from The New Yorker* that you see pictured here--for two reasons:
  • The first is that when Mary Oliver died recently, a number of my poetry-reading and -writing friends whose taste in poems often guides me well were genuinely heartbroken: for them, the world had truly become a poorer place for lack of Oliver's continued poetic presence.
  • The second is that I loved--didn't just like, but loved--the Oliver poems** we read at the June meeting of the poetry discussion group held monthly at the Scituate Town Library.
So why have I persisted in hanging on to my ambivalence about Mary Oliver's poetry, despite my very positive reactions to a number of her poems? Have too few of them touched me really deeply, struck me as profoundly true, even though I've wanted to embrace them and hold them fast? Take "Wild Geese," for example: it has a releasing, absolving first line; offers multiple apt, sweeping images to the mind's eye and ear; and concludes with final lines that I often quote because they so beautifully communicate the comfort of being and feeling part of Creation. But at one point a few years back, I actually felt the need to revise it to better suit a very complex moment.***

In the past, I've often explained my ambivalence about Oliver's work by pointing to certain poems that simply don't seem as good to me as the others. But couldn't I say exactly the same thing about any other poet's work? Not every William Butler Yeats poem rocks my world the way "The Second Coming" does every time I read it. But somehow I have both more forgiveness and more expectation when it comes to Yeats--and I'm much more apt to wonder how I'm failing the poem rather than how the poem is failing me. Hmmm . . .

Having said that, I don't think it's accidental that I've chosen Yeats to exemplify my struggle. Some of Yeats' poetry is prophetic, and one of my favorite graduate school courses was about the relationship between poetry and prophecy.**** The prophetic books of the Bible, required reading in one of my undergraduate English courses, fascinated me not only because they were beautiful and puzzling, but because they placed great faith in people's imaginative and interpretive abilities. 

The truth of the matter is that I like to wrestle with poems. I like to feel that I'm up to the task of wrestling, if not on my own, then in the company of other interested wrestlers. In addition, I like to feel that the poem and I are both bringing something to the struggle--and the joy--of making meaning. I love it when I find my entry point, my toehold in the glistening and resistant rock face that some poems first present to me. It's almost like I'm both paralyzed and captivated, and then slowly I begin to make my way.

So I was relieved when I read the review of Oliver's Blue Horses***** in which Barbara Berman quoted the poem "What We Want" in its entirety:

In a poem
people want
something fancy,


but even more
they want something
inexplicable
made plain,


easy to swallow-
not unlike a suddenly
harmonic passage


in an otherwise
difficult and sometimes dissonant
symphony-


even if it is only
for the moment
of hearing it.

Right away I realized what, at least in part, my resistance to Oliver's work reflected: I really don't agree with Oliver's ideas about what people want from poetry. Not only that, I feel a bit patronized by her attitude. I might be being condescending when I criticize her for not being more "prophetic," "literary," and "indirect"--maybe she'd call that "fancy"--but I think she's being equally condescending when she assumes my interest is in having the "inexplicable/ made plain" and "easy to swallow." And on the other hand, the "We" in her title includes her among those seeking the relief of illumination, even if it's only temporary.

"Franz Marc's Blue Horses,"****** from the same collection, does not deliver on her poetic promise and principle of the "inexplicable made plain."******* I suspect that's part of why I liked it so much when we read it the other day. Rather than providing certainties, Oliver floats two possibilities in lines beginning with "Maybe," and ends with a question, not an answer. 

I wanted to hold tight to one of those possibilities: "Maybe the desire to make something beautiful/ is the piece of God that is inside each of us." Questions of wanting to make, what to make, and God's relationship to all of this have been much on my mind of late. A few weeks ago in my synagogue, we spent some time talking about the elaborate specifications for, and the artisanship required for the construction of, the Ark of the Covenant. We were also reminded that the people in earlier Torah chapters had made/built some other things that had displeased God: the golden calf and the Tower of Babel. Since then, I've been wondering what these human-made buildings and objects tell us about what it means to be people. What do we as humans need to see and touch, and why? Must our hands keep busy, building--or even writing poems?

There's definitely more than one way and more than one reason to write poetry--or even a single poem. I'll blog again in a couple of weeks after I've read and reread some more Oliver poems. Please send along to me the names of Oliver poems you really think I should be reading in the weeks ahead. Thank you!

* Illustration accompanying the following article: Franklin, R. (2017, November 20). What Mary Oliver's Critics Don't Understand. [Review of the book Devotions, by M. Oliver]. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/27/what-mary-olivers-critics-dont-understand
** Poetry discussion group leader Joyce Wilson always does such a great job of bringing this group great poems to read.
*** The revision is in a blog post entitled "Wild Geese in This Season of Return."
**** This course was taught by Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr., editor of Milton and the Line of Vision.
***** Berman, B. (2014, December 3). Blue Horses by Mary Oliver. [Review of Blue Horses, by M. Oliver]. Retrieved from https://therumpus.net/2014/12/blue-horses-by-mary-oliver/ 
*******. . . And not just because I have thing for horses captured in poetry.  
******* This caused me to question the tone of "What We Want."

2 comments:

  1. Hi Joan , Some very thought provoking questions from you in this blog. Ever the teacher( that's a good thing!). I wonder though if you might not be the exception regarding "but even more they want something inexplicable made plain" I have often heard people say they don't understand modern poetry, that wading through and investigating complex images constructed in unfamilia words, not quite be able to get to the heart of the poem,leaves them scratching their heads,that this stuff is just too heady for them. I admit, I don't comprehend most of the poems in the NYT magazine or even the New Yorker though I've tried. Some people love to put the creative puzzle together. But I think most people give up on poetry altogether which is a shame. Mary Oliver's work is accessible. For me it speaks very directly and creatively to the heart as I believe it does for most people who have read her poetry. And isn't it wonderful that she has opened the door for so many of us to explore further and begin to love poetry and perhaps one day decide we actually can tackle that NYT magazine poem?
    I will send you some of her poems that I think you might find interesting. I believe I have 5 of her 22 books and another book of essays, Upstream, coming in the mail any day now.
    I loved this blog . I truly admire your intellectual curiosity.

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  2. Pink Moon - The Pond - Mary Oliver

    You think it will never happen again.
    Then, one night in April,
    the tribes wake trilling.
    You walk down to the shore.
    Your coming stills them,
    but little by little the silence lifts
    until song is everywhere
    and your soul rises from your bones
    and strides out over the water.
    It is a crazy thing to do -
    for no one can live like that,
    floating around in the darkness
    over the gauzy water.
    Left on the shore your bones
    keep shouting come back!
    But your soul won't listen;
    in the distance it is sparkling
    like hot wires. So,
    like a good friend,
    you decide to follow.
    You step off the shore
    and plummet to your knees -
    you slog forward to your thighs
    and sink to your cheekbones -
    and now you are caught
    by the cold chains of the water -
    you are vanishing while around you
    the frogs continue to sing, driving
    their music upward through your own throat,
    not even noticing
    you are someone else.
    And that's when it happens -
    you see everything
    through their eyes,
    their joy, their necessity;
    you wear their webbed fingers;
    your throat swells.
    And thats when you know
    you will live whether you will or not,
    one way or another,
    because everything is everything else,
    one long muscle.
    Its no more mysterious than that.
    So you relax, you dont fight it anymore,
    the darkness coming down
    called water,
    called spring,
    called the green leaf, called
    a woman's body
    as it turns into mud and leaves,
    as it beats in its cage of water,
    as it turns like a lonely spindle
    in the moonlight, as it says
    yes.

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