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."