There's Something About Mary

How did Mary Oliver become so divisive? Why is it so dangerous to read her? And why you should read her anyway.

Photo by Gary Bendig on Unsplash

In a house around the corner from where I live, one of my neighbors hosts a “poetry salon” where he invites people in our area to come and talk about poetry. It happens about once every month or two, and since it started last year we have had a handful of people, a few new faces and some regulars, attend and sit in the front room of

Jack F.

’s house to do a deep dive into a couple of poems.¹

As a way to break the ice, we go around the room and ask a question like, Why are you interested in poetry? This will sometimes lead to more specific questions like, Who are your favorite poets? Do you have a favorite poem?

On more than one occasion someone has brought up Mary Oliver, often quoting the famous last line of “The Summer Day”:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

These words are so popular that a quick search on Etsy will yield many items emblazoned with it, ranging from mugs to bracelets, wall prints to makeup bags.

Mary Oliver’s other wildly popular poem, “Wild Geese,” has another often quoted single line:

The world offers itself to your imagination

Both “The Summer Day” and “Wild Geese” show Mary Oliver at her finest: articulating human experience through one’s relationship with the natural world. Her use of plain language makes it accessible to many people, thus making her more likely to be read and enjoyed by those who don’t usually pick up literary journals or collections of verse.

Mary Oliver’s poetry doesn’t make people feel stupid. It makes people feel seen. It invites readers into a conversation with her. The last line of “The Summer Day” is not merely a sentence, but a question, which offers her reader the last word—an act of generosity more of us could practice in our everyday lives.

The question Oliver poses cannot be properly answered out of context. The poem actually begins with three questions:

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?

This answer is, obviously, God. If you doubt this, browse her poetry collections. She mentions God and prayer frequently. The problem is that her poems offer only a milquetoast spirituality., prone to sentimentality and relativism. When we have only our own truths, we have no shared universal Truth.

The first three sentences of "Wild Geese” betray this doctrine of self-affirmation:

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.

In a 2016 First Things article, “The Sentimentality Trap,” Benjamin Myers writes that Western Wind, the poetry textbook he uses for his students, “defines sentimentality as emotion in excess of its object.”

Sentimentality is not simply too much emotion, but an imbalance of it, an over-investment of emotion relative to that in which it is invested. I have never put down a poem and complained that it was too moving, too resonant. Sentimentality is a defect in the quality, not the quantity, of feeling in a poem.

Myers uses the beginning of Oliver’s “On Traveling to Beautiful Places” from her 2012 collection A Thousand Mornings, to illustrate his point:

The poem seems to exist only to congratulate the poet and the reader, loading a weight of wonder and faith and yearning onto a flimsy, cardboard version of reality. Surely anyone who did find God in such items wouldn’t render them so blithely in bland and flat images. The whole approach belies the emotions it purports to express.

And yet…

I still love Mary Oliver. I have memorized her poems and have shared her poems with my children despite her dangerous spirituality.

Why, Zina, why?

Henry Oliver

at

The Common Reader

makes a strong defense for Mary Oliver (no relation, I assume) in a Substack post after some shade Tweeting by Maggie Zhu who claimed that the beloved poet is an “upmarket Rupi Kaur.” Please read:

Is Mary Oliver a good poet?

After this piece was published, the poet’s critics and defenders came out of the woodwork to state their cases. Over on the site formerly known as Twitter² the formalist poet A. M. Juster made this fairly well-balanced statement :

I am not a big fan or a big detractor of #MaryOliver.

I love that she spoke to readers outside the literary establishment, but also feel that her #poems are lost opportunities to do more.

I also think her spirit wanted to write religious #poetry, but her mind wouldn't let her.

The commentary of Juster and Myers had me thinking of a recent interview that Krista Tippett did with Nick Cave for On Being. Tippett used a reading of Oliver’s “Drifting” as a launching off point to talk to Cave about music. However, the more interesting portion of the conversation came when Tippett paraphrased a sentence from the book Cave wrote with Seán O’Hagan, Faith, Hope and Carnage, which says,

Religion is spirituality with rigour, I guess, and yes, it makes demands on us. [emphasis mine]

Prior to that part of the book Cave wrote,

The word ‘spirituality’ is a little amorphous for my taste. It can mean almost anything, whereas the word ‘religious’ is just more specific, perhaps even conservative, has a little more to do with tradition.

In Nick Cave’s words you get a feeling that he is a man who is migrating toward that “rigor” that Juster suggests Oliver never explored in her poetry.³

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As it happens, Krista Tippett also interviewed Mary Oliver just several years before she died. In their 2015 discussion they go over “Wild Geese.”

Tippett: If you think of it, tell me. So “Wild Geese” is in Dream Work, and I’ve heard people talk about that — “Wild Geese” — as a poem that has saved lives. And I wonder if, when you write something like that — I mean, when you wrote that poem or when you published this book, would you have known that that was the poem that would speak so deeply to people?

Oliver: This is the magic of it — that poem was written as an exercise in end-stopped lines.

Tippett: As an exercise in what?

Oliver: End-stopped lines: period at the end of the line. I was working with a poet; I had her in a class.

Tippett: So it was an exercise in technique. [laughs]

It is interesting that Oliver’s two most popular poems feature the end-stopped line. Where “Wild Geese” explores the Statement, “The Summer Day” investigates the Question.

Poetry is made to be remembered, and in order for that to happen it must take on characteristics that make it easier for the mind to clasp onto, like meter and rhyme. Homer’s epics were in non-rhymed dactylic hexameter, Beowulf was written in accentual meter. Rhyming was first seen in Chinese poetry in 10th century BCE, but in English it flourished in the high Middle Ages.

One might argue that Oliver’s technique of the end-stopped line is another way to make verse memorizable. How else could children easily recite “The Summer Day” as Tippett’s daughter did in the recording heard on the podcast and as my own daughter did in this post I wrote a while ago.

In posing a series of questions in “The Summer Day”, Oliver heightens the level of intimacy by inviting the reader to imagine, not just the swan, the black bear, and the grasshopper, but Who made them.

In “Wild Geese” the speaker reassures the reader, “You do not have to walk on your knees/ For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.” And invites the reader into a confidence: “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.”

As Robert Frost said that poetry “is a way of remembering that which it would impoverish us to forget.” When we do not feel seen, understood, or loved, Mary Oliver’s poetry reminds us that there is a God out there that sees us, understands us, and loves us. She gives us that we starve for: Connection. And she did it in a way that makes it easy for us to remember. Her voice is so natural and conversational that hardly anyone notices how carefully structured her best poems are. “The Summer Day” is three questions followed by four sentences followed by three questions. You see a balance in a number of her other works as well. This isn’t the undisciplined free verse that passes for much of mediocre poetry these days. Those who have read A Poetry Handbook know that she understands the craft.

I agree with critics that many of her poems were lackluster, but when she was exemplary she surpassed some of the best poets out there, simply because her poems are memorized while other talented poets of this era are not. Much ink has been spilled on the supposed death of poetry. However, for as long as random poetry lovers at my neighbor’s house and school children across the country continue to recall the wild geese and grasshopper—whether quoted in one line or a whole poem—Mary Oliver should receive credit for keeping poetry alive and offering it to the imaginations of those who felt like poetry never belonged to them.

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Please tell me…

Do you think Mary Oliver is a good poet or a bad poet?

Should she be as influential as she is?

How would you explain her popularity?

I would love to hear your comments.

1. This month the conversation was about Wordsworth and Angelou. Seems like

Jack F.

has started a Substack to talk about the poems discussed at the salon.

2. Are we allowed to call it TwiX or is there some type of legal issue with this because of the candy bar?

3. I have to add this interesting article with Nick Cave about being “a hammer-and-nails kind of guy”: https://www.salon.com/2004/11/18/cave_4/