Thinking about poetry, affection, and accessibility, I find myself thinking about music. There are songs from the ''60s and '70s, when I first began listening to popular music, that I love unabashedly; there are musical theater songs that I play when I want to raise my spirits. So many of these songs I love (I'm almost embarrassed to mention titles but I'll offer two: "Happy Together" by the Turtles, and "You Can't Stop the Beat" from Hairspray) are hardly Schubert or even Lennon-McCartney/Sondheim but something about them (the melodic hook, a stray lyric, the rhythmic drive) strike a chord in me. I'm so glad they exist in the world, no matter where they rank on any artistic/aesthetic scale. That's the way I feel about certain poems. I love them, and can even tell you why, but the reasons aren't those that I bring to bear when asked what makes a poem great. When I am in their presence, I feel like I suspend judgment and simply enjoy them.
I think it’s interesting that Mary Oliver is dismissed as being twee and sentimental, while Maggie Smith is just seen as being deep with things like her oft-shared “Good Bones”:
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
The key difference I see between Mary Oliver and Maggie Smith is that Smith is an alleged “realist,” nattering on about how terrible things are even though it is clearly empirically not true that “for every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird” or that “for every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake.” (Does Maggie Smith actually think the mortality rate for children is >50%? Do her readers?)
“Good Bones” is a parallel poem to “Summer Day,” about life being short but having “delicious” moments in it, that “could be beautiful,” with the critical difference that Smith wraps her sentiments in a particularly nasty pessimism that’s currently hip, while Oliver just focuses on the joy. If Oliver’s poems are trite, pop-pessimism like “Good Bones” is more so, without the benefit of making the reader happier. But we culturally treat poems like “Good Bones” as uncontroversially profound, because we like to pretend that cynicism is smart.
I wish Mary Oliver's poems gave me the same feels that it does to other readers, but to my mind her voice (especially in poems like Wild Geese) sounds like a faux-grandmother's, artificially crinkled and aged, used to sell Steen's Syrup; it feigns wisdom and offers little of substance (perhaps your point in analyzing her Crystal Lite approach to the spiritual life). In fact, I think it mocks folks who have no choice but to drag themselves through the dark night of the soul, whether because of depression, addiction, bullying, or abuse. It is easy for the cozy cat I imagine curled in her poetry to speak the things it does, I suppose, because it does feel flimsy in its experience. Of course you need to repent - ask any alcoholic who has joined AA.
I think Mary Oliver earns the oft-quoted question at the end of The Summer Day by the particularity of her careful and meticulous description of the grasshopper in the middle of the poem:
"the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away."
The poem begins with three questions and ends with three questions, as if it's a kind of catechism.
The first three questions echo the questions that God asks Job: who made the world?
I like that it doesn't stay at that general level but drills down to the particular, to a moment in time, an image. And that image is a sort of communion with the natural world, the grasshopper eating out of her hand, it's a kind of Eucharistic image.
But Oliver follows that image not with answers but with uncertainty, "I don't know exactly what a prayer is." As a person of faith, it seems to me that if she could answer her first three questions she might come closer to knowing what prayer is. But she shies away from that encounter. She turns away from seeking God the maker to enjoy the beauties of the created world. Which are truly lovely. There is something of a sabbath mood of the image of her being idle and blessed and strolling through the fields and paying close attention to grasshoppers, just as in other poems she's paid attention to swans and black bears, as she alludes to in her other opening questions.
So yes on one level she earns those three final rhetorical questions, which suggest a sort of Thoreau-ian call to seize the day.
And yet... indeed this spirituality falls short for me. Communion with nature is a necessary and natural first step, but she doesn't seem to go beyond her questions to actually trying to nail down an answer. She doesn't offer praise to the one who made the grasshopper, except, perhaps by implication. Is asking "who made thee?" in echo of Blake enough to constitute a sort of prayer? I might be tempted to think of it as a kind of prayer if the speaker hadn't undercut that motion by disavowing a knowledge of what prayer is. Unlike Blake, Oliver doesn't offer an answer. Blake tells us that the one who made the lamb was himself called a Lamb. Blake offers explicit blessing in his twice repeated line of the final couplet: Little 'Lamb, God bless thee.'
I contrast Oliver's grasshopper, too, to Hopkins Windhover, another faithfully observed poem wondering at a creature of the natural world. Yet Hopkins makes the praise explicit in his poem with the dedication "to Christ our Lord".
So for me as a reader, Oliver's questions at the end of Summer Day stir me as good carpe diem poems should do.
"Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?"
But this little catechism at the end also leaves me a bit sad that she doesn't press into the first three questions more. The second set of questions wants to be exhilarating, and does exhilarate with a call to live, to enjoy the sabbath joy of communion with nature in the fields. But at the same time they imply that one doesn't have to answer her first set of questions, one doesn't have to praise the Maker. It is enough to simply pay attention, to kneel in the grass not to pray but to observe nature. It is enough to be idle and feel oneself to be blessed, she implies. But I don't agree. If everything dies and death is universal then life is too short not to make lazy jabs at God without holding harder to the quest for answers. If everything dies then it's not enough to spend my wild and precious life merely observing and wondering, I think a poet needs to do more. There is the work of praise. Granted, this is more of a theological argument than a poetic one. But it's why I find Oliver's spirituality a little flat. It's a bit too much moral therapeutic deism for me.
I like Mary Oliver because for me her poems are relatable on different levels. Her comment that she was trying endstops made me think of Peter or Paul of the folk group Peter, Paul, and Mary when asked about the song "Puff the Magic Dragon". As to its meaning he replied it's a fun song about a dragon. I think perhaps at times we analyze a bit too much and take away the joy of writng and reading.
Someone gifted me "Devotions" some years ago and it gave me a great deal of confidence and comfort to read poetry that I "understood" without twisting myself in knots, and that my narrative and straight-forward poetry might not all be total trash. To learn she is controversial is surprising to me since I know her as much beloved, but I do believe you obviously and don't disagree wholeheartedly with her detractors. I feel a little insecure now—I used to say she was one of my favorites and felt that was a "legitimate" answer as I try to become familiar with more poets and now maybe I'll be written off!
That being said, I'm reading her handbook now and am finding it very helpful. :)
In Mary Oliver's introduction to her poetry handbook she gives this wise advice: "A poet's interest in craft never fades, of course. This book is not meant to be a good beginning. Many instructors, for whatever reasons, feel their 'professional' criticism (i.e., opinion) of a student's work is what is called for. This book is written in cheerful disagreement with that feeling. It is written to empower the beginning writer who stands between two marvelous complex things—an experience (or an idea or a feeling), and the urge to tell about it in the best possible conjunction of words."
I love Mary Oliver. I wouldn't say that every one of her poems grabs my attention, but enough of them have made me sit there and think about what they were trying to say long after I had read them. That is my measuring stick.
I confess that I am not as familiar with contemporary poetry as I would like to be, but even I kept coming across references to Mary Oliver. I read her collection A Thousand Mornings a couple of years ago and was surprised that I didn’t love her. I love her way of engaging with and describing the natural world, but I did leave that collection wanting there to be a little “more” there. But not all poets are for everyone, and I am not going to be a gatekeeper when it comes to deciding who is and isn’t truly a “good” poet (mainly because I change my mind a lot, ha). I do not like snobbishness around writing.
This is a really interesting conversation because of the rising popularity of what is known as “Instagram poetry” (a term I think is meant as an insult but which I use as merely descriptive). Is poetry that appeals to the masses really good poetry? Is poetry that has a fairly evident meaning good poetry? I don’t really know, but I think poetry that inspires people to want to read more poetry is a good thing, and Oliver has done that for me.
At this point in my reading life, her poetry doesn't appeal to me. But that's probably because I don't read a lot of poetry. And the poems I do love are those I first learned in high school. So there's a lot of room for my evolution as a reader of poetry!
I've never read Oliver's poems. Interesting she's this divisive. I think it's great to end poems with questions though. It's a bit direct, true. But the reader feels engaged.
I wonder who gets to decide what amount of emotion is appropriate under which circumstances. I am probably one of the first to shrug at poetry I think of as "precious", but also believe anything that employs metaphors is necessarily subjective and cannot be quantified as "correct". I find discussion fascinating, absolutes absurd. (Yeah, I see the paradox there.)
The response I got showed me she was admired by many people who clearly read a lot of the poetry I liked. So I started reading her poetry and I have found many lovely poems by her, especially in her collection, Dream Work. I'm really glad I found her work.
I haven't come across much of Mary Oliver's poetry, but when I saw this I strongly disagreed, and I didn't look for more:
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 the links you posted and at Poetry I found some of her poems that I think are excellent. You don't win a Pulitzer prize if you are merely sentimental. Maybe it's just her spirituality that's soft.
Thinking about poetry, affection, and accessibility, I find myself thinking about music. There are songs from the ''60s and '70s, when I first began listening to popular music, that I love unabashedly; there are musical theater songs that I play when I want to raise my spirits. So many of these songs I love (I'm almost embarrassed to mention titles but I'll offer two: "Happy Together" by the Turtles, and "You Can't Stop the Beat" from Hairspray) are hardly Schubert or even Lennon-McCartney/Sondheim but something about them (the melodic hook, a stray lyric, the rhythmic drive) strike a chord in me. I'm so glad they exist in the world, no matter where they rank on any artistic/aesthetic scale. That's the way I feel about certain poems. I love them, and can even tell you why, but the reasons aren't those that I bring to bear when asked what makes a poem great. When I am in their presence, I feel like I suspend judgment and simply enjoy them.
I think it’s interesting that Mary Oliver is dismissed as being twee and sentimental, while Maggie Smith is just seen as being deep with things like her oft-shared “Good Bones”:
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
The key difference I see between Mary Oliver and Maggie Smith is that Smith is an alleged “realist,” nattering on about how terrible things are even though it is clearly empirically not true that “for every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird” or that “for every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake.” (Does Maggie Smith actually think the mortality rate for children is >50%? Do her readers?)
“Good Bones” is a parallel poem to “Summer Day,” about life being short but having “delicious” moments in it, that “could be beautiful,” with the critical difference that Smith wraps her sentiments in a particularly nasty pessimism that’s currently hip, while Oliver just focuses on the joy. If Oliver’s poems are trite, pop-pessimism like “Good Bones” is more so, without the benefit of making the reader happier. But we culturally treat poems like “Good Bones” as uncontroversially profound, because we like to pretend that cynicism is smart.
I wish Mary Oliver's poems gave me the same feels that it does to other readers, but to my mind her voice (especially in poems like Wild Geese) sounds like a faux-grandmother's, artificially crinkled and aged, used to sell Steen's Syrup; it feigns wisdom and offers little of substance (perhaps your point in analyzing her Crystal Lite approach to the spiritual life). In fact, I think it mocks folks who have no choice but to drag themselves through the dark night of the soul, whether because of depression, addiction, bullying, or abuse. It is easy for the cozy cat I imagine curled in her poetry to speak the things it does, I suppose, because it does feel flimsy in its experience. Of course you need to repent - ask any alcoholic who has joined AA.
I think Mary Oliver earns the oft-quoted question at the end of The Summer Day by the particularity of her careful and meticulous description of the grasshopper in the middle of the poem:
"the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away."
The poem begins with three questions and ends with three questions, as if it's a kind of catechism.
The first three questions echo the questions that God asks Job: who made the world?
I like that it doesn't stay at that general level but drills down to the particular, to a moment in time, an image. And that image is a sort of communion with the natural world, the grasshopper eating out of her hand, it's a kind of Eucharistic image.
But Oliver follows that image not with answers but with uncertainty, "I don't know exactly what a prayer is." As a person of faith, it seems to me that if she could answer her first three questions she might come closer to knowing what prayer is. But she shies away from that encounter. She turns away from seeking God the maker to enjoy the beauties of the created world. Which are truly lovely. There is something of a sabbath mood of the image of her being idle and blessed and strolling through the fields and paying close attention to grasshoppers, just as in other poems she's paid attention to swans and black bears, as she alludes to in her other opening questions.
So yes on one level she earns those three final rhetorical questions, which suggest a sort of Thoreau-ian call to seize the day.
And yet... indeed this spirituality falls short for me. Communion with nature is a necessary and natural first step, but she doesn't seem to go beyond her questions to actually trying to nail down an answer. She doesn't offer praise to the one who made the grasshopper, except, perhaps by implication. Is asking "who made thee?" in echo of Blake enough to constitute a sort of prayer? I might be tempted to think of it as a kind of prayer if the speaker hadn't undercut that motion by disavowing a knowledge of what prayer is. Unlike Blake, Oliver doesn't offer an answer. Blake tells us that the one who made the lamb was himself called a Lamb. Blake offers explicit blessing in his twice repeated line of the final couplet: Little 'Lamb, God bless thee.'
I contrast Oliver's grasshopper, too, to Hopkins Windhover, another faithfully observed poem wondering at a creature of the natural world. Yet Hopkins makes the praise explicit in his poem with the dedication "to Christ our Lord".
So for me as a reader, Oliver's questions at the end of Summer Day stir me as good carpe diem poems should do.
"Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?"
But this little catechism at the end also leaves me a bit sad that she doesn't press into the first three questions more. The second set of questions wants to be exhilarating, and does exhilarate with a call to live, to enjoy the sabbath joy of communion with nature in the fields. But at the same time they imply that one doesn't have to answer her first set of questions, one doesn't have to praise the Maker. It is enough to simply pay attention, to kneel in the grass not to pray but to observe nature. It is enough to be idle and feel oneself to be blessed, she implies. But I don't agree. If everything dies and death is universal then life is too short not to make lazy jabs at God without holding harder to the quest for answers. If everything dies then it's not enough to spend my wild and precious life merely observing and wondering, I think a poet needs to do more. There is the work of praise. Granted, this is more of a theological argument than a poetic one. But it's why I find Oliver's spirituality a little flat. It's a bit too much moral therapeutic deism for me.
I like Mary Oliver because for me her poems are relatable on different levels. Her comment that she was trying endstops made me think of Peter or Paul of the folk group Peter, Paul, and Mary when asked about the song "Puff the Magic Dragon". As to its meaning he replied it's a fun song about a dragon. I think perhaps at times we analyze a bit too much and take away the joy of writng and reading.
Someone gifted me "Devotions" some years ago and it gave me a great deal of confidence and comfort to read poetry that I "understood" without twisting myself in knots, and that my narrative and straight-forward poetry might not all be total trash. To learn she is controversial is surprising to me since I know her as much beloved, but I do believe you obviously and don't disagree wholeheartedly with her detractors. I feel a little insecure now—I used to say she was one of my favorites and felt that was a "legitimate" answer as I try to become familiar with more poets and now maybe I'll be written off!
That being said, I'm reading her handbook now and am finding it very helpful. :)
In Mary Oliver's introduction to her poetry handbook she gives this wise advice: "A poet's interest in craft never fades, of course. This book is not meant to be a good beginning. Many instructors, for whatever reasons, feel their 'professional' criticism (i.e., opinion) of a student's work is what is called for. This book is written in cheerful disagreement with that feeling. It is written to empower the beginning writer who stands between two marvelous complex things—an experience (or an idea or a feeling), and the urge to tell about it in the best possible conjunction of words."
I love Mary Oliver. I wouldn't say that every one of her poems grabs my attention, but enough of them have made me sit there and think about what they were trying to say long after I had read them. That is my measuring stick.
I confess that I am not as familiar with contemporary poetry as I would like to be, but even I kept coming across references to Mary Oliver. I read her collection A Thousand Mornings a couple of years ago and was surprised that I didn’t love her. I love her way of engaging with and describing the natural world, but I did leave that collection wanting there to be a little “more” there. But not all poets are for everyone, and I am not going to be a gatekeeper when it comes to deciding who is and isn’t truly a “good” poet (mainly because I change my mind a lot, ha). I do not like snobbishness around writing.
This is a really interesting conversation because of the rising popularity of what is known as “Instagram poetry” (a term I think is meant as an insult but which I use as merely descriptive). Is poetry that appeals to the masses really good poetry? Is poetry that has a fairly evident meaning good poetry? I don’t really know, but I think poetry that inspires people to want to read more poetry is a good thing, and Oliver has done that for me.
(Also, Jane Kenyon has also made me weep!)
At this point in my reading life, her poetry doesn't appeal to me. But that's probably because I don't read a lot of poetry. And the poems I do love are those I first learned in high school. So there's a lot of room for my evolution as a reader of poetry!
I've never read Oliver's poems. Interesting she's this divisive. I think it's great to end poems with questions though. It's a bit direct, true. But the reader feels engaged.
I wonder who gets to decide what amount of emotion is appropriate under which circumstances. I am probably one of the first to shrug at poetry I think of as "precious", but also believe anything that employs metaphors is necessarily subjective and cannot be quantified as "correct". I find discussion fascinating, absolutes absurd. (Yeah, I see the paradox there.)
When I came across Mary Oliver on Substack (I hadn't read her before), I was initially curious as to why she was quoted so often and so obviously revered by many readers. I wrote about this: https://open.substack.com/pub/jeffstreeter/p/whos-mary-oliver?r=1h6yf6&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
The response I got showed me she was admired by many people who clearly read a lot of the poetry I liked. So I started reading her poetry and I have found many lovely poems by her, especially in her collection, Dream Work. I'm really glad I found her work.
I haven't come across much of Mary Oliver's poetry, but when I saw this I strongly disagreed, and I didn't look for more:
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 the links you posted and at Poetry I found some of her poems that I think are excellent. You don't win a Pulitzer prize if you are merely sentimental. Maybe it's just her spirituality that's soft.