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Mary Oliver

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other people with the same name, see Mary Oliver (disambiguation).

Mary Oliver
Born(1935-09-10)September 10, 1935
Maple Heights, Ohio, U.S.
DiedJanuary 17, 2019(2019-01-17) (aged 83)
Hobe Sound, Florida, U.S.
OccupationPoet
EducationVassar College
Ohio State University
Notable awardsNational Book Award (1992)
Pulitzer Prize (1984)
PartnerMolly Malone Cook

Mary Jane Oliver (September 10, 1935 – January 17, 2019) was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. She found inspiration for her work in nature and had a lifelong habit of solitary walks in the wild. Her poetry is characterized by a sincere wonderment and profound connection with the environment, conveyed in unadorned language and simple yet striking imagery. In 2007, she was declared to be the country's best-selling poet.

YouTube Encyclopedic

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  • 'A Thousand Mornings' With Poet Mary Oliver
  • When I am Among The Trees - Mary Oliver
  • "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver (read by Tom Hiddleston) (12/04)
  • Mary Oliver: Stage Fright
  • Why I Wake Early by Mary Oliver (read by the poet on Many Miles)

Transcription

This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin. Mary Oliver is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose body of work is largely filled with imagery of the natural world. Her most recent collection is titled "A Thousand Mornings." I spoke with her from member station WSHU in Fairfield, Connecticut. She began our interview by reading her poem, "I Happen to Be Standing." MARY OLIVER: (Reading) I don't know where prayers go or what they do. Do cats pray while they sleep half-asleep in the sun? Does the opossum pray as it crosses the street? The sunflowers, the old black oak growing older every year? I know I can walk through the world along the shore or under the trees with my mind filled with things of little importance. In full self-attendance, a condition I can't really call being alive. Is a prayer a gift or a petition, or does it matter? The sunflowers blaze - maybe that's their way. Maybe the cats are sound asleep, maybe not. While I was thinking this, I happened to be standing just outside my door with my notebook open, which is the way I begin every morning. Then a wren in the privet began to sing. He was positively drenched in enthusiasm. I don't know why. And yet why not? I wouldn't persuade you from whatever you believe or whatever you don't. That's your business. But I thought of the wren singing what could this be if it isn't a prayer? So, I just listened, my pen in the air. MARTIN: Poet Mary Oliver. I asked her if she in fact begins her days the way she describes in this poem, "I Happen to be Standing." OLIVER: Almost. I thought, gee, I do lie a little bit. And I should have said, which is the way I begin most mornings. MARTIN: Talk to me a little bit about that ritual. Do you make it part of the writing discipline to go out into the world and make some observations every day? OLIVER: I think it began with discipline, because I did understand that any artistic venture requires a lot of discipline. But it's no longer a discipline, it's no longer something I think about. I'm often up - on most mornings - I'm up to see the sun. And that rising of the light moves me very much. And I'm used to thinking and feeling in words, so it sort of just happens. MARTIN: Have you always done that? Have you always written in the mornings? OLIVER: Yes, yes. I like the mornings. I like to give the mornings to those first good thoughts. And I suppose in a way it sets up the day. MARTIN: You have written many collections. How is this one different? OLIVER: I think one thing is that prayer has become more useful, interesting, fruitful and, again, almost involuntary in my life. And when I talk about prayer, I mean really what that Rumi says in that wonderful line, there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. I'm not theological specifically. I might pick a flower for Shiva as well as say the hundredth prayer. The name of the god doesn't interest me so much as the fact there are so many names of that mystery. MARTIN: Has your work become more prayerful, more spiritual over the years? OLIVER: I would say yes. Maybe a little bit of that is that the two things I loved from a very early age were the natural world and dead poets, which were my pals when I was a kid. But the concern I have for the natural world is really a very sorrowful business. MARTIN: Why sorrowful? OLIVER: Because we aren't doing what we should do to preserve the world. The woods that I loved as a child are entirely gone. The woods that I loved as a young adult are gone. The woods that most recently I walked in, they're not gone but they're full of bicycle trails and - I grew up in a town that was 3,500 people in Ohio, very pastoral and there were woods to go to. That town is now over 250,000 people. And this is happening to the world and I think it is very, very dangerous for our future generations, those of us who believe that the world is not only necessary to us in its pristine state but it is in itself an act of some kind of spiritual thing. I said once, and I think this is true, the world did not have to be beautiful to work, but it is. What does that mean? MARTIN: Because you write about the natural world and because you write these beautiful meditations about your natural surroundings, as so many others have done, how do you find new words to describe what you see? OLIVER: I suppose by paying very close, close, close attention to things and seeing new details. I love words. I love the mechanics of poetry. I often speak of the choreography of the poem on the page. And to find a new word that is accurate and different, you have to be alert for it. It's wonderful. It's fun. But one thing I do know is that a poetry to be understand must be clear. It mustn't be fancy. I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are - they sort of tap dance through it. I always feel that whatever isn't necessary should not be in the poem. MARTIN: How do you know when a poem is done? OLIVER: Oh. Well, I don't know that you ever know but in some way you have made a completion of a thought or a mood or whatever you're doing and it's time to go on with the next one. MARTIN: Mary Oliver. Her new book of poetry is called "A Thousand Mornings." She joined us from member station WSHU in Fairfield, Connecticut. Mary, thanks so much for talking with us. It's been a real pleasure. OLIVER: Thank you, thank you. A pleasure for me too.

Early life

Mary Oliver was born to Edward William and Helen M. Oliver on September 10, 1935, in Maple Heights, Ohio, a semi-rural suburb of Cleveland.[1] Her father was a social studies teacher and an athletics coach in the Cleveland public schools. As a child, she spent a great deal of time outside where she enjoyed going on walks or reading. In an interview with the Christian Science Monitor in 1992, Oliver commented on growing up in Ohio, saying

"It was pastoral, it was nice, it was an extended family. I don't know why I felt such an affinity with the natural world except that it was available to me, that's the first thing. It was right there. And for whatever reasons, I felt those first important connections, those first experiences being made with the natural world rather than with the social world."[2]

In 2011, in an interview with Maria Shriver, Oliver described her family as dysfunctional, adding that though her childhood was very hard, writing helped her create her own world.[3] Oliver revealed in the interview with Shriver that she had been sexually abused as a child and had experienced recurring nightmares.[3]

Oliver began writing poetry at the age of 14. She graduated from the local high school in Maple Heights. In the summer of 1951 at the age of 15 she attended the National Music Camp at Interlochen, Michigan, now known as Interlochen Arts Camp, where she was in the percussion section of the National High School Orchestra. At 17 she visited the home of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, in Austerlitz, New York,[1][4] where she then formed a friendship with the late poet's sister Norma. Oliver and Norma spent the next six to seven years at the estate organizing Edna St. Vincent Millay's papers.

Oliver studied at Ohio State University and Vassar College in the mid-1950s but did not receive a degree at either college.[1]

Career

She worked at ''Steepletop'', the estate of Edna St. Vincent Millay, as secretary to the poet's sister.[5] Oliver's first collection of poems, No Voyage, and Other Poems, was published in 1963 when she was 28.[6] During the early 1980s, Oliver taught at Case Western Reserve University. Her fifth collection of poetry, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984.[7][1][8] She was Poet In Residence at Bucknell University (1986) and Margaret Banister Writer in Residence at Sweet Briar College (1991), then moved to Bennington, Vermont, where she held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College until 2001.[6]

She won the Christopher Award and the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award for her piece House of Light (1990), and New and Selected Poems (1992) won the National Book Award.[1][9] Oliver's work turns towards nature for its inspiration and describes the sense of wonder it instilled in her. "When it's over," she says, "I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms." ("When Death Comes" from New and Selected Poems (1992)) Her collections Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (1999), Why I Wake Early (2004), and New and Selected Poems, Volume 2 (2004) build the themes. The first and second parts of Leaf and the Cloud are featured in The Best American Poetry 1999 and 2000,[10] and her essays appear in Best American Essays 1996, 1998, and 2001.[6] Oliver was the editor of the 2009 edition of Best American Essays.

Poetic identity

Mary Oliver's poetry is grounded in memories of Ohio and her adopted home of New England, with Provincetown acting as the principal setting for her work after she moved there in the 1960s.[4] Influenced by both Whitman and Thoreau, she is known for her clear and poignant observations of the natural world. In fact, according to the 1983 Chronology of American Literature, the "American Primitive," one of Oliver's collection of poems, "...presents a new kind of Romanticism that refuses to acknowledge boundaries between nature and the observing self."[11] Nature stirred her creativity, and Oliver, an avid walker, often pursued inspiration on foot. Her poems are filled with imagery from her daily walks near her home:[6] shore birds, water snakes, the phases of the moon, and humpback whales. In Long Life she says "[I] go off to my woods, my ponds, my sun-filled harbor, no more than a blue comma on the map of the world but, to me, the emblem of everything."[4] She commented in a rare interview "When things are going well, you know, the walk does not get rapid or get anywhere: I finally just stop and write. That's a successful walk!" She said she once found herself walking in the woods with no pen and later hid pencils in the trees so she would never be stuck in that place again.[4] She often carried a 3-by-5-inch hand-sewn notebook for recording impressions and phrases.[4] Maxine Kumin called Oliver "a patroller of wetlands in the same way that Thoreau was an inspector of snowstorms."[12] Oliver stated that her favorite poets were Walt Whitman, Rumi, Hafez, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats.[3]

Oliver was also compared to Emily Dickinson, with whom she shared an affinity for solitude and inner monologues. Her poetry combines dark introspection with joyous release. Although she was criticized for writing poetry that assumes a close relationship between women and nature, she found that the self is only strengthened through an immersion in the natural environment.[13] Oliver is also known for her straightforward language and accessible themes.[10] The Harvard Review describes her work as an antidote to "inattention and the baroque conventions of our social and professional lives. She is a poet of wisdom and generosity whose vision allows us to look intimately at a world not of our making."[10]

In 2007 The New York Times described her as "far and away, this country's best-selling poet."[14]

Personal life

On a visit to Austerlitz in the late 1950s, Oliver met photographer Molly Malone Cook, who would become her partner for over forty years.[4] In Our World, a book of Cook's photos and journal excerpts Oliver compiled after Cook's death, Oliver writes, "I took one look [at Cook] and fell, hook and tumble." Cook was Oliver's literary agent. They made their home largely in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where they lived until Cook's death in 2005, and where Oliver continued to live[10] until relocating to Florida.[15] Of Provincetown, she recalled, "I too fell in love with the town, that marvelous convergence of land and water; Mediterranean light; fishermen who made their living by hard and difficult work from frighteningly small boats; and, both residents and sometime visitors, the many artists and writers.[...] M. and I decided to stay."[4]

Oliver valued her privacy and gave very few interviews, saying she preferred for her writing to speak for itself.[6]

Death

In 2012, Oliver was diagnosed with lung cancer, but was treated and given a "clean bill of health."[16] Oliver died of lymphoma on January 17, 2019, at the age of 83.[17][18][19]

Critical reviews

Maxine Kumin describes Mary Oliver in the Women's Review of Books as an "indefatigable guide to the natural world, particularly to its lesser-known aspects."[12] Reviewing Dream Work for The Nation, critic Alicia Ostriker numbered Oliver among America's finest poets: "visionary as Emerson [... she is] among the few American poets who can describe and transmit ecstasy, while retaining a practical awareness of the world as one of predators and prey."[1] New York Times reviewer Bruce Bennetin stated that the Pulitzer Prize–winning collection American Primitive, "insists on the primacy of the physical"[1] while Holly Prado of Los Angeles Times Book Review noted that it "touches a vitality in the familiar that invests it with a fresh intensity."[1]

Vicki Graham suggests Oliver over-simplifies the affiliation of gender and nature: "Oliver's celebration of dissolution into the natural world troubles some critics: her poems flirt dangerously with romantic assumptions about the close association of women with nature that many theorists claim put the woman writer at risk."[13] In her article "The Language of Nature in the Poetry of Mary Oliver", Diane S. Bond echoes that "few feminists have wholeheartedly appreciated Oliver's work, and though some critics have read her poems as revolutionary reconstructions of the female subject, others remain skeptical that identification with nature can empower women."[20] In The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, Sue Russell notes that "Mary Oliver will never be a balladeer of contemporary lesbian life in the vein of Marilyn Hacker, or an important political thinker like Adrienne Rich; but the fact that she chooses not to write from a similar political or narrative stance makes her all the more valuable to our collective culture."[21]

Selected awards and honors

Works

Poetry collections

  • 1963 No Voyage, and Other Poems Dent (New York, NY), expanded edition, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1965.
  • 1972 The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems Harcourt (New York, NY) ISBN 978-0-15-177750-1
  • 1978 The Night Traveler Bits Press
  • 1978 Sleeping in the Forest Ohio University (a 12-page chapbook, p. 49–60 in The Ohio Review—Vol. 19, No. 1 [Winter 1978])
  • 1979 Twelve Moons Little, Brown (Boston, MA), ISBN 0316650013
  • 1983 American Primitive Little, Brown (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-316-65004-5
  • 1986 Dream Work Atlantic Monthly Press (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-87113-069-3
  • 1987 Provincetown Appletree Alley, limited edition with woodcuts by Barnard Taylor
  • 1990 House of Light Beacon Press (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-8070-6810-6
  • 1992 New and Selected Poems [volume one] Beacon Press (Boston, MA), ISBN 978-0-8070-6818-2
  • 1994 White Pine: Poems and Prose Poems Harcourt (San Diego, CA) ISBN 978-0-15-600120-5
  • 1995 Blue Pastures Harcourt (New York, NY) ISBN 978-0-15-600215-8
  • 1997 West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-395-85085-5
  • 1999 Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-395-85087-9
  • 2000 The Leaf and the Cloud Da Capo (Cambridge, Massachusetts), (prose poem) ISBN 978-0-306-81073-2
  • 2002 What Do We Know Da Capo (Cambridge, Massachusetts) ISBN 978-0-306-81206-4
  • 2003 Owls and Other Fantasies: poems and essays Beacon (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-8070-6868-7
  • 2004 Why I Wake Early: New Poems Beacon (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-8070-6879-3
  • 2004 Blue Iris: Poems and Essays Beacon (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-8070-6882-3
  • 2004 Wild geese: selected poems, Bloodaxe, ISBN 978-1-85224-628-0
  • 2005 New and Selected Poems, volume two Beacon (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-8070-6886-1
  • 2005 At Blackwater Pond: Mary Oliver Reads Mary Oliver (audio cd)
  • 2006 Thirst: Poems (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-8070-6896-0
  • 2007 Our World with photographs by Molly Malone Cook, Beacon (Boston, MA)
  • 2008 The Truro Bear and Other Adventures: Poems and Essays, Beacon Press, ISBN 978-0-8070-6884-7
  • 2008 Red Bird Beacon (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-8070-6892-2
  • 2009 Evidence Beacon (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-8070-6898-4
  • 2010 Swan: Poems and Prose Poems (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-8070-6899-1
  • 2012 A Thousand Mornings Penguin (New York, NY) ISBN 978-1-59420-477-7
  • 2013 Dog Songs Penguin Press (New York, NY) ISBN 978-1-59420-478-4
  • 2014 Blue Horses Penguin Press (New York, NY) ISBN 978-1-59420-479-1
  • 2015 Felicity Penguin Press (New York, NY) ISBN 978-1-59420-676-4
  • 2017 Devotions The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver Penguin Press (New York, NY) ISBN 978-0-399-56324-9

Non-fiction books and other collections

Works in translation

Catalan

See also

Notes

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h "Poetry Foundation Oliver biography". Retrieved September 7, 2010.
  2. ^ Ratiner, Steve (December 9, 1992). "Poet Mary Oliver: a Solitary Walk". Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved March 6, 2018.
  3. ^ a b c "Maria Shriver Interviews the Famously Private Poet Mary Oliver". Oprah.com. Retrieved November 30, 2018.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g Duenwald, Mary. (July 5, 2009.) "The Land and Words of Mary Oliver, the Bard of Provincetown". New York Times. Retrieved September 7, 2010.
  5. ^ Stevenson, Mary Reif (1969). Contemporary Authors. USA: Fredrick G. Ruffner Jr. p. 395.
  6. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Mary Oliver's bio at publisher Beacon Press (note that original link is dead; see version archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20090508075809/http://www.beacon.org/contributorinfo.cfm?ContribID=1299 ; retrieved October 19, 2015).
  7. ^ "Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet Mary Oliver Dies at 83". The New York Times. Associated Press. January 17, 2019. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved January 17, 2019.
  8. ^ a b ""Poetry: Past winners & finalists by category". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved April 8, 2012.
  9. ^ a b "National Book Awards–1992". National Book Foundation. Retrieved April 8, 2012.
  10. ^ a b c d "Oliver Biography". Academy of American Poets. Retrieved September 12, 2012.
  11. ^ "The Chronology of American Literature". 2004.[permanent dead link]
  12. ^ a b Kumin, Maxine. "Intimations of Mortality". Women's Review of Books 10: April 7, 1993, p. 16.
  13. ^ a b Graham, p. 352
  14. ^ Garner, Dwight. (February 18, 2007.) "Inside the List". New York Times. Retrieved September 7, 2010.
  15. ^ Tippett, Krista (February 5, 2015). "Mary Oliver — Listening to the World". On Being. Archived from the original on November 11, 2016. Retrieved September 6, 2020.
  16. ^ Helgeson, Mariah (February 16, 2015). "Mary Oliver's Cancer Poem". On Being. Retrieved January 20, 2019.
  17. ^ Neary, Lynn (January 17, 2019). "Beloved Poet Mary Oliver Who Believed Poetry Mustn't Be Fancy Dies at 83". NPR. Retrieved January 20, 2019.
  18. ^ Parini, Jay (February 15, 2019). "Mary Oliver obituary". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved February 18, 2019.
  19. ^ "Mary Oliver". Poetry Foundation. May 7, 2019. Retrieved May 8, 2019.
  20. ^ Bond, p. 1
  21. ^ Russell, pp. 21–22.
  22. ^ "Book awards: L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award". Library Thing. Retrieved July 18, 2016.
  23. ^ "Phi Beta Kappa • Remembering Phi Beta Kappa member and poet Mary".
  24. ^ Lawder, Melanie (November 14, 2012). "Poet Mary Oliver receives honorary degree". The Marquette Tribune. Archived from the original on March 5, 2013. Retrieved December 6, 2012.
  25. ^ "Goodreads Choice Awards 2012". Goodreads. Retrieved July 18, 2016.

References

  • Bond, Diane. "The Language of Nature in the Poetry of Mary Oliver." Womens Studies 21:1 (1992), p. 1.
  • Graham, Vicki. "'Into the Body of Another': Mary Oliver and the Poetics of Becoming Other." Papers on Language and Literature, 30:4 (Fall 1994), pp. 352–353, pp. 366–368.
  • McNew, Janet. "Mary Oliver and the Tradition of Romantic Nature Poetry". Contemporary Literature, 30:1 (Spring 1989).
  • "Oliver, Mary." American Environmental Leaders: From Colonial Times to the Present, Anne Becher, and Joseph Richey, Grey House Publishing, 2nd edition, 2008. Credo Reference.
  • Russell, Sue. "Mary Oliver: The Poet and the Persona." The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, 4:4 (Fall 1997), pp. 21–22.
  • "1992." The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt, Houghton Mifflin, 1st edition, 2004. Credo Reference.

External links

External media
Audio
audio icon Mary Oliver—Listening to the World, On Being, October 15, 2015
Video
video icon Oliver reading at Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on August 4, 2001, video (45 mins)
Wikiquote has quotations related to Mary Oliver.
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