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I send this poem to my children the first day
- of summer every year. -“The Summer Day.”
I don't know if I can read this.
It's not gonna get better later. “The Summer Day.
Who made the world?"
“Roses Late Summer.”
"What happens to the leaves after they turn red and golden
and fall away?
What happens to the singing birds when they can't
sing any longer?
What happens to their quick wings?
Do you think there is any personal heaven for any of us?
Do you think anyone the other side of
that darkness will call to us, meaning us?"
“Maybe.” Sweet Jesus talking his
melancholy madness stood up in the boat
and the sea lay down, silky and sorry.
So everybody was saved that night.
But you know how it is when something different
crosses the threshold.
The uncle's mutter together, the women walk away,
The young brother begins to sharpen his knife.
Nobody knows what the soul is."
"Beyond the trees
the foxes keep teaching their children to live in the valley.
So they never seem to vanish,
they are always there in the blossom of light
that stands up every morning in the dark sky."
She was a brilliant poet from beatnik years.
I think she was always a beatnik.
Mary Oliver's poems are
for me, a balm in the storm.
They speak the language of my soul
and I think multiple souls around the earth.
I wouldn't mind being a rose in a field full of roses.
Fear has not yet occurred to them, nor ambition.
Reason they have not yet thought of. Neither
do they ask how long they must be roses, and then what.
Or any other foolish question.
She was our most famous poet for a long time.
Very famous and yet completely elusive.
I think of her
as a mystic.
She's radical.
What do you think you have
done with your one wild and precious life?
What I have done is learn to love
and learn to be loved and that didn't come easy.
Ohio where I grew up was important to me.
It being the initial place
where I learned to love the earth.
The two things I loved from a very early age were the
natural world and dead poets.
I was a kind of solitary kid
and dead poets were my friends.
I have a kind of joke answer to
“Who do I read?” But I mean it. I read Whitman
and Whitman
and Whitman.
Walt Whitman created this new voice
that was riding on the waves of American speech.
Mary Oliver was one of the first poets that pointed
to Whitman as an important influence.
The tumbling down the page
of those long lush sentences became part of her education.
I started writing probably when I was about 13.
I saw some poems I liked and
and I was trying to imitate them.
You don't think at 13 about career
or profession or stuff like that,
I just started doing it.
It was shocking. I was in girl in Ohio
and I wanted to write poems?
Unheard of. Even boys didn't do that.
Just to be a poet in America is already queer enough.
It's hard to grow up feeling invisible, feeling
that you don't fit in the culture around you
and come out of that with a strong sense of self.
I felt different. I went to school because I had to.
The only record I broke in high school was truancy.
When you say you felt different,
how did different feel to you?
Not belonging.
I had two or three very good friends during that time,
but I was always trying to get them to go to the woods.
I very much wished not to be noticed and to be left alone.
The world is a cruel and violent place.
It's in country songs, it's in ancient songs.
A poem is a wayfaring stranger
and it's moving through a world of woe.
My mother was the blue wisteria,
my mother was the mossy stream out behind the house,
my mother, alas, alas, did not always love her life,
heavier than iron it was
as she carried it in her arms from room to room,
oh, unforgettable!
I bury her in a box in the earth
and turn away.
It was a very dark and broken house that I came from.
I escaped it barely.
That was my strength, but I wasn't all strength.
My father was a demon of frustrated
dreams, was a breaker of trust, was a poor thin boy
with bad luck. He followed God,
there being no one else he could talk to;
he swaggered before God,
there being no one else who would listen.
Listen, this was his life. I bury it in the earth.
I sweep the closets. I leave the house.
When she was 17, she left that house
and she hid out in the woods for a week.
I mention them now, I will not mention them again.
It is not lack of love nor lack of sorrow.
But the iron thing they carried, I will not carry.
I give them one, two, three, four
the kiss of courtesy, of sweet thanks, of anger,
of good luck in the deep earth.
May they sleep well. May they soften.
But I will not give them the kiss of complicity.
I will not give them the responsibility for my life.
You know, forget it. Set it down, walk on.
It's an amazing poem.
You think that's being written at a time in the culture when
there was so much emphasis on investigating
childhood abuse, on the kinds of traumas
that might have shaped us, and Mary is saying,
“You don't need it.
Bury them and leave.”
When Mary Oliver was beginning, there weren't
that many paradigms for
what a woman poet was supposed to be like.
Edna St. Vincent Millay moved
to this small village in upstate New York
after her celebrated youth in Greenwich Village.
It was on the 700 acre estate called Steepletop
that she wrote the main body of her work
and it was here too, that she died.
Now living at Steepletop is Millay’s younger sister
Norma Millay Ellis.
In her senior year of high school, she wrote
to Norma Millay to ask if she might come to Steepletop
and she left the day after she graduated from high school.
One visitor came to Steepletop for an afternoon
and stayed four years as Norma's secretary. She spent
some time living at Edna St. Vincent Millay’s house
with Millay’s sister, helping her to catalog
and organize Millay’s papers.
There's an idea of Edna St.
Vincent Millay being in the past
and then there's the real Edna
St. Vincent Millay, known best as “Vincent.”
She was the scandalous
and celebrated young woman who was liberated
and flouting all kinds of conventions.
Between Edna St.
Vincent Millay and Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath.
There's this aura of problematic sexuality
and living on the edge
and that that's where feminine genius was
supposed to reside.
Like it was supposed to be risking itself in every sense
risking shame, social death,
actual death, insanity.
Millay was hailed as a kind of wunderkind early on
and then less so later.
Miss Millay is an artist of considerable accomplishments.
She is also a woman.
She therefore fascinates the male reviewer
but at the same time horrifies him too.
Mary attended college for two years,
one year at Ohio State, one year at Vassar
and when she left Vassar, she once again was
between Ohio
and Steepletop until in 1959
she moved to Greenwich Village.
She enjoyed being part of the culture in that moment.
Many of her Vassar classmates were in the village.
It was a very alive time,
but I do think it was deeply uncomfortable for her to be
that removed from the natural world.
Mary Oliver moved to New York City
but continued visiting Steepletop.
One day when she was visiting, Molly Malone Cook also was
there and Mary described falling
head-over-heels in love with her.
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don't hesitate. Give into it.
There are plenty of lives
and whole towns destroyed or about to be.
We are not wise, and not very often kind.
And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left.
Molly was 10 years Mary's senior, just this charismatic,
stylish, sophisticated person.
She just appeared in her life.
Perhaps this is its way of fighting back,
that sometimes something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world.
It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins.
Anyway, that's often the case.
Anyway, whatever it is, don't be afraid of its plenty.
Joy is not made to be a crumb.
M had will and wit
and probably too much empathy for others.
She was quick in speech
and she did not suffer fools. When you knew her,
she was unconditionally kind.
But also, you had to be brave to get to know her.
Molly had been a staff photographer
for the Village Voice at its inception
and she was still living in the Village
and really taking photographs quite seriously.
When M was a small child, someone asked her
what she wanted to do when she grew up
and she answered, I want to see every face in America.
She was born in 1925 in San Francisco.
It was not the most fortunate
beginning, years later she searched for
and found her parents.
But for many years she was moved
through various temporary homes, a childhood of mystery
and insufficiency.
It is not hard to guess the reason she wanted to see faces,
to find someone, somewhere
who would be recognizable, would look like her.
Molly was a very strong character,
so Molly gave her the belief that she was a great,
great talent, and was gonna succeed and everything
and stick with me baby.
Her world certainly wasn't daisies or birds
or trees as mine was.
We each had our separate natures.
Watching M when she was taking photographs
and no less watching the intensity
and openness with which she dealt with friends
and strangers too, taught me what real attention is about.
Attention without feeling,
I began to learn, is only a report.
I was in my late twenties
and well filled with a sense of my own thoughts,
my own presence.
I was eager to address the world of words,
to address the world with words.
Provincetown is probably the most beautiful
small town in America.
A wonderful cluster of white clapboard houses
with shingled roofs next to the harbor.
Provincetown is at the literal end of the country
where the light is so gorgeous when you get in the harbor.
No wonder so many people come here and find a new life.
Cape Cod hippies conduct a “paint-in” at the famous
Provincetown art colony.
It was a place that could absorb anyone
who couldn't fit in anywhere else.
You know, it was like a place for outcasts and misfits.
I came to Provincetown with a book of poems in one pocket
and a bottle of wine in the other.
It was a healthy environment for the creative soul.
The bars were full of writers and artists.
There was a lot of drugs and alcohol
and promiscuity, which was fine with me.
It has been an artist colony for 150 years.
That came about because
the Portuguese community, the fishing community
that had settled there, had a very welcoming kind of culture.
They were happy to rent rooms, to take people in
and they really weren't too concerned about their
sexual orientation.
Our Provincetown was pretty much a
Portuguese neighborhood.
We had Portuguese superstitions.
My mother couldn't sweep the floors if it was dark
because it would bring the dead up.
We still heated with coal.
We cooked on a kerosene stove,
but we had roomers in our house
and these people were from another world.
And they were colorful and they knew things.
There was something magical about it.
I hitchhiked to Provincetown, this long ago
I had a girlfriend. And we hitchhiked to Provincetown
because somebody said, “It’s a
weird place, you'll like it.”
It was, I did.
In June of ’64 with Molly,
she went to Provincetown for the summer
and they just didn't leave.
Do you know how many people I know who came here
for the summer, or for a visit and are here 50 years later?
Previously M had gone back to New York for the winter,
but that long fall we kept lingering, feeling our roots
settling into that magical and beautiful town.
M was taking and printing her own photographs.
I was writing poems at the kitchen table and we were young.
Molly had one of the first photo art galleries ever.
It's really this electric moment in photography.
When you look at the roster of people
that she was showing, they're just titans.
This was really at the very beginnings of photography
as fine art and there just was not the market.
Eventually the gallery became a bookstore
and someone who comes
through the bookstore in those days is John Waters.
It was called East End Books
and I nagged them every day if I could work there
and I had long hair and looked freakish and everything
but Molly liked me and she said “When it rains you can work.”
Because that's when it got crowded.
So wherever I was, I'd have to run in when it rained
and work there. Mary then, well she'd be in the back in a
pea coat in the middle of summer.
I mean, I think she was going through a lot
of adjustment there.
Ohio and Steepletop had a similar landscape. Streams
and meadows and forest that she was very familiar with
and so to come
to Provincetown it was like going to the moon.
She had never seen anything like that before.
You could go not very far
and be in the Beech Forest, and like not see a soul.
The period from 1964 until 1979,
Mary left Provincetown rarely.
And what she was doing was just working
and getting to know this place that was her home.
I call it primary sources.
Some people go to the library, but I went to the woods.
She went into the woods with her questions,
which is exactly what the great proponents
of her tradition in American poetry encouraged her to do.
Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, say, “You don't need a spiritual
teacher, you need to go out into the world and look.”
I drive people crazy because I could sit for two hours
and look at the clouds and be very silent
and I'm having a nice time
and sometimes I'm with people who say,
“This is kind of nuts.”
I would say to Mary, “I know you’re crawling around the woods
talking to animals. They're gonna put you in a mental
institution.” And then she got bit once by a badger.
I said, “That's what you get.”
She was down there, you know,
helping him build the dam. Get out of there!
I walked Beech Forest with Mary one time.
And I had to respect not to talk
and she was just looking, looking, looking.
My own nature is to like to walk the same path every day
to see what I missed the day before.
There's a poem called “The Clam,” which is about
how a clam is like us and how we are like a clam.
She takes this clamminess
and she finds all
of the common denominators without ever imposing human
assumptions on what a clam must be experiencing
and all she does is look at the things that a clam has
that I also have.
It breathes, it has a stomach like me, it has this,
it has that, and then at the end she just backs her way
into the cathedral.
It tries very hard not to die. It just opens me up.
And how do you do that with words?
Because what words do, by nature, is name things
and close them off. And yet she does it.
Before I know it, I'm suddenly a clam.
If you love something you give it a lot of attention
and if you give something a lot of attention,
you very often learn to love it
and that spiritual investigation requires
that you pay attention to the world
and paying attention to the world
often leads you to love the world.
Years ago, a reviewer
surmised that I must have a private income
of some substance
since all I ever seemed to do
was walk around the woods and dunes
and the long beaches of my town.
It was a silly surmise.
Looking at the world,
whatever shape my finances were in,
was the important part of my life.
Indeed, I had almost no income at all.
Poets, if they ever make a living
from their writing,
do not do so when they are
first beginning to publish.
In the money economy,
I had none.
Nor did my partner, and every
evening there was supper
to think about.
- She had no money, like, none. - Having to steal an egg
out of a nest of eggs in order to feed yourself.
She was broke. So she was working both as a writing
advisor and secretary. At the same time
she was working at the marine specialties store
and she was doing typing for many different people.
She was doing what you need to do to be a working artist.
Is it a bad time for you?
No. I was coming in with some
animal food.
Oh God. Oh, how's Mary's father?
Not well at all. He’s real bad.
She's gotta stay for a while.
First through Mary, actually, they started working
for Norman Mailer because Mary started doing some typing
and then Molly stepped in to say that she could take on more
of the enormous work
that was managing Mailer's career in those years.
I'm worried. What I'm worried about is I'm not sure
how long I can keep doing this.
With every other responsibility I have
on my mind, there’s you too, you know.
The money may just run out.
I want you to pay first the people who work for me.
So you, Mary, the people who work for me come first
and tradespeople second, and the wives last.
Okay - Okay, beautiful. Bye-bye.
If you want to be a writer,
I would say give your second best energy to your boss.
Writing is a really hard taskmaster
and if you do not want to do it as well as you can
do it, it's sort of like a piano player.
I mean, who wants to listen to a piano player who just
wants to play a little bit?
"It is six a.m, and I am working.
I am absent-minded, reckless, heedless
of social obligations, etc.
It is as it must be. The tire goes flat,
the tooth falls out,
there will be a hundred meals without mustard.
The poem gets written.
I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light
and I have no shame.
Neither do I have guilt.
My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely.
It does not include mustard, or teeth.
It does not extend to the lost button,
or the beans in the pot.
My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever
and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting
with you at three o'clock, rejoice if I am late.
Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all."
I am very disciplined about working.
You do not accomplish anything without discipline.
The creative part of your mind is ready all the time.
And if you say to it, “Hey,
let's have a date tomorrow at 7:30 in the morning,
I'll be there.” It will be there.
She was frustrated.
She was turning 40
and like all poets, looking for a break.
What I observed in her was this humbleness,
but it wasn't humbleness like an artist often experiences,
which is to say, “I’m no good, I should just give this up.”
She was sure of her work
and never once to me expressed any doubt in
what she was here to do.
She was writing poems and sending them everywhere
and seeing who would take them.
One of the most important places where she was publishing
during that period of time was The New York Times.
What was important to her was who can open the newspaper
and find a poem that might change their life.
What about people who are going to get a nice magazine
and read a business article?
How do you attract them to poetry?
I was of the opinion that most anybody
who starts a sentence will finish that sentence
and so quite a number of these poems are 36 lines,
but they're one sentence.
That was the spine of how she was living
because she had a a personal loan that was for $25 a month
and that's how much she was paid by The Times.
She was seeking the support of some publisher
who saw in her work what she knew was there.
“The Night Traveler” received a review from Joyce Carol Oates
and that really changed everything.
She sees the true terror of the country
as nature's pitiless disregard for the individual,
with a prey or predator.
She cannot divide the world into victim and oppressor.
She learned what a really considered review could do
and it began really selling.
"I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts,
her pockets full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but
my thoughts, and they floated light as moths among the
branches of the perfect trees."
"All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me,
the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better."
I wrote for many I wrote for about 30 years
before I ever gave a reading.
I mean, if you start when I was a kid.
Trying to find my own voice took a long enough time
and I didn't want to read till I did that.
And the first book I did
that I felt was my own voice was“Twelve Moons.”
Reading that book,
I was so enamored. Even though we were separated by gender,
even though there was at least 33 years difference
between us, I took to her
because the deep kind
of lyric presence leapt off the page for me.
I can hear that sense of rapture in her work.
People have forgotten to be ecstatic.
I mean, you could get ecstatic over
a box of matches.
They're kind of, you know, amazing.
And it's the balance with the rage, I suppose,
the emptiness.
Emptiness is never going to get us to get up
and do anything.
But ecstasy might.
Mary had an idea that every poem she wrote, she submitted
to three tests.
Does it have a spiritual purpose?
Does it have a sincere energy?
and does it have a genuine body?
I think you have to be in the world to understand
what the spiritual is about
and you have to be spiritual in order to really be able
to accept what the world is about.
We're all going to be something else,
part of something else, someday.
I mean, I certainly believe for instance,
that stones are alive.
You believe stones are alive?
I believe everything is alive.
The move to a kind of
delicious deep dive into the natural world,
can be read as a certain kind of escapism.
So when people are sort of not down with nature poetry,
one way they can sort of be like, “Eh, you know, really?”
Is like, “Hey,
are you noticing what's happening there in the cities?”
Well, I was snarky. I was a New Yorker.
I lived in the world of cement.
I was so sarcastic about Mary when I was younger
because I was so sarcastic about the Earth.
I was so detached and disassociated
and so poetry about the Earth, I actually made fun of.
She did not fit in. Her poems,
probably, to editors, felt antique
because they seemed like late Romantic poems
of a hundred years before.
She had her grievances.
She really disliked being categorized as a nature poet.
She just thought it was a silly idea.
I mean, my God, what's a nature poet? You know?
Why the great interest in nature?
One of the great concerns,
I think, is the fact that we are moving so thoroughly
to an urban environment and without experience
with the natural world,
you cannot appreciate the body
of literature which you have inherited because all the
figurative language, all the metaphors, have to do
with the natural world.
And so, there is a rift now
between people who wake up and it's daylight.
They don't wake up and see the sunrise
and how can they understand a line which says, “It is the east
and Juliet is the sun”?
She made me see the beauty that she saw definitely,
and that's really great because I'm not naturally
that's not my scene really.
I would say nature is planning
to kill you from the day you're born.
I don't know what's so great about it.
Mary wants to empty that self out
as if she could go into the woods without having a history,
without having a biography, to allow the reader
to step into that space and be her.
Once you find the language to describe the natural world,
it's hard to degrade it.
It's hard to pollute it,
but ‘nature poet’ can be a box that one does not want
to merely be confined in.
I have heard many stories about her not wanting
to participate in certain anthologies and
not wanting be to be labeled.
I do refuse to be in in women's anthologies
and people wonder why and they take offense.
I'm certainly for equality,
but the tendency of the feminist point of view
to separate, I can see nothing
for it except one thing it'll sell.
Any marketing person would say, “Hey, here's a good idea.
Let's do women cooking,
and then we'll do men cooking, then we'll do dogs cooking.”
Look, Mary was a feminist, of course she was a feminist.
She was an independent woman who loved who she wanted
to love, who wrote the poetry,
she wanted to write, who lived where she wanted to live.
I mean, come on, what is more feminist than that?
When I go and I talk about Mary as a lesbian,
it is true, I will still have a lot of people come up
to me and say, “I never knew that about her.
And I've read all of her books.” And I'm like, okay, you know.
But her love for Molly, her love for
female bodies, like her love for love
and eroticism, was always present.
And yet it did also seem to me
that she talked about it in a way
that was pretty different than a lot of the other people
that I was reading at that time.
Part of that really has to do
with extremely complicated feelings about privacy
and romantic love.
We live in a time where it's really hard for us
to not connect privacy and shame,
but she was a deeply romantic person who felt
that love was like a close to religious experience.
We were talkers about our work, our pasts, our friends,
our ideas, ordinary and farfetched.
We would often wake before there was light in the sky
and make coffee and let our minds rattle our tongues.
We would end in exhaustion and elation.
Not many nights or early mornings
later, we would do the same.
They were definitely a complete out couple,
completely everywhere,
but they weren't lesbian activists in any
possible way.
It has not come to me to write about it,
but I certainly think about it a lot.
It's very, very hard to want
to write about a particular subject like that
and have it work.
You have to have something that impels you.
I would be pleased with myself
if I wrote a poem about AIDS
and did a good job of it, but it hasn't happened.
Of course, they knew people that had AIDS.
I mean, half everybody we knew died of AIDS.
But she didn't address current events, ever
really. No, she was in the woods like a crazy
person talking to animals.
There are poets who would say, “Well, her responsibility
in that moment should have been saying she was a lesbian,
opening doors for the rest of us.”
When I think about the civic duty of a writer,
there's immediately a part of me that hates the word “civic”
and hates the word “duty.”
And I know that's funny because I'm the Poet Laureate,
but I really believe in the resistance of an artist
to be fully an artist.
She lived a life like St. Francis.
She wasn't interested in going to the world.
She was interested in opening up a space in herself
and going deep enough so that you meet everybody else.
She had someone in the formative part
of her life, in Molly Malone Cook, who took care of her.
That's a huge deal.
Molly ran the show. Definitely.
You have time, you have space, you might be so broke,
but this is the work of your life and you
and your partner have decided everything is
going to be done to protect it.
These were still really lean times.
She was 48 years old.
She had had various visiting teacher positions,
but nothing consistent.
She really was still struggling.
I was at that time going out
to the dump most mornings to buy shingles.
I was shingling the house and a friend of mine came by,
She said, “Ha, what are you doing?
Looking for your old manuscripts?”
The winners of the 1984 Pulitzer
Prizes were announced today.
They included Mary Oliver for her book of poetry,
“American Primitive.”
It was a big surprise, you know, to her
and to everyone who knew her.
Mary won the Pulitzer! So deserving and so exciting
- And you didn't know? - I knew but
my job in the morning was to go find some shingles.
Molly was very happy about it
and very happy to talk about it.
Mary, typically just sort of,
yeah, shrugged it off.
“American Primitive,” because it does win
the Pulitzer Prize, is when Mary Oliver launches into
her celebrityhood.
And I'm sorry we don't have enough chairs for everybody.
I have the opportunity this evening of presenting to you
a really exciting poet.
Thank you. I have to get used to this.
Mary Oliver has won the Pulitzer Prize for her book,
“American Primitive,” and in 1992, the National Book Award.
Mary Oliver won the National Book Award for Poetry.
So I'm a scribbler, I'm a catcher of whatever is given.
It took Mary Oliver more than 27 years of scribbling,
writing and revising
to complete the works in her award-winning book,
“New and Selected Poems.”
Think about it, not many poets’ careers blast off,
but her’s sure did.
In the wake of those two major prizes,
it was more like: “This is what I'm doing.
It has a home, it’s going to be published.”
There is nothing to me so exciting as the fact
that somebody who's not even born yet will be able
to have a whole set of emotional reactions.
"The summer day. Who made the world?
Who made the swan,
and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean 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.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how
to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed,
- how to--" - "How to stroll
through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day.
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?"
It’s great every single time. It almost I’m almost
I'm kind of like verklempt. Which is wild.
How, how?
I don't know how it all works. Whatever that life whatever
that energy is, whatever the intangible, inexplicable energy
is, that makes us go. You can feel that
and that's power.
Who made the world? Ugh, who made you?
What do you forgive the world for it’s beauty?
Everything. Can you forgive
yourself, for your own beauty?
When I read Mary's poetry, I assent to every line.
I say “Yes, yes, yes.”
And besides her text itself is full of
huge, imponderable, unanswerable questions
like “What am I supposed to do?”
If you grow up writing poetry, you don't really expect
that anybody's going to pay attention to it.
Whoever thinks that someone might write you
a fan letter about a poem,
People come over to me and start crying
and saying, “You saved my life.”
I'm sure she gets a thousand more of that kind of thing.
And I'm sure she did. She really spoke to people.
I don't think a poet like her comes along very often
and I think that poet does get found
by the people who need her.
I love the way
that you all love Mary.
I mean, it was like flies to flypaper.
Let's just be honest.
Let me be the person to say
that people were turned on by Mary Oliver.
There was that famous picture
of her sitting on a sea wall somewhere
with her sleeves rolled up.
It's like the Walt Whitman picture of
him in his loose pirate shirt.
When I saw this photo of Mary Oliver,
the way like she's looking out,
she's a little bit cruising you
in that photo, or a lot.
I looked at this person just looking out at me
and I was just like, oh my God,
I want that. Not even in like a sexual way, like I want
to be able to do that.
When we talk about queer family,
one of the things about family
is that you just have someone to emulate.
It was then Mary's career was what this couple was about.
Molly was like a police dog if a tourist came
and tried to knock on her front door.
And Molly always was “No!” to everything.
Molly wouldn't let them get anywhere near her.
She was a very tough agent,
but I think she certainly looked out for her.
Really nothing in the outside world got to Mary
unless it got to Mary through Molly.
It's weird. The more accepted and famous
and more she sold,
the less critically good the reviews were.
And I always wondered if people were mad
She was the number one poet.
- It seemed like they were. - Lots of poets are
in love with the ordinary,
but should the ordinary seem so ordinary?
It’s as if you've been promised a miracle,
yet all that lies on the tablecloth
before you is a dead mouse on a garbage can lid.
You know, Molly would get really would fume about
something like that, and Mary would just
she'd go, “huh.”
The conundrum with poetry is that sometimes
when you gain the people, you can lose the poets.
I was having a conversation with
some poets about Mary Oliver some years ago now,
and one of them said, “If you've read one Mary Oliver poem,
you've read them all.” Which was a wild statement to me.
I was that felt like a
like a perfect kind of dismissal.
For some people that simplicity is suspicious,
but also so many of us know we can't do it.
I think at a certain point I was like, okay,
I want to see more with Mary.
Like I really did want to see more.
And also knowing a little more about her, I'm like,
I know there's a lot more to her life
than just waking up in the morning
and going out for a walk. Like, what is the storm?
But again, like I haven't read all her work.
I read a lot at the beginning
and then I was like, “Okay, I get this.”
I'm getting a little critical now.
I was shocked researching that New Yorker piece.
I was shocked to discover
that Mary Oliver had never received a full length
book review in The New York Times.
And that struck me as such an indication
of the ridiculously low level of respect
that she was getting from the poetry establishment.
It's not just that people said, “Oh, her poems aren't good.”
It was like teaching a student a Mary Oliver poem would like
somehow ruin poetry.
Because like then people might start writing like
Mary Oliver. First of all, you wish, like, try it.
On the surface it looks awful easy, what she was doing,
but it's not easy.
She's going to the deepest, most contradictory places
where life and death usher from the same source.
And then she's speaking
with clear language about that mystery.
"The first fish I ever caught would not lie down
quiet in the pail but flailed
and sucked at the burning amazement of the air
and died in the slow pouring off of rainbows.
Later I opened his body
and separated the flesh from the bones and ate him.
Now the sea is in me: I am the fish,
the fish glitters in me;
we are risen, tangled together, certain
to fall back to the sea.
Out of pain, and pain, and more pain
we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished by the mystery.
People think of her walking the beaches
of Provincetown without troubling anyone
or having troubles herself
and that certainly wasn't the life that she led.
Everybody thinks Mary was this little earth mother.
Mary did not suffer fools and she caused trouble.
She was shit-stirrer. You wouldn't think she would
chain smoke. You'd think she's this healthy person
that's in the woods breathing the frog's air
or something, but no.
She smoked cigarettes like she ate
turtle eggs off the beach.
You know, she would take one with great care
and smoke that cigarette, which I begged her to stop.
I remember when she brought me to Sweet Briar College
where she taught for a while to do my spoken word show
and worked in the word “asshole” into her introduction
of me, in front of her horrified poetry purists.
Teaching young writers has also become a passion
for Oliver, and she's decided
to extend her stay at Sweet Briar for at least another year.
I don't think I've read a single poor student response.
They're extraordinary.
In the early 1990s, Mary Oliver published one
of the great poetry craft books,
the“Poetry Handbook,” and it's still a bestseller.
I'm Natalie. I'm a published poet
and this is ‘books that changed my life,’
part four.
I just picked up this book on the advice of a friend.
This is a good introduction to the different styles
and the different forms.
It has really good tips for beginners.
Just wanted to shout that out.
You've gotta know what words
sound like.
Have you ever wondered what's the difference
between a stone and a rock?
The “K.”
What advice would you give to upcoming poets as myself?
Be interested in the whole world and not just writing.
Read a whole lot.
Most important, set yourself a schedule
of writing every day.
I've written everything I know in that little book
because I didn't want to teach anymore.
She joked saying the hope was that the books could go out
and do the teaching and she could stay at home.
- Hi there, Ms. Oliver. - Dear Mary Oliver,
Dear Mary Oliver,
Do you guys remember how I'd start each class?
You’d usually do a poem.
And 90% of the time it was probably
like 94%. -We decided the whole class would
write letters to Mary Oliver.
Like eighth grade authenticity.
Dear Mary, writing
and reading poems has become an outlet for us lately as they
provided blessings and stanzas to live by.
And we have learned to appreciate poems
and fully understand their magical capabilities.
Poetry is important because it sets you free.
Have you ever lived till poetry pours out of your heart?
It's in everyone.
I've been reading your work for
awhile and it makes me smile.
I like the way you talk about life
and its virtue and meaning.
Your poems have inspired me
to do things I never thought I could do.
Your poems have inspired me to accept myself for who I am,
something I never thought I could do.
What I'm trying to say is thank you.
I wish you a day as beautiful as the poems you write.
I have little chills right now.
I mean I remember what I was going through
in eighth grade when I wrote this, and reading it
I remember what I'm referencing.
We had a conversation once about teaching
and she told me, “You know, it might be better
for you if you quit your job and moved to the woods
and wrote poetry.”
In all our time together, we were rarely separated.
Three or four times I went away to teach,
but usually M would come with me
and we simply made our home, temporarily, somewhere else.
And while I always loved the stillness I found in the fields
and the woods, our house was a different thing,
and I loved that too.
Dear Paulus, thank you for your Christmas greetings.
On Christmas morning, cold
and windy, I ran to the beach to fetch home an injured gull.
I expected him to slip the latch
and leave this world pretty quickly.
He's pretty bashed up. Yet he is still here.
Can't fly, can't walk.
But utterly responsive
and all together receptive to our attentions.
"In the morning when I came downstairs in the half-dark,
he was eager for me to lift the shade
and turn him around so he could begin looking.
He would swing his head slowly from east to west, and back,
and again, gazing slowly
and deeply. During the colorful winter sunsets,
the descent of the light,
he also turned his attention entirely from us,
and into the world."
"Dear Paulus, Molly has a developing lung tumor.
She waits patiently and without argument.
Molly looks out at the harbor
and says, cheerfully, “I’m home.
Bring me some toast and a peach, sliced.”
And with great care I do."
The feeling was no. I mean that can't happen to Molly.
Molly was suffering from emphysema
and was not spending much time out of bed
and she said, “This is the way it is with great age.”
I used to go out at night with a flashlight
and sit on a little bench
right outside the house and scribble poems.
I was just so busy during the day.
"The broken part of the wing hung now by a single tendon;
we clipped it away.
One withered foot literally fell from him, along
with the first section of leg bone,
so he was a one-winged, one-legged gull.
But still patient, attentive."
I would go over there every day. I lived
you know, half a block away, basically.
She did not have Alzheimer’s,
but if you can't get enough oxygen
in your brain, it’s just about the same thing.
I was sitting on the couch in her room
with a wonderful friend, very helpful
during that period of time, John Waters, the filmmaker.
And Molly looked at John Waters and said, “Where's Mary?
Where's Mary Oliver?”
"He was, of course, a piece of the sky.
His eyes said so. This is not fact;
this is the other part of knowing something,
when there is no proof,
but neither is there any way toward disbelief.
Imagine lifting the lid from a jar and finding it filled
not with darkness but with light.
Bird was like that. Startling, elegant, alive."
She was style, she was an old loneliness
that nothing could quite wipe away;
she was vastly knowledgeable about people, about books,
about the mind's emotions and the heart’s.
She lived sometimes in a black box of memories
and unanswerable questions, and then would come out
and frolic be feisty, and bold.
Many years ago, we did not have much income.
We had love and work and play instead.
We were talkers.
It was a 40 year conversation.
The winters were they were tough.
I spent like three or four winters there over the years,
but then I couldn't stay there forever,
it’s so desolate.
It's also a space really riddled with elegy.
There's a lot of ghosts there too.
I want to read two poems
that are about my partner, Molly Malone Cook,
or about us.
"There are these: the blue skirts
of the ocean walking in now, almost to the edge of town,
and a thousand birds, in their incredible wings
which they think nothing of,
crying out that the day is long, the fish are plentiful.
And friends, being as kind as friends can be, striving
to lift the darkness.
Forgive me, Lord of honeysuckle, of trees,
of notebooks, of typewriters,
of music,
that there are also these: the lover, the singer,
the poet asleep in the shadows."
Did she change?
Well, everybody changes when their partner
dies for their whole life.
Mary spent some time feeling
a little unmoored,
I would say.
My question is of a personal nature,
and please tell me if it's too personal.
I too am a grieving widow of a partner.
And I didn't know if you felt comfortable talking at all
about your grieving process?
Well, first you're crazy for about a year,
and do everything in excess.
You know, I'm not I'm not over it.
The amount of alcohol and cigarettes.
The drinking was crazy too, but she was headstrong,
nobody told Mary what to do ever, ever, except Molly.
How did her death change your life?
Very, very lonely.
I tried the church and that did not work.
Mary did not do well with groups
She turned to the church in the direct
aftermath of Molly's death.
But it was not a lasting relationship.
Joined the church, she joined the church 'cause she was
after the woman preacher.
That's why she joined the church.
And the poor preacher thought she was saving a soul
of a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet
and then realized she had the hots for her.
That's what happened. Everybody knows that.
This is from a letter to her friend, the poet Pat Fargnoli.
"Dear Pat, exhaustion leads one
to unexpected places and I'm going to A.A.
Do you know anything about that?
Many people show up that I wouldn't have expected.
Not that many people here in town would've expected me.
Lesson in humility."
People in the program here in Provincetown
all knew who she was.
But anonymity is anonymity.
But then I, I don't know what happened.
She stopped coming to the meetings.
She made startling choices
how to follow up on Molly, who was untoppable, in my book.
Molly had really been the guardian at the gate for
so many years, and she protected Mary's solitude,
protected her from invasive sides of fame.
She went through a hard time
and she looked around for someone to be a lover.
That was when Anne started coming around
Right from the beginning, everyone in town who was part
of the A.A. program, who knew Mary's situation
and knew Anne, was saying “This is not good.”
It was a bad vibe. Molly, I do think built a life with,
but also for her.
And that was not my sense about Anne. It really wasn't.
And I think that in that way Mary is also a good
cautionary tale.
You can be the most famous poet in the world.
Everybody can love your poems,
and you can be involved with someone
who's really bad for you.
You could hear the truck coming down the road, it was
Anne wanted to have a house in Florida.
So I flew out and I spent maybe a week with Mary.
We were packing, you know,
and I couldn't read her emotionally.
She was resolute.
I did not see any joy.
But I, I don't want to try to speak about them too much.
Very much so. We talked about it a lot.
As a matter of fact, some of our later conversations
down in Florida, she said, “I made a big mistake.”
I don't know that she regretted it. I think she missed it.
Mary wrote in a book of prose,
"I don't know whether I'm going to heaven or hell,
but I've been, I've been in heaven for the last 50 years.
Thank you Provincetown."
That was one of my frustrations with Mary's poems.
She was just presenting herself in the light.
Everyone's entitled to reveal what they want to reveal,
but not acknowledging
or wrestling with one's own shadow, feels somehow false.
Like it's not a full picture,
of a life.
My father, for example, who was young once
and blue-eyed, returns on the darkest of nights
to the porch and knocks wildly at the door,
and if I answer, I must be prepared
for his waxy face, for his lower lip
swollen with bitterness.
And so, for a long time, I did not answer,
but slept fitfully between his hours of rapping.
One of the things that's really hard about writing
about traumatic experiences, is that
you have to look at it.
And if one is a poet like Mary Oliver, you have
to go in earnestly to look at it.
I do know from my own experience that
that pressure does become inexorable.
You know, you can sort of have your defenses up
and at a certain point, you know
it comes calling, it's due.
But finally there came the night when I rose out
of my sheets and stumbled down the hall.
The door fell open
and I knew I was saved and could bear him,
pathetic and hollow, with even the least of his
dreams frozen inside him, and the meanness gone.
There's something about art. It takes a lot of energy.
And some of that energy, unfortunately, is from
wild suffering.
That energy pushes something
through a person into the world.
And I greeted him and asked him into the house,
and lit the lamp,
and looked into his blank eyes in which at last
I saw what a child must love,
I saw what love might have done had we loved in time.
Here's how I first met
When I was First Lady in California,
I kept trying to get her to come
and speak at this women's conference that I was doing.
I had discovered her, like anybody discovers her
through her poetry.
And then I started hounding her to come
to the women's conference.
Every time I would call her, she would say, “No.”
I said to her, “Look, you know,
‘The Journey’ just upended my life.
It's the most incredible thing I ever read.
My life has never been the same.”
And she was like, “So?”
Then I'd ask her again.
I was like, but Mary, “I guarantee you'll sell
30,000 books.”
She said, “I don't care. No!”
And she always just said to me, “I don't travel,
I don't leave home.
I don't speak in conferences. I don't do that.”
And I said, ‘Yes you do. Yes, you can do that.”
I think I spent six years trying to get her to come.
I know Mary Oliver's poems very well.
But on the night before my cancer surgery,
my dear friend asked me to pick a poem
out of her deck of poem cards
that would be the guide for my operation.
And the card was “The Journey.”
And I thought I knew this poem.
The first day I came out of my cocoon of cancer,
I spoke at this huge mega conference in California.
I was still bald.
I had just finished my last chemo and I had agreed to speak.
And I get there and there's 20,000 people
and I'm like, what am I doing?
And I just got up and I gave a speech about cancer
and about sexual abuse
and about the journey of what the cancer had done.
And when I walked off stage, I was walking downstairs and
I saw this woman walking up towards me who was weeping
and it was Mary Oliver.
And she threw her arms around me and she said, “Thank you.”
I was like, “No, thank you! You set me on my path.
Like, you were part of me living.”
And she goes, “No, no, no. You have set me on a path.”
If I close my eyes and think about that day,
there was just so much laughter.
I had developed a friendship with her.
Oh my God, look, look,
I would've walked right under this and by it.
I’m sure people do.
How do you know she's not dead?
Maria, tell us where we are?
Well, we're in the middle of the woods.
I was the guest editor of this “O Magazine” edition on poetry
and she was the poet that I admired the most.
And I wanted to interview her for the magazine.
I'm Maria Shriver, and I'm standing here
with the legendary Mary Oliver.
So I flew down to Florida where she was living.
That's great, Mary.
Gorgeous.
Ooh, what a shame the weather is like this.
We could be in Provincetown, right?
I'm going to have to smoke a cigarette.
Okay, then we can pause.
I felt that she was very comfortable with me,
which is perhaps why she said what she said.
And then you started this new book of yours.
“What can I say that I have not said before?” - Yeah.
Is that something that you worry about?
And I don't even think she probably thought it through.
I want to be a little braver
and more honest about my own life and -and -um -
difficulties there.
And you know, I was sexually abused.
There's a lot of damage. You know
that's the first time I've ever said that out loud.
But that's, you know that’s -
Tell me about that.
Well, that's why I wanted
to be invisible, I'm sure.
I had been interviewing people at that point
for 30, 40 years.
So I knew well enough not to go, “Oh my God, what?!”
- But I was - You were sexually abused as a child?
Very, very little,
and it wasn't until I was in my forties that I
was able to figure out that
it wasn't a giant.
I was very little.
Children forget. I mean, they don't forget,
but they forget the details.
They just don’t know why they have nightmares all the time.
Just think about that, how scary that is,
that your body is going through something
that you can't even remember. When you're young,
you block it out, particularly if it's your father,
because you can't remember.
It's so long term, it's so multi-layered.
It would've been a very different life.
Whether I would've written poetry or not, who knows?
But I did find the entire world, in looking
for something.
I got saved by poetry
and I got saved by the beauty of the world.
Mary was very clear that it wasn't going to define her.
The fact that she really didn't address it till her
seventies, she'd already determined who Mary Oliver was.
Mary, I always tell you
that “The Journey” is my all time favorite poem.
It's hard to craft your own journey when voices are
trying to pull you back.
I read it as though it had been written for me,
and I'm sure millions of other people did too.
Like, uh, many of your fans, sorry, my voice is a little -
The one poem that I was really hoping you
might read was “The Journey,” which means a lot
to my family and my brother who couldn't be here, but who -
- I will read it. - Thank you.
Thank you for asking. Of course, I will.
"One day you finally knew what you had to do,
and began, though the voices
around you kept shouting their bad advice
though the whole house began to tremble
and you felt the old tug at your ankles. “Mend my life!”
each voice cried."
"But you didn't stop. You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very
foundations, though their melancholy was terrible.
It was already late enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen branches and stones.
But little by little, as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice which you slowly
recognized as your own, that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do the only thing you could do
determined to save the only life you could save."
You know, she said, “I had two choices when Molly died.”
I would either go buy a little cabin in the woods
and go inside with all my books, write poems,
and see nobody and shut the door, and
that would be that. Or I said
I will unlock all the doors.
And so she really accelerates her public readings in the
wake of Molly's death.
It is a wild
and precious privilege to introduce to you tonight
for a singular and heartfelt experience.
Please welcome our national treasure
and the guardian of Earth, Mary Oliver.
You know, she never became impossible to criticize,
but she became super impossible to ignore.
Thank you.
Thank you
Here you have someone who is very close
to living a hermit's life, who then goes out
to these auditoriums and fills them up.
Mary became a kind of icon for the hermit within each of us.
You know, Mary was a genuinely humble person,
and so this is a little bit difficult to say,
but I don't think that she was surprised by her popularity.
People who don't know anything about poetry
and who don't need to know
when they are in a state of being torn open
by life, and they need someone to speak to
that state of the soul, it's Mary Oliver.
What is the meaning of life? Where can I go for solace?
How do I find happiness?
How do I cope with sorrow?
It's a Mary Oliver poem
that people find themselves held by
and they don't need a critic to explain to them why.
Mary Oliver's first book of poems
was reviewed in this publication by James Dickey,
who dumped all over it.
The last laugh has been Oliver’s.
"Forty-two years after Dickey's review,
She is far and away this country's bestselling poet."
Dwight Garner, The New York Times.
The public at that point was also really hungry
to know about her.
What about you would surprise us?
I don't -I don't know. I was pretty sad yesterday
after the football game.
The Giants have won the Super Bowl.
That was surprising.
You have said what a poem is not.
You say, “A poem is not the world.”
Oh, I'm changing my ideas about that.
I'm in trouble. I went a little crazy at one reading
a few months ago and
started shouting that I wanted my poems
to be inflammatory.
We're all better people for literature.
Meanwhile, the world burns.
Our enjoyment of the natural world is, in the long run,
political.
The poem that I think about the most is,
“Was it Necessary to Do It?"
And it's a poem about an ant being stepped on.
"I tell you that ant is very alive!
Look at how he fusses at being stepped on."
The reason this poem matters so much to me
is because so many people that I know,
know what it is to be the ant.
Whether it's people of color in this country,
whether it's women, whether it's folks from the LGBTQIA+
community, whether it's disabled people,
and the assumption is that either the ant does not exist
because it is not seen, or that the ant is easy to kill.
And so what she does in the poem is says, you can tell by
how the ant fusses at being stepped on,
which means the ant is not dead.
The ant is fighting for its life.
The thing I'm most worried about actually is
what I consider a most serious ongoing devastation
of the Earth, which we need both spiritually and materially
and we're not dealing with it.
I worry about little children.
Are they going to know what the Earth looked like?
As I was leaving, she kind of blew kisses
and said, “I love you” and goodbye.
But the last thing that she said was, “No moping.
No moping!” To me.
You could look at every poem that she's written
and say, is the underlying message here
“No moping”?
“Meanwhile the world goes on.”
Meanwhile, everything is happening.
Meanwhile, the wild geese.
"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.
Tell me about despair,
yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun
and the clear pebbles
of the rain are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies
and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things."
You can read it a hundred times
and hear it differently every time.
Who is the you? And what does good even mean?
It's a wild goose. It’s the wild geese.
We think of wild as chaotic,
but wild is harmonious with the wilderness
which is where we all came from.
We're born wild.
I think people feel a lot of pressure to be good
by external metrics.
One of the things she learned by being dedicated
to nature was that that question doesn't follow
deer and it doesn't follow bees.
Why are we putting this on ourselves?
How many people here love dogs?
Yay. Yay.
Aren't they something! Who needs language?
What I get from her poetry is a sense
that you belong here in this world
and the evidence is how you are compelled
by the beauty of it.
That beauty of the world is an accusation
that you are withholding your own beauty,
by being good
as opposed to being yourself.
Mary kept finding the light
and realizing she did not have to be good.
You could not contain her any more than you could
contain the season outside.
The cycle continues.
The fear of death,
as long as death is understood
to be a cessation, it's quite logical.
But if one understands it to be a change,
then it becomes quite interesting.
How do you know when a poem is done?
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.
A cottage of darkness.
The concept of death is one
that is so impenetrable,
but for the poet to shrink it down
to a cottage, makes it something we can emotionally handle.
Here's a poem for today by Mary Oliver entitled
“When Death Comes.”
"When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes
and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me,
and snaps the purse shut;"
"when death comes like the measle-pox;
when death comes like an iceberg
between the shoulder blades, I want to step through the door
full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like,
that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything as a brotherhood
and a sisterhood, and I look upon time
as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity
as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music
in the mouth, tending, as all music does, toward silence,"
"and each body a lion of courage,
and something precious to the earth. When it's over,
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 it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply
having visited this world."
What a preparation, what a freedom, to not go into fear.
“Eternity as another possibility.”
Some reader, someone is facing this moment right now
and I feel as though there's such consolation
in thinking about a passage
and thinking about this moment right here
while we are alive and breathing.
A major American poet, Mary Oliver, has died.
Oliver authored more than 15 poetry and essay collections.
She died today of lymphoma at her home in Florida
at 83 years old.
Her work will live on.
We know she believed we all will, just as a beloved,
buried dog will sprout a rose bush next spring.
There are these talismanic artists who, as much
as they meant to us while they were alive,
as they're leaving the planet, we turn toward the fullness
of their living in this new way.
And we see, oh, you've offered us a way to be,
you've never demanded that we respect you.
You weren't shoved down our throats at school.
You were just there, shining.
The world is just waiting waiting
for you to pay attention.
Poetry, especially Mary Oliver’s poetry, invites you
to pay attention to the beauty of the world
and to see in that, you're not divorced from it.
You're your own grasshopper. You know what I mean?
Mary Oliver was the real thing.
A beautiful bohemian,
a gay woman who didn't fit in her own minority,
an unabashed eccentric who helped me understand poetry.
There are a lot of stories that I could tell you
that you didn't know to ask me about.
She was very private
and I really protect my conversations with Mary.
If I thought of something that
she wouldn't want me to tell you,
I wouldn't tell you.
One more thing:
when she went into the woods
during that week when she was on the lam,
she met somebody in the woods whose name was Lenny,
and he was also on the lam.
He was like she was 17-year-old, 18-year-old kid.
Something had happened, he got into some kind of trouble
and he was afraid to go back into town
and they were there together.
Two very different people.
Years later she said, “I wonder what happened to Lenny?”
And I said, “You know Mary, there's a machine
where we could find that out fairly quickly.”
He had died only a few days before.
He had gone back to town and lived his life there.
He had been in the service. He had many grandchildren.
He went back into the world
after spending that week in the woods with her.
And she went off to live her destiny.
For Mary, the woods are neither good nor bad.
The woods are just the place where we gain the space
to consider what it is that we want.
My wife sent me this the other day.
- We send each other Mary Oliver. - Oh, what'd she send?
I'll show you. She put it on the family chain. Here it is.
“Teach the children.” Do you know this?
"We don't matter so much, but the children do.
Show them daisies and the pale hepatica.
Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen.
The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts,
the moccasin flowers
And the frisky ones inkberry lamb’s-quarters, blueberries.
And the aromatic ones
rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint
to put in their pockets as they go to school.
Give them fields and the woods
and the possibility of the world salvaged from
the lords of profit.
Stand them in the stream, head them upstream,
rejoice as they learn to love the green space they live in,
its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.
Attention is the beginning of devotion."
She’s pretty good.