American Poets | Our Right To Write

I recently discovered the engaging and captivating poetry of Mary Oliver, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet and nature lover, whose influences included Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau.

Her love of nature began as a child in Ohio, where she escaped the drama of her dysfunctional family and found solace in the woods nearby. This love bloomed into a passion for both nature and poetry, which continued throughout the rest of her life.

She later worked at Steepletop, the estate of Edna St. Vincent Millay, and continued on to study at Ohio State University and Vassar College. Her first collection of poems, No Voyage and Other Poems, was published in 1963 when she was 28. She held several university teaching posts, as well as residencies in the northeast during the 1980’s and 1990’s.

She met her partner, photographer Mary Malone Cook in the late 1950’s, and eventually, the pair moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts where they lived together until Cook’s death in 2005. Mary eventually moved to South Florida, where she remained until her death in 2019.

She valued her privacy and did few interviews, preferring instead to let her poetry speak for itself. Her body of work is extensive, as is her list of honors and awards. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for the book “American Primitive“, as well as The National Book Award for Poetry in 1992 for “New and Selected Poems”.

Here are the first few lines of “Wild Geese” which first caught my attention…

And these lines, from “A Summer’s Day”…

“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 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?”

Her thoughts on creativity drew me in as well…

“ I think we’re creative all day long. We have to have an appointment to have that work out on the page. Because the creative part of us gets tired of waiting, or just gets tired.”