Skip to main content

Three clear poems by mary oliver

 Mary Oliver (1935-2019)

 

Oliver lived a profoundly simple life: she went on long walks through the woods and along the shoreline nearly every day, foraging for both greens and poetic material.

With her consistent, shimmering reverence for flora and fauna, Oliver made herself one of the most beloved poets of her generation. She worked in the Romantic tradition of Wordsworth or Keats, but she also infused a distinctly American loneliness into her words—the solitary reflections of Thoreau gazing over a lake, or of Whitman peering from the Brooklyn Ferry at the shuffling tides below his feet. Hers were not poems about isolation, though, but about pushing beyond your own sense of emotional quarantine, even when you feel fear. Everywhere you look, in Oliver’s verse, you find threads of connectivity.

-- Obituary from the New Yorker, January 19, 2019

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/mary-oliver-helped-us-stay-amazed

 

Moments

 

There are moments that cry out to be fulfilled.

Like, telling someone you love them.

Or giving your money away, all of it.

 

Your heart is beating, isn’t it?

You’re not in chains, are you?

 

There is nothing more pathetic than caution

when headlong might save a life,

even, possibly, your own.

 

-- From Felicity (2015)

                                                                     ***

 

Song for taking chances, plug for spontaneous acts

 

                                                                     ***

 

The World I Live In

 

I have refused to live

locked in the orderly house of

reasons and proofs;

The world I live in and believe in

is wider than that. And anyway.

what’s wrong with Maybe?

 

You wouldn’t believe what once or

twice I have seen. I’ll just

tell you this:

only if there are angels in your head will you

ever, possibly, see one.

 

-- From Felicity (2015)

                                                       ***

 

The compelling pull of not-knowing – Keats’ negative capability – being comfortable in ambiguity (inside maybe)

 

                                                       ***

 

Believing is seeing

I’m reminded of Wordsworth –

The mind is lord and master—outward sense

The obedient servant of her will.

 

-- from The Prelude


                                                     ***


Do the Trees Speak?

 

Do the trees speak back to the wind

When the wind offers some inivitational comment?

As some of us do, do they also talk to the sun?

I believe so, and if such belief need rest on

              evidence, let me just say, Sometimes it’s

              an earful.

 

But there’s more.

 

If you can hear the trees in their easy hours

Of course you can also hear them later,

              crying out at the sawmill.

 

-- From Felicity (2015)

                                                                     ***

 

The poet hears music – poem about listening, being ear-full

 

                                                                     ***

 

But there’s more – like in the first poem - The world I live in and believe in / is wider than that

 

                                                                     ***

 

The tree is a sentient being, just like us – they cry out at the sawmill

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

From Academy to the Street, From Poetry To Prose

From academy to the street, from poetry to prose - Nicanor Parra – ‘My own antipoems use this blank verse. I’ve often been asked what an antipoem is and the most frequent response I’ve given, without realising  what I was saying is – “an antipoem is quite simple a dramatic utterance”, and a dramatic utterance, we would have to add, is a Shakespearean blank verse. Or rather, it is a hendecasyllable that lengthens and shortens, and that oscillates between the academy, the street and the fairground.   I’ve always worked with these elements: I’ve even managed to combine verse with eleven syllables and one with one syllable, and verses with prose. I thought it was a great invention of mine, but the Elizabethans were already working with these methods – Shakespeare used them in King Lear , where a large percentage of the work is written in prose, without us fully knowing what is verse and what is prose. This is very important: we could say that they are prosaic verses, or poetic verse’
Post a Comment
Read more

Breaking Heads - Two Rompecabezas From Nicanor Parra

  PUZZLE by Nicanor Parra   I give no one the right. I love a piece of rag. I shift tombs back and forth.   I shift tombs back and forth. I give no one the right. I'm a ridiculous sort In the light of the sun, The plague of soda fountains Dying of rage.   I am a hopeless case, My own hairs accuse me On the bargain altar The machines give no pardons.   I laugh from behind a chair, my face fills with flies.   I am the one who can’t say what he means Talking in long rows of what.   I stutter, With my foot touches a sort of foetus.   What are these stomachs for? Who made up this mess?   It's best thing is not to let on. Thinking one thing I think something else. (Translated by W.S. Merwin) Rompecabezas   No doy a nadie el derecho. Adoro un trozo de trapo. Traslado tumbas de lugar.   Traslado tumbas de lugar. No doy a nadie el derecho. Yo soy un tipo ridículo A los rayos del sol, Azote de las fuen
Post a Comment
Read more

The Strange and Compelling Inner Life of Clarice Lispector

Dedication - Cuando a la casa del lenguaje se le vuela el tejado y las palabras no guarecen, yo hablo When the house of language has its roof blown off and words do not shelter, I speak - fellow Latin American writer and contemporary, Alejandra Pizarnik, "Fragmentos para dominar el silencio” (Fragments to overcome silence)   ---   “ALL THE WORLD BEGAN WITH A YES. ONE MOLECULE SAID YES TO ANOTHER MOLECULE and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I don’t know why, but I do know that the universe never began. Make no mistake, I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort” - From The Hour Of The Star (1977)   ---   When I read Clarice, I’m reminded of Montaigne - "I continually observe myself, I take stock of myself, I taste myself … I roll about in myself” Maurice Merleau-Ponty described Montaigne as someone who put "a consciousness astonished
Post a Comment
Read more