Through reading Roger Housden's extraordinary "Ten Poems..." anthologies (starting with Ten Poems to Change Your Life) I have become aware of the poems of Mary Oliver. (OK, I'm slow... Google shows over 52,000 hits for her name. At least I got there eventually.) My first impression was of an impatient Walt Whitman: a combination of transcendent vision with a fierce and uncompromising urgency. These are Emergency Broadcast System messages to one's inner heart: save the only life you can: your own. Consider the opening of The Journey:
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.
But the message is not always a call to action: here are the opening lines of her Mockingbirds:
This morning
two mockingbirds
in the green field
were spinning and tossing
the white ribbons
of their songs
into the air.
I had nothing
better to do
than listen.
I mean this
seriously.
As I read more of Mary Oliver, I have come to reallize that those first few poems that I encountered in no way define or constrain her. There are many sides to Oliver's work: romantic, visionary, organic, mimetic, mythic; above all grounded in nature. And yet I find myself particularly drawn to these direct, imperative pieces: Journey, the shocking West Wind 2, the absolution of Wild Geese, or the exhortation of Have You Ever Tried To Enter The Long Black Branches?, with its blunt question:
Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
Well? Are you?
Posted by geoff2 at November 8, 2004 11:27 PM>Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
Nope.
I'm avoiding listening to everyone telling me what I shoudn't do.
That's all right then......
Posted by: Geoff Arnold at November 9, 2004 11:41 PMI (being the fan of haiku that I am, think mockingbirds would have been stronger for losing the last versicle.
But I like it.
TK
Posted by: Terry Karney at November 11, 2004 12:30 PMI have "are you breathing just a little.... on my desk at work to see everyday.
Another favorite excerpt of a poem of hers is:
"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 visted this world"
Posted by: Lori at June 22, 2005 11:09 AMUm that was very interesting?
Posted by: Jennalee at September 2, 2005 11:10 PM