Mary Oliver, Halfway Through

I'm nearly done with Oliver's New and Selected Poems, Volume One. For me, it's a lot of lyric poetry to read at once. I was impressed, and a little horrified, when Dave Bonta undertook to read and review a poetry book every day this April. A little like someone vowing to eat three cheesecakes at a sitting. But I've gone along reading probably five to fifteen poems per day without bursting my poetry stomach.

I've started memorizing my favorite poem so far, “Some Herons,” but I'm finding it heavy going, with no rhyme and no regular meter to help me. And it makes me a little sad: even if I succeed in nailing this poem, I'll never have much of Oliver in my head, as I have Shakespeare or Blake. She'll always be in her books, indistinct and out of focus unless I have the text in my hands. I don't much miss those tricks of the poetic trade, otherwise, and I understand why modern poets feel that the extra ornamentation is not worth the cost, or even that it's just too frilly and fussy. But to me the consummation of love affairs with poets has always been memorizing their work. With Oliver, with most of the moderns, it's just not going to happen, not much.

Oh, she irritates me occasionally. I get tired of her consternation that animals prey on each other, and also of the “animals are so innocent and egoless and I wish I was like them!” poem, which appears in a variety of forms. The animals I know best -- dogs, cats, and crows -- are not at all free from ego, worry, or social anxiety. I've seen them get their dignity offended, try to impress their peers, harbor resentment. But I'm not surprised that Oliver romanticizes them this way, because if she has a weakness, it's that she stands on her dignity and innocence. She's not willing to do much clowning, and when she does confess, she confesses to things such as not giving as much money to a beggar as maybe she should have. C'mon, Mary. Do you never eat too much ice cream, covet pretty undies, watch trash television? Maybe not: but taking on the sins and absurdities of your people is actually part of the job description of a poet. It's not a part she does very well.

But. Her sense of beauty is intense. The herons' swamp:

The water
was the kind of dark silk

that has silver lines
shot through it
when it is touched by the wind

or is splashed upward
in a small, quick flower
by the life beneath it.

And even if she's unwilling to clown, she's by no means humorless. The first heron in the swamp is

an old Chinese poet,
hunched in the white gown of his wings

And the second to arrive is a “a blue preacher”:

The preacher
made his difficult landing,
his skirts up around his knees

If you know herons, their solemnity and stiffness, their odd combination of grace and gawkiness, you have to laugh at this accuracy. Oliver's eye is perfect. She misses nothing, glosses nothing over.

She's most famous, I guess, for her sententious poems, such as “Some Questions You Might Ask,” in which she fails to understand why only human beings are supposed to have souls -- the face of the moose is as sad / as the face of Jesus, she says, and why should I have it and not the anteater / who loves her children? I like those, but the ones I've enjoyed most have been pure description, or ones where the lesson, if any, is oblique – say “Rice,” in which she implores the reader, for reasons obscure but to me compelling, to go far away from the white tablecloth and lift a handful of wet mud; or “Crows”:

wherever you arrive
they'll be there first,

glossy and rowdy
and indistinguishable.
The deep muscle of the world.

Of course, I have twenty more years of her poetry to read, and I will not be surprised if she surprises me. But I'm not sure if I'm going to go straight on to that, or hop over to another poet for a bit. Probably hop. Maybe Elizabeth Bishop is next?

The Ohio Voice

Around the upper Great Lakes – Minnesota, Michigan – the rural people speak in a quick clipped flat deadpan, precise and quiet: Norwegian with the sing-song erased. But you get as far as Ohio, and a trace of the South creeps in, at odd moments: sometimes a syllable will hang, and change tone. There's a little ferocity and a little languor in it.

Sometime in the late 1970s Oliver finds her Ohio voice. She drops the Yeats, around the same time that she drops the capitals at the start of her lines:

. . . the rain, everybody's brother,
won't help. And the wind all these days
flying like ten crazy sisters everywhere
can't seem to do a thing. No one but me,
and my hands like fire, . . .

It's exciting to watch, to see someone settle into their native idiom. You have to go sit at the masters' feet, but you also at some point have to say, “screw the masters: this is how we talked at home.”

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Patching my life back together, doing things I should have done a while ago. Catching up. The intensity of my love just grows. Nothing contains it or dampens it. Maybe it will burn up my whole life, and leave nothing behind. I hope so.

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Thanks for the new suggestions, here, by mail, on facebook! I'll update the report post in a day or two with the new arrivals.

He Starts To Read

So I indulged myself and bought it, Mary Oliver's New and Selected Poems, Volume One. And opening it I was perplexed, as I have been before. I don't know the conventions of modern poetry books. But there is no introduction, by her or anyone else. The blurbs on the back are the only markers. No side door into this book. No shady walk where you could perch a while, study the house, watch how other people go in and out. You have to walk straight up to the front door. There's nothing to do but walk in and read the poems.

But at once, there's trouble. The book is backwards. The first section is called New Poems, though of course this is – by the standards of this queer unfamiliar world – an old book; the new poems are from (1991-1992). All right. The fans who had been following wanted her new poems right away; I'll just skip to the next section, and come back to the new poems at the end. I want to read her as I read Shakespeare or Shelley, from beginning to end.

But no, it's not set up that way. The whole book runs backwards, so that the oldest poems are at the back. Stubbornly, I go to the last section and read the poems from the 1960s, then back up to the poems from the 1970s. But I'm aware that the publisher and I – and maybe the poet and I? -- are at odds. They want me to read the poems from newest to oldest; I want to read from oldest to newest. I want front matter (where did she grow up? Where did she go to school? Who did she take as mentors?) and they don't think I should have it. I'm reminded of why I don't ordinarily like reading modern novels: I find it tiresome now to pretend that the author doesn't exist and that I don't have an ordinary human curiosity about her. I don't want to gaze at a well-wrought urn: I want to have a conversation. Or at least read a diary. I've been spoiled, maybe, by blogging. Or humanized.

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She whispers. She's a very quiet poet: she stands there a long time beside you before she starts, and you have to attend, because she's not going to seize your attention. She's not going to frighten you, or entice you, or tease you. Just that quiet voice. In those early days, I see, she had been reading her Shakespeare and her Yeats. She has a lovely controlled iambic pentameter, the most unforced feeling American blank verse that I've ever read, maybe. I count out “Going to Walden” because I'm not quite sure: I think it's regular, but it's so idiomatic I have a hard time believing it.

Going to Walden is not so easy a thing
As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult
Trick of living, and finding it where you are.

Sure enough. No more metrical liberties than Shakespeare takes. I could memorize this. And I see that the lines all begin with capital letters. Does she abandon that later? I skip backwards (forwards) a little, and sure enough, she changes over to the new style late in the 1970s. I have mixed feelings about the abandonment of capital letters at the beginning of lines. Sometimes I think it's caving in to prosification: the sentence rules the poem now, instead of the line. But other times I think it's simply sensible. After all, the line is already there, in front of your nose: you don't need another marker for it. The little hope that fluttered – that Oliver would prove a rebel to fashion in this matter – vanishes. She's not the sort to make a fuss about that kind of thing. Once again, I have the feeling that I'm childish, unruly, out of order, gauche, in the world of modern poetry.

But she has me. She has me at the second stanza of the very first poem I read. She's obviously drunk on Yeats, which is right and proper for a young poet in the 1960s:

Now of all voyagers I remember, who among them
Did not board ship with grief among their maps?--
Till it seemed men never go somewhere, they only leave
Wherever they are, when the dying begins.

I love this poem, I love all these poems, in fact, and I can see already why she would have recurred so often as a favorite poet among people in my circle. She's the quintessential second-wave feminist. She doesn't want entry into the masculine world of conquest and glory. She doesn't want to ditch Ariadne on the beach and go questing: she wants to pay the costs of sitting still in one place, and finding out what home might be.