Mary Oliver (with Tristan)

Tristan was so kind as to agree to read one of my all-time Comfort Poems, the simple yet indomitable Wild Geese

& he bodied it!! As Kyle said “Hearing You do not have to be good is like listening to the opening bars of a cover of your favorite song.”

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Here’s Tristan’s (stunning) reading of Such Singing in the Wild Branches:

Listen, everyone has a chance.
Is it spring, is it morning?
Are there trees near you,
and does your own soul need comforting?
Quick, then – open the door and fly on your heavy feet; the song
may already be drifting away.

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“Helping the traveler, 1965” Oliver, photographed by her partner Molly Malone Cook.

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Me & Mary with our fave shells <3

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I first read The Summer Day during the fall of my freshman year of college in a 201: Intro to Creative Writing class that set me on the path I’m walking now, pursuing an MFA in poetry while teaching a course of the same title (for the 3rd year in a row!!)

It liberated something in me, and she kindled a candle that’s been burning quietly but steadily in my gut ever since. I’ll always be grateful to my professor-mentor at the time, Leah Green, for introducing me to Oliver and Annie Dillard and many other writing ancestors/contemporaries who’ve guided my spiritual-writing practice.

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I based my undergraduate English thesis on queer eroticism in Oliver’s work. I referred back to Audre Lorde’s definition: “The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.” Oliver wrote:

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted—
each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,
whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.

It was fascinating to weave personal narrative with queer theory with critical analysis and to unpack how a poet sometimes reduced to “just writing about birds” embedded a lesbian worldview and ethos of survival into all of her ecologically-minded poetry. Sexual abuse survivor, sapphic icon, her legacy is expansive. Her legacy is attention.

In Winter Hours, she said, “And as with prayer, which is a dipping of oneself toward the light, there is a consequence of attentiveness to the grass itself, and the sky itself, and to the floating bird. I too leave the fret and enclosure of my own life. I too dip myself toward the immeasurable.”

I came to feel immeasurable gratitude to her. I won a departmental award with a small cash prize for this paper (🤑), but more importantly, I got the chance to live inside the riches of her words, carrying my copy of Selected poems into the woods of the Blue Ridge Mountains, reading it by creek.

I’ve read her beside the Atlantic, to friends and family members, to a lover, in the car, in beds, with a cat in my lap, all by myself, in coffee shops, in libraries, in the middle of the night when I could not sleep, glowing in the grass under bright sun in utter peace.

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Pumpkin lulled to sleep by his favorite collection

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She nudges the doors to the enclosure around my heart. It’s been a pleasure sharing her with my 201 students, many of whom adore her and have prior relationships to her work.

Every morning in Poetry I, we begin with a student sharing a poem of their choice. Sarah recently read Dogfish, and it blew me away. I wanted to cancel class and go home after that, because how do you follow this up?

(Would I had recordings of their poem-readings!) Here’s my (lesser) version:

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I never walk away from hearing Mary Oliver without feeling refreshed. Like I’ve gone to church and taken communion or drunk a glass of still water sitting on a wood table and reflecting sunlight from an open window. Like I’ve taken my crumbs of joy and paid attention to them and told about it and now they are not crumbs. They’re miles and miles of cake. Honey at the table.

Don’t Hesitate:

Honey at the Table:

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She died on my 19th birthday, and on that day I memorialized her by reading and re-reading When Death Comes. It brought to tears to my eyes to know that all her life she was a bride married to amazement. That she took the world into her arms like a bridegroom before it took her back into its lap forever.

^plz read this at my funeral.

Sleeping in the Forest:

The shape of this one just drives me crazy.

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Every day I wake up and I think about her words, “It is a serious thing / just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.” On days I’ve felt more broken than alive it was the serious simplicity of her voice that made me fresh.

I think, “What will [I] do with [my] one wild and precious life?”

I think of her sleeping in the forest, walking in the woods. I think of her holding her dog and looking at paintings of Blue Horses. I think of her running away from an abusive home and finding love with her partner, photographer Molly Malone Cook (fun fact: they met in the 50s at Steepletop, the home of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay)

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Here’s my pic of a Millay quote found “in the wild”, aka Greenfield Lake Park.

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In the gorgeous tribute book Mary wrote after Molly’s passing (after forty years together), she says the following:

“It has frequently been remarked, about my own writings, that I emphasize the notion of attention. This began simply enough: to see that the way the flicker flies is greatly different from the way the swallow plays in the golden air of summer. It was my pleasure to notice such things, it was a good first step.

But later, watching M. when she was taking photographs, and watching her in the darkroom, 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. An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter.

Such openness and empathy M. had in abundance, and gave away freely… I was in my late twenties and early thirties, 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. Then M. instilled in me this deeper level of looking and working, of seeing through the heavenly visibles to the heavenly invisibles. I think of this always when I look at her photographs, the images of vitality, hopefulness, endurance, kindness, vulnerability… We each had our separate natures; yet our ideas, our influences upon each other became a rich and abiding confluence.”

(Stab me in the heart !)

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Thanks to Mary Oliver, I can wake up to light pouring through my bedroom window and invoke the prayer, “Hello, sun in my face. / Hello, you who make the morning / and spread it over the fields…Watch, now, how I start the day / in happiness, in kindness.”

Thank you to Tristan and thank you for reading/listening!

XOXO Gigi