I *Heart* Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver is reading tonight in Seattle, at Town Hall, a venue that seats about 3000 people and is SOLD OUT (correction: the hall seats 900 people; still that's a hell of a lot for a poetry reading). I know her poetry (or at least a specific poem and its "dead kitten poetics") has been pilloried of late in the blogosphere. But I think she has written a lot of terrific poems. You have to read her for what she is, a kind of Romantic/Transcendentalist. She looks to nature for instruction on the self. Nature is just one big teeming pool of metaphors for her spriritual growth. Occasionally she comes off as preachy; but often she is quite illuminating. For more on this see the Mark Doty essay here.

Here's a poem that I think could be her ars poetica. It is one of my favorite Oliver poems:

The Lilies Break Open Over the Dark Water


Inside
that mud-hive, that gas-sponge,
that reeking
leaf-yard, that rippling

dream-bowl, the leeches'
flecked and swirling
broth of life, as rich
as Babylon,

the fists crack
open and the wands
of the lilies
quicken, they rise

like pale poles
with their wrapped beaks of lace;
one day
they tear the surface,

the next they break open
over the dark water.
And there you are
on the shore,

fitful and thoughtful, trying
to attach them to an idea —
some news of your own life.
But the lilies

are slippery and wild — they are
devoid of meaning, they are
simply doing,
from the deepest

spurs of their being,
what they are impelled to do
every summer.
And so, dear sorrow, are you.