Tag Archives: Mary Oliver

“One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice –”

Mary Oliver’s poem “The Journey” continues, “though the whole house / began to tremble / and you felt the old tug / at your ankles . . .” The journey she describes didn’t stop, even though it was “a wild … Continue reading

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“Lately I’ve found myself reaching for the books of certain familiar writers, whose own zest and energy offer some kindly remedy to my condition.”

Perhaps you can relate to this: while I enjoy the holidays, I also am running low on the “zest and energy” that Mary Oliver describes in this essay. Her solution to this problem is to reconnect with familiar writers. Her … Continue reading

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“There is a notion that creative people are absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations.”

The poet Mary Oliver continues: “It is, hopefully, true.” She argues that interruptions and schedules and errands are the enemies of creative work. I’ve been thinking a lot about the level of concentration that writing require. I’m working with writers … Continue reading

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“For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.”

The poet Mary Oliver died this week, and I’m convinced that if we all would take a break to read her poetry, we would be strengthened by it. The level of anger – about the shut-down, the bickering, the brutal … Continue reading

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“I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak – to be company.”

The school year is drawing to a close now, and so for me it’s time to revisit my goals and consider the extent to which we met them.  On the top of my list is the wish that students will … Continue reading

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“Is the soul solid, like iron?”

The poet Mary Oliver continues: “Or, is it tender and breakable, like the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?” With these questions, Oliver opens the poem “Some Questions You Might Ask,” which has inspired artists, videographers, … Continue reading

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“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

Much like Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, this collection of elegant essays by the poet Mary Oliver is for those who “are not trying to help the world go around, but … Continue reading

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Best of 2015 Books

2015 has been a wonderful year for publishers and readers. My “Best of 2015” list consists of the books that I am most likely to read again. In the memoir category, Norway’s Karl Ove Knausgaard’s fourth volume of My Struggle … Continue reading

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“Poems arrive ready to begin. Poets are only the transportation.”

So often, I see my students take an adversarial stance when they sit down to write. They use phrases such as “grinding it out” and “forcing it” to describe how they work. Sometimes that’s been my experience, too. But does … Continue reading

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“”Understand, I am always trying to figure out what the soul is, and where hidden, and what shape…”

I have always felt more at home with questions than with answers, and I gravitate toward poets who explore rather than explain. Mary Oliver, one of my favorites, writes in this poem, “I believe I will never quite know.  Though … Continue reading

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“…the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting…”

Today, Thanksgiving Day, should not end before we think about the writers who have  changed us. For me, the one who floats to the top this year is Mary Oliver. It’s hard not to say “wow” after reading a poem like “Wild Geese” .  You might expect it … Continue reading

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