Abstract
am sensual in order be spiritual.--Oliver, Winter Hours In the poems Mary Oliver writes and the manner in which she has chosen live her life, it clear that the poet's vocation consists of attending the world, which for her a sacred home. With the vitality and second sight of a mystic, Oliver proclaims that inside the bright of poppies is an invitation / happiness, / and that happiness / / when it's done right, / a kind of holiness, / palpable and redemptive (Poppies Blue Iris 45). For nearly fifty years, in her art Oliver has celebrated this kind of happiness--which she locates in the daily workings of the earth--and with gratitude and reverence she has been redeemed by her love for the earth again and again, declaring that day / I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth / of the ideas of God (So Every Day, Red Bird 70). Oliver's ability sustain a voice of joy, of true ecstatic fervor, remarkable and rare in a postmodern age that celebrates irony and cynicism, and like so many of the poets she calls upon and descended from--Whitman and Blake and Emerson and Hopkins and Shelley and Keats, all unabashed lovers of the spirit--she sees her writing as a quest toward different ways of knowing, seeking, as she says in Bone, to figure out / what the is, / and where hidden, / and what shape (Why I Wake Early 4). Yet in the course of a poetic lifetime that includes winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Oliver continues live an astonishingly humble existence, characterizing herself as a woman of no special courage Oliver describes her ritualized writing schedule as Everyday--a little conversation with God, or his envoy / the tall pine, or the grass-swimming cricket (The Leaf and the Cloud 9). Her daily practice of rising early and entering the woods or walking the beaches that surround Provincetown at the far edge of Cape Cod's turning spit may seem unremarkable the poet, but for her audience--which itself quite unusual for its size and devotion in an era of diminishing poetry sales and readers--such journeys into the elemental beginning of day are holy work, a kind of communion they yearn read about in their poet's missives sent back from her time spent studying envoy. In Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature, John Elder claims that Poetry, like faith, depends upon the substance of things hoped for and illuminates the evidence of things not seen (217). At every turn, Oliver uses poetry explore her own faith and her own faith create a poetry that can only be described as a fusion of Transcendental, Buddhist, and Christian thought grounded firmly in the earth, which Oliver repeatedly avows God's body. Through her art the poet reaches outward in language, as well as in body, embrace a particular flower or tree, a dog or deer, or the very ocean itself, which slips through her hands like the Holy Ghost. As she explains in On Thy Wondrous Works I will Meditate it not hard understand where body is, it everywhere and everything; shore and the vast fields of water, the accidental and the intended over here, over there. And I bow down participate and attentive. (Thirst 57) What draws her participation and attention the firm conviction, shared with her beloved Emerson, that we are all part or particle of God and like Saint Francis of Assisi, she chooses not elevate humans as the sole possessor of the soul. In the essay Staying Alive Oliver interrupts herself boldly say, in italics, believe everything has a soul (Blue Pastures 63), and this belief--perhaps Oliver's sole dogma or doctrine (1)--continually carries her out the door and into the sacrament of the world's wild beauty. Dogma or doctrine sounds so stern, so rigid, however, and be fair Oliver, her conviction appears be far less about some hard-earned catechism, learned and recited dutifully, and far more about joyful play, about the spontaneous music of discovery she hears as she strides through a field or sits beneath the boughs of a hemlock. …
Published Version
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