MARY OLIVER

Aizenman[photo] - a young Mary Oliver New York Times

It's the birthday of poet Mary Oliver  born in Maple Heights, Ohio (1935). She had an unhappy childhood and was sexually abused as a very young girl. She spent most of her time outside, wandering around the woods, reading and writing poems. She once said to a reporter: "I don't talk about my childhood because it's time we all get a new subject." She wrote a poem about skipping school to spend time outside, called "Violets." It begins: "Down by the rumbling creek and the tall trees — / Where I went truant from school three days a week / And therefore broke the record — / There were violets as easy in their lives / As anything you have ever seen / Or leaned down to intake the sweet breath of."

From the time she was young, she knew that writers didn't make very much money, so she sat down and made a list of all the things in life she would never be able to have — a nice car, fancy clothes, and eating out at expensive restaurants were all on the list. But young Mary decided she wanted to be a poet anyway.

Oliver went to college, but dropped out. She made a pilgrimage to visit Edna St. Vincent Millay's 800-acre estate in Austerlitz, New York. The poet had been dead for several years, but Millay's sister Norma lived there along with her husband. Mary Oliver and Norma hit it off, and Oliver lived there for years, helping out on the estate, keeping Norma company, and working on her own writing. In 1958, a woman named Molly Malone Cook came to visit Norma while Oliver was there, and the two fell in love. A few years later, they moved together to Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Oliver said: "I was very careful never to take an interesting job. Not an interesting one. I took lots of jobs. But if you have an interesting job you get interested in it. I also began in those years to keep early hours. [...] If anybody has a job and starts at 9, there's no reason why they can't get up at 4:30 or five and write for a couple of hours, and give their employers their second-best effort of the day — which is what I did."

She published five books of poetry, and still almost no one had heard of her. She doesn't remember ever having given a reading before 1984, which is the year that she was doing dishes one evening when the phone rang and it was someone calling to tell her that her most recent book, American Primitive (1983), had won the Pulitzer Prize. Suddenly, she was famous. She didn't really like the fame — she didn't give many interviews, didn't want to be in the news. When editors called their house for Oliver, Cook would answer, announce that she was going to get Oliver, fake footsteps, and then get back on the phone and pretend to be the poet — all so that Oliver didn't have to talk on the phone to strangers, something she did not enjoy. Cook was a photographer, and she was also Oliver's literary agent. They stayed together for more than 40 years, until Cook's death in 2005.

Mary Oliver died of lymphoma on January 17, 2019. Her final book was Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (2017).

She said: "I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else. There were times over the years when life was not easy, but if you're working a few hours a day and you've got a good book to read, and you can go outside to the beach and dig for clams, you're okay."

I love Mary Oliver's work and indeed Edna St Vincent Millay too both seem ahead of their years to my mind but while I admire and appreciate Millay's work it is Mary Oliver's poetry that sustains and fascinates. I seem to always be drawn and attracted to the broken and the damaged in early life and this occupies my worries and yet I continue to admire . . . . . 

From the Writer's Almanac

Mary Oliver - Song For Autumn