During morning davening, I’ll sometimes incorporate poetry. When I do, Mary Oliver is often the go-to poet.
A great many of her poems celebrate humility and reverence. Yet Oliver is not popular among poetry cognoscenti, and my affection for her writing is sometimes mocked by others involved in the arts. This is a shame. I feel that Oliver’s poetry is successful to a degree that most contemporary poetry is not.
I sometimes struggle to explain Mary Oliver’s value to non-believers (in her work). One acquaintance described Oliver as “the Thomas Kinkade of poetry.” The comparison is ludicrous. Oliver writes of the “live animal,” of a becoming with the natural world that impregnates experience with a meaning distinct from reason. Kinkade, by contrast, is the master of commodifying kitsch. They are worlds apart.
I was happy to read a friend’s toast to Oliver. She observed, “Some critics grumble that [Oliver] is insufficiently challenging or unsurprising, but she leans so heavily on the sense of wondrous recognition fed by nature, I wonder if a failure to be moved isn’t primarily a failure of that wonder-sense.” Or, in the words of Oliver herself,
“I don’t want you just to sit down at the table.
I don’t want you just to eat, and be content.
I want you to walk out into the fields
where the water is shining, and the rice has risen.
I want you to stand there, far from the white tablecloth.
I want you to fill your hands with the mud, like a blessing.”
-from Rice, “New Poems” (1991 – 1992)
My friend continued:
“[Oliver's] poems make me feel rooted in humanity, grounded in my own body, aware of this lumpy, piecemeal tangle of cells which is somehow, miraculously, taking pleasure in language. Oliver’s poems are spiritual experiences for those who would not necessarily describe themselves as spiritual.”
Amen. And another poem!
The Fish
The first fish
I ever caught
would not lie down
quiet in the pail
but flailed and sucked
at the burning
amazement of the air
and died
in the slow pouring off
of rainbows. Later
I opened his body and separated
the flesh from the bones
and ate him. Now the sea
is in me: I am the fish, the fish
glitters in me; we are
risen, tangled together, certain to fall
back to the sea. Out of pain,
and pain, and more pain
we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished
by the mystery.
Great comment. Thank you so much. I didn’t realize Mary Oliver was not approved of by the cognoscenti but I might have guessed, since she is such a favorite of many people I know who are trying to lead decent, spiritually aware lives. Uh oh, my prejudices are showing. There is so much modern poetry I don’t get, I imagine because I haven’t spent enough time climbing the stairs of what looks like an ivory appreciation tower. While capitalism promotes the commodification of everything, the expansion of higher education seems to promote something else, that we could maybe call the professionalization of intellectual taste. The priests of this cause see themselves as bastions against grubby capitalist values. But they themselves are so cut off from the rest of us by their refined taste and complex language that they can’t make common cause with us to create a society based on more people centered values. While there is much genuine searching after knowledge, there is also a great deal of intellectual insecurity in the academy — indeed that is one of its prime products, reliably produced from at least middle school upwards, and it’s that that leads people to mock someone for having insufficiently intellectual tastes in poets (or art, or anything else). Let’s go straight to the kitsch master himself: one can disagree with someone who likes Kincade, but why mock them? Why put people down? The cognoscenti too often become just another competitive hierarchy, from where I sit, and one dedicated to impressing each other, not to communicating what they have learned with the rest of us. Mary Oliver’s ideas are as complex as anything in the academy, but she is a communicator with a wide range of people, and that is always a rather despised thing in the higher circles of professionalized taste.
Outstanding post however I was wanting to know if you could write a litte more on this subject? I’d be very grateful if you could elaborate a little bit further. Kudos!
twitter.com/tikkunonline
During morning davening, I’ll sometimes incorporate poetry. When I do, Mary Oliver is often the go-to poet.
A great many of her poems celebrate humility and reverence. Yet Oliver is not popular among poetry cognoscenti, and my affection for her writing is sometimes mocked by others involved in the arts. This is a shame. I feel that Oliver’s poetry is successful to a degree that most contemporary poetry is not.
I sometimes struggle to explain Mary Oliver’s value to non-believers (in her work). One acquaintance described Oliver as “the Thomas Kinkade of poetry.” The comparison is ludicrous. Oliver writes of the “live animal,” of a becoming with the natural world that impregnates experience with a meaning distinct from reason. Kinkade, by contrast, is the master of commodifying kitsch. They are worlds apart.
I was happy to read a friend’s toast to Oliver. She observed, “Some critics grumble that [Oliver] is insufficiently challenging or unsurprising, but she leans so heavily on the sense of wondrous recognition fed by nature, I wonder if a failure to be moved isn’t primarily a failure of that wonder-sense.” Or, in the words of Oliver herself,
“I don’t want you just to sit down at the table.
I don’t want you just to eat, and be content.
I want you to walk out into the fields
where the water is shining, and the rice has risen.
I want you to stand there, far from the white tablecloth.
I want you to fill your hands with the mud, like a blessing.”
-from Rice, “New Poems” (1991 – 1992)
My friend continued:
“[Oliver's] poems make me feel rooted in humanity, grounded in my own body, aware of this lumpy, piecemeal tangle of cells which is somehow, miraculously, taking pleasure in language. Oliver’s poems are spiritual experiences for those who would not necessarily describe themselves as spiritual.”
Amen. And another poem!
The Fish
The first fish
I ever caught
would not lie down
quiet in the pail
but flailed and sucked
at the burning
amazement of the air
and died
in the slow pouring off
of rainbows. Later
I opened his body and separated
the flesh from the bones
and ate him. Now the sea
is in me: I am the fish, the fish
glitters in me; we are
risen, tangled together, certain to fall
back to the sea. Out of pain,
and pain, and more pain
we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished
by the mystery.
-from “American Primitive” (1983)
Great comment. Thank you so much. I didn’t realize Mary Oliver was not approved of by the cognoscenti but I might have guessed, since she is such a favorite of many people I know who are trying to lead decent, spiritually aware lives. Uh oh, my prejudices are showing. There is so much modern poetry I don’t get, I imagine because I haven’t spent enough time climbing the stairs of what looks like an ivory appreciation tower. While capitalism promotes the commodification of everything, the expansion of higher education seems to promote something else, that we could maybe call the professionalization of intellectual taste. The priests of this cause see themselves as bastions against grubby capitalist values. But they themselves are so cut off from the rest of us by their refined taste and complex language that they can’t make common cause with us to create a society based on more people centered values. While there is much genuine searching after knowledge, there is also a great deal of intellectual insecurity in the academy — indeed that is one of its prime products, reliably produced from at least middle school upwards, and it’s that that leads people to mock someone for having insufficiently intellectual tastes in poets (or art, or anything else). Let’s go straight to the kitsch master himself: one can disagree with someone who likes Kincade, but why mock them? Why put people down? The cognoscenti too often become just another competitive hierarchy, from where I sit, and one dedicated to impressing each other, not to communicating what they have learned with the rest of us. Mary Oliver’s ideas are as complex as anything in the academy, but she is a communicator with a wide range of people, and that is always a rather despised thing in the higher circles of professionalized taste.
Outstanding post however I was wanting to know if you could write a litte more on this subject? I’d be very grateful if you could elaborate a little bit further. Kudos!