Remembering Mary Oliver and her prose
The poet’s essays are winsome and articulate, wide-ranging and intellectually rigorous.
In the days following the death of Mary Oliver, public mourning was impassioned, eloquent, and everywhere. Posts by admirers well-known and unknown crowded social media news feeds. I was caught off guard by the news and surprised by how it surprised me, how viscerally I felt her loss. For years I’ve lived almost daily with Oliver’s work. I’ve written about her in these pages. I knew how old she was. I knew about the cancer. But my heart hurt that day. It still does.
I learned about Oliver’s death from the New York Times, a publication that never ran a full-length review of any of her books. This fact, and what it reveals about the reception of Oliver’s work in prestigious circles, was the subtext of many of the tributes and remembrances that saturated social media in those first few days. Familiar questions were debated, many of which seemed to drill down to this: If you’re Pinterest-quotable, can you be a serious poet? Fresher insights and anecdotes emerged, too: How fiercely Oliver was loved by many in the LGBTQ community. How once, while teaching at Bennington College, she wrote on the chalkboard with her left hand because she’d just been bitten by an injured muskrat she was trying to save.
What I was drawn to in the days after her death was not her poetry so much as her extensive prose. It was hardly mentioned by those who grieved her publicly, and it’s rarely been explored in the (slim) corpus of scholarly work on her 50-plus-year career. But Oliver’s essays are winsome and articulate, wide-ranging and intellectually rigorous. She writes about time, memory, imagination, and work. She writes about the companionship of some creatures and the unknowable wildness of others. In an essay on the sea and its inhabitants, she makes elegant the concept of natural selection: “Every vitality must have a mechanism that recommends it to existence—what seems like ornamentation or phantasm is pure utility. It comes from an engine of mist and electricity that may be playful, and must be assertive. And also, against the odds of endurance in the great-shouldered sea, prolific.”
