The Ohio Legacy Series
Read more about Mary Oliver
Landscapes Strange and Manifold as Morning:
The Poetry of Mary Oliver
An essay by Terry Hermsen
Reprinted from the Spring 2002 Ohioana Quarterly
Some day, for a whole day, what we might do, when we’re tired of paper
shuffling of whatever kind, is gather in a quiet room, or better yet a porch at the
edge of the forest, and swap lines from the poetry of Mary Oliver. We’ll lay out
her books in front of us on the table and re-discover poems we’ve long known.
But at times we’ll go to ones we didn’t realize were there, starting even in the
middle, forgetting the title, till we’re washed into the stream of her language
and we learn to start the universe all over again.
Then, when we step back out into the garden the next morning, or walk the dog,
or head out into the sad traffic, there will be another voice inside us, something
from when the world began, something to which we might, with luck, return.
You might remind us of the lusciousness of the unclaimed lands we once
wandered in, with these lines from “August”:
When the blackberries hang
swollen in the woods, in the brambles
nobody owns, I spend
all day among the high
branches, reaching
my ripped arms, thinking
of nothing, cramming
the black honey of summer
into my mouth . . . .
And I might answer, remembering the need to forget ourselves for a while,
with these lines from “Dogfish”:
You don’t want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen
to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.
Opening up at random, near the middle of Twelve Moons, you’ll wander across
these echoing words from “At Blackwater Pond,” and hear her speaking back:
You know how it feels,
wanting to walk into
the rain and disappear -
wanting to feel your life
brighten and grow weightless
as a leaf in the fall.
And sometimes, for a moment,
you feel it beginning - the sense
of escape sharp as a knife-blade
hangs over the dark field
of your body, and your soul
waits just under the skin
to leap away over the water.
And we’ll realize that, as careful readers discovered with Frost, we’re not in the
realm of a “pretty nature poet,” but of a writer for whom the questions of earth
matter, shaping, from deep inside the body, the urge to return to essential things.
Awakening to a tone of urgency we might have missed in her before, one of
us will pick up Dream Work and find “One or Two Things,” in the style of her
many sectioned-off pieces, where the numbers serve to slice the poem a dozen
different directions:
3
The god of dirt
came up to me many times and said
so many wise and delectable things, I lay
on the grass listening
to his dog voice,
crow voice,
frog voice; now,
he said, and now,
and never once mentioned forever,
4
which has nevertheless always been,
like a sharp iron hoof,
at the center of my mind.
And the other of us will jump to the end, humming back:
7
For years and years I struggled
just to live my life. And then
the butterfly
rose, weightless, in the wind.
“Don’t love your life
too much,” it said,
and vanished
into the world.
And we’ll slide out, from under the pile, an old edition of Heartland: Poets
from the Midwest, edited by Lucien Stryk in 1967, and find these words from
“Anton and Yaro,” her grandfather’s two brothers who planted trees in Ohio in
the late 1800s:
When they come back to us, then we shall know,
Shall see our lives like crosses on a map
Of landscapes strange and manifold as morning;
Then we shall stand, on that white edge of day,
And stare upon the hills and hammered clouds, -
And fear shall be like night, that blows away.
And we’ll realize that her themes have always been with her: of fear, and the
land, and a love for those who care for our “landscapes strange and manifold as
morning.”
* * * * *
I spent a week with Mary Oliver in 1984, the year American Primitive won the
Pulitzer Prize. She had been contracted by Gordon Grigsby of Ohio State to
give a seminar in poetry for the creative writing department. I’d known her
work from years back, beginning with poems like “Beyond the Snow Belt” in
that same Lucien Stryk anthology, to “Sleeping in the Forest” from Twelve
Moons, which I’d been reciting to school kids for years, and although I was not
an OSU student, I begged my way in to sit with the dozen or so others who
would spend every morning for a week writing with and listening to her. And
copying down idea after idea. The pages
of notes I typed from the week have
followed me through many moves since,
resurrecting themselves at the most
appropriate moments, reminding me of
the wealth of tools she passed on to us in
those few brief hours.
“Don’t tell anything in a poem,” she said,
“unless it has to be told.” And: “Let the
poem tell its own story.” And: “One is
sustained by the doing, never by what is
accomplished.” She called us “to find a
connection with a process . . . some way to
get to the lower voice . . . to show the
imagination that you’re trustworthy,”
reminding us, as she did ten years later in
her Poetry Handbook (1994) that we have to
keep our appointments with the imagination,
or the muse - that if we show up on a
consistent basis, that mysterious force will
come to trust us and show up, too.
As one might expect, she warned us against spending too much ego in the
poem. “Use from your own life only that which is necessary to the poem,” she
cautioned. She asked us to look outward, being led, as by the butterfly, away
from the self and out into the world.
Her first assignment for us was to set
up a still life arrangement on a table at
home, as a beginning art student
might, and make a poem from what
we saw. “You have to be able to do the
simple well,” she counseled, “to make
it fit into the more elaborate.” We had
to teach ourselves, over and over, to
make the effort of observation. (This is
still the hardest lesson for me - but
one I return to again and again -
feeling best when I can make a poem a little bit like a painting. And, when
teaching, on her example, I begin nearly every writing class by bringing in a table
of objects to set in the middle of the room).
In lesson after lesson, she strove to break us of the habit of thinking that the
poem was mostly about us. “Read the poem the way a stranger would read it,”
one of my notes says. And: “The poem belongs to the lady with the shopping
bag.” This too is a hard lesson to stay with: how can we readily believe that the
“lady with the shopping bag” will want to listen? Yet there is a technique here,
something like Marvin Bell’s “technique of the right attitude” that sets the
distant image of the reader before the poet, that asks us to write outward as
much as we dive within. “Who writes the poem? Someone else inside you. Who
reads the poem? Always a stranger.” These words are so ingrained in me it’s hard
to believe that I just scribbled them down, one of those five days. She was
passing on a craft she had struggled years to perfect. The lessons were so fluid,
so useful, because they grew from what she knew.
Just as in her poems, she let little of her own life’s background spill out,
though she did tell us of her impulse to stay out of university work and teaching,
at least in the beginning. “I never took a job,” she claimed, almost proudly,
“that would ask me to use my wits, or give me a chance to advance.” One can
believe, when we consider her long apprenticeship - her first book coming out
when she was twenty-eight, in 1963, and her third, really her first breakthrough
book, Twelve Moons, sixteen years later, in 1979 - that she put her life into the
process she was passing on to us that week. It was clear to us when we met her
then, in her forty-ninth year, that she had asked herself the question she asked of
us, “How fierce a fire is blazing within you?” Sitting with Mary Oliver, we
knew: her intensity lit up the room.
Three main lessons have stayed with me over these years. The first has to do
with sound. I don’t know that I would have recognized how crucially chosen
were the words in her poems, had she not taught us about the mutes. She went
on to explain much of her attitude toward sound in her handbook, but for us it
was a revelation when she had us experiment with what she had been taught
were the key letters in English: b, d, g, k, q, p, and t. She said these were “the
hard sounds [where] something happens in the palate.” Even then, she used
Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” to spell out the effects of
these letters. That night I went back and re-read “Sleeping the Forest,” and
heard her own lesson spilling out into the air.
I thought the earth
remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds . . .
Over and over, the significant words in Mary Oliver’s poems play across these
sounds like deep piano chords. For those of us raised on an avoidance of rhyme
and meter - foolishly - as old-fashioned things, that day sent us out into the
world of language with new ears.
The second strongest, most sustaining lesson came in the form of one
comment in the midst of a session dealing again with the attention we need to
pay to the details of the world. She had been saying things like “Watch out for
words which fancify, which say too much. Leave room for emotional effect.”
And along the lines of “Plath is a protagonist of the extraordinary vs. the
ordinary. Art has more to do with seeing the ordinary depth.” And then, these
words, the central key to her work if there is one: “I love to hold something in
my hand that’s true, because then I can dream around it.” This may be a
variation on Frost’s dictum that “It’s not what you do to the facts, it’s what the
facts do to you...” Or it might be quite another thing. Either way, it shows me
what Oliver is after in poem after poem. And what we might be too, if we
would follow her guide.
Take “Snakes in Winter”:
Deep in the woods,
under the sprawled upheavals of rocks,
dozens lie coiled together.
Touch them: they scarcely
breathe: they stare
out of such deep forgetfulness
that their eyes are like jewels -
and asleep, though they cannot close.
And in each mouth the forked tongue,
sensitive as an angel’s ear,
lies like a drugged muscle.
With the fires of spring they will lash forth again
on their life of ribs! -
bodies like whips! -
But now under the lids of the mute
succeeding snowfalls
they sleep in their cold cauldron: a flickering broth
six months below simmer.
Book by book, she gives us dreams and “something that’s true,” and both the
heft of the biological world and the flourish of myth emerge, like double
strands of a fire. She said she went to the woods, as she’s made clear elsewhere is
her habit, “to keep words from eating the mind, to hear sounds and not
verbalize them ... to reach to the level that has no name.” I think she goes to the
facts of nature in much the same way: to let them be something that they by
nature are. As much as words can.
Finally, she astonished me by her directness. From the poems in American
Primitive onward (and often before), she speaks of her concerns for life, and for
the world. I had sunk at the time into a half-belief that poems had to couch
their meanings, to avoid saying anything in terms of “truths.” And then I sat at
her public reading, on Thursday night of that week, and heard “truths” like this
in “In Blackwater Woods”:
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
Could one be this direct? Speak “truths about life” in a poem? I was dumbfounded.
But I see now these sorts of lines were just part and parcel of her
hard-won conviction that poems needed to be more than pretty objects. Poems
must face our deepest concerns. Or else, as she had said to us, “we are just
middle class people with a little time to kill.” If the poem is going to speak to
the woman with the shopping bag, then it better have something to say. Mary
Oliver told me then - and I don’t know as I’ve fully listened - that one doesn’t
have to give up technique, or concern with the beautiful phrase, in order to
push the poem into territory that touches on political or social or spiritual
concerns. It just has to, as others have put it, earn those lessons. When Mary
Oliver left the stage that night, I knew she had passed onto us all a vision of
what poetry could be that surpassed all our training.
As the fire deepens its central presence in our room, on this, our mythical day of
returning to her words, we might at last get out that book of hers, American
Primitive, destined to stay with us for as long as poems seek their places in our
national life, and read it straight through. “What is poetry which does not save
nations or people?” she asked, quoting a line from Czeslaw Milosz. Without being
polemical, her work - and particularly this book - tackles our national self. And
asks us to come home. Every so many years we might meet here, and weigh ourselves
in the light of these lifewrought lines. These, for example, from “Tecumseh”:
I went down not long ago
to the Mad River, under the willows
I knelt and drank from that crumpled flow, call it
what madness you will, there’s a sickness
worse than the risk of death and that’s
forgetting what we should never forget.
She’ll give us our history. In “John Chapman,” for instance:
Well, the trees he planted or gave away
prospered, and he became
the good legend, you do
what you can if you can; whatever
the secret, and the pain,
there’s a decision: to die,
or to live, to go on
caring about something. In spring, in Ohio,
in the forests that are left you can still find
signs of him: patches
of cold white fire.
 We will start with “August,” which begins the book, and we will close with
“The Gardens” that ends it. All along the way we’ll savor “this happy tongue” of
the blackberry picker. And we’ll find that same seeker in “The Gardens,” saying:
. . . It was
summer on earth
so the prayer
I whispered was to no
god but another
creature like me.
Where are you?
The wind stood still.
Lightning flung
its intermittent flares;
in the orchard
something wandered
among the windfalls,
licking the skins,
nuzzling the tunnels,
the pockets of seeds . . . .
In Mary Oliver’s poems, the split between human and creature is never so
huge, never so impassable. She gives us back our bodies that she urges us to
love again, somewhere beyond the magazine slicks and the touched-over
photographs, somewhere closer to the earth we arose from, that we still return
to, if we come to listen. So we too might glisten, like the one she loves, in the
summer grass, later in “The Gardens,” to whom she says:
You gleam
as you lie back
breathing like something
taken from water,
a sea creature, except
for your two human legs
which tremble
and open
into the dark country
I keep dreaming of. How
shall I touch you
unless it is
everywhere?
So we might see, perhaps for
the first time, that Mary Oliver
is not so much a poet of nature,
as a poet finding her way
through nature, re-finding our
way into nature, so we might in
the end love each other better.
So we might embrace so much
that we’ve left behind.
 Terry Hermsen is
a poet and editor and on the faculty of Otterbein College.
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