What is it you plan to do . . .
Mary Oliver on life. (The Commonplace Book Project)
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” ― Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver died today. She was 83 years old.
I have a difficult relationship with poetry. As a student of writing and literature, I’ve been surrounded by it. Definitely, I’ve felt as if I should be able to produce it. But even more, I’ve felt as if I was supposed to love it.
I did once. When I was a teenager, I loved poetry. I kept bits of it in a little book, no more than a three inches square. And I wrote it. Badly, probably. But still, I wrote it.
When I was fifteen, or maybe sixteen, a friend of my step-mother’s came across something I’d written. He read it out loud, in a flat voice. In a wrong voice. I was embarrassed, and I don’t know. It stuck, I guess, like a barnacle. Somehow, in the last thirty years, I have become someone who says, “I’m not a poetry person.”
And means it.
But Mary Oliver is different. Hers is not the kind of poetry that I’ve listened to in a room full of poetry people — the kind that makes that soft, droning mmmm of understanding slip from person to person, but skip me.
Her poem, The Summer Day, speaks directly to my soul. It always has. Almost, but not as long as I can remember. It was first published the year after I graduated from high school.
Here’s Mary Oliver, reciting it.
It’s the last line, of course, that melts . . . everyone, probably. A direct question that assumes that very life is wild and precious. And singular.
And maybe most importantly, something both expansive and under our control.
If you’ve never read the whole poem, but know the last lines thanks to Instagram and Pinterest, you might be surprised to see that on its surface, it’s basically an ode to a grasshopper.
Her book, A Poetry Handbook, helped me get through my MFA program. If you struggle with poetry but want to remember how to enjoy it, like I do, I think you’ll enjoy it.
I really enjoyed this NPR interview with Oliver, speaking about her book A Thousand Mornings.
“Poetry, to be understood, must be clear. It mustn’t be fancy.”
The New Yorker published an article titled “What Mary Oliver’s Critics Don’t Understand” in 2017 that I loved. Maybe because it inadvertently does a good job of illustrating why poetry is so difficult for me.
Oliver had a difficult childhood and was saved by words. For her that was poetry. For me, it was stories.
I’ve pulled out my copy of New and Selected Poems, Volume One. Maybe the key to letting poetry back in is to start with what I never stopped loving.
Today’s Poem:
I learned that Mary Oliver died today because my friend Gayle Brandeis, who is an author and the kind of poet who reminds me that I want relearn how to be a poetry person, posted this poem on her Facebook wall.
It’s another poem with an ending that is a gut punch.
the only way to tempt happiness into your mind is by taking it
into the body first, like small wild plums.
The Plum Trees by Mary Oliver.
Here’s my secret weapon for sticking with whatever your thing is.
Shaunta Grimes is a writer and teacher. She is an out-of-place Nevadan living in Northwestern PA with her husband, three superstar kids, two dementia patients, a good friend, Alfred the cat, and a yellow rescue dog named Maybelline Scout. She’s on Twitter @shauntagrimes and is the author of Viral Nation and Rebel Nation and the upcoming novel The Astonishing Maybe. She is the original Ninja Writer.