Mary Oliver’s Temple
Summer Chronicles #5*
By Jim Miller
If for some reason you are unable to be in nature this summer, the next best thing is a Mary Oliver poem. Oliver’s poems stop you in your tracks the way seeing a deer in a meadow at twilight does. Her work is as arresting as the glowing sun on the ocean. They are poems like prayers.
In her last collection of essays, Upstream, she tells us what feeds her poetic soul, her “friend” Walt Whitman who she snuck off to the woods with as a young girl:
I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple—or a green field—a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing--an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness—wonderful as that part of it is. I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak, to be company. It was everything that was needed, when everything was needed. I remember the delicate, rumpled way into the woods, and the weight of the books in my pack. I remember the rambling, and the loafing—the wonderful days when, with Whitman, I tucked my trouser-ends in my boots and went and had a good time.
And you can hear her friend Whitman’s voice in Oliver’s bold declaration in “When Death Comes”:
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
If I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing or frightened,
Or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
You also know that she, like Whitman, could turn and live with the animals and flowers that show her tokens of themselves and do not possess the same tiresome pretenses and vanity that humans do. As she observes in “Roses, Late Summer”:
I would be a fox, or a tree
Full of waving branches.
I wouldn’t mind being a rose
In a field full of roses.
Fear has not yet occurred to them, nor ambition.
Reason they have not yet thought of.
Neither do they ask how long they must be roses, and then what.
Or any other foolish question.
Then there is the other signature bit of Whitman that Oliver so beautifully translates—the close observation of the delicious, simple detail of the natural world followed by the intimate question that leaps off the page. In “The Summer Day,” she asks simply “Who made the swan?/And the black bear?/And the grasshopper?/I mean this grasshopper.” Then after a careful consideration of said grasshopper, the poem turns to the same old grass that Whitman loved:
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is your plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Happy summer, dear reader.
***
Summer Chronicles #5*
In the summer of 1967, the great Brazilian writer, Clarice Lispector, began a seven-year stint as a writer for Jornal de Brasil (The Brazilian News) not as a reporter but as a writer of "chronicles," a genre peculiar to Brazil. As Giovanni Pontiero puts it in the preface to Selected Chrônicas, a chronicle, "allows poets and writers to address a wider readership on a vast range of topics and themes. The general tone is one of greater freedom and intimacy than one finds in comparable articles or columns in the European or U.S. Press."
What Lispector left us with is an eccentric collection of "aphorisms, diary entries, reminiscences, travel notes, interviews, serialized stories, essays, loosely defined as chronicles." As a novelist, Pontiero tells us, Lispector was anxious about her relationship with the genre, apprehensive of writing too much and too often, of, as she put it, "contaminating the word." It was a genre alien to her introspective nature and one that challenged her to adapt.
More than forty years later, in Southern California—in San Diego no less—I look to Lispector with sufficient humility and irony from my place on the far margins of literary history with three novels and a few other books largely set in our minor league corner of the universe. Along with this weekly column, it's not much compared to the gravitas of someone like Lispector. So, as Allen Ginsberg once said of Whitman, "I touch your book and feel absurd."
Nonetheless the urge to narrate persists. Along with Lispector, I am cursed with it--for better or worse. So, for a few lazy weeks of summer I will, as I have for a few years now, try my hand at the form.