I send this poem to my
children the first day
-of summer every year.
-"The Summer Day."
I don't know if I can read this.
It's not gonna get better
later. "The Summer Day.
Who made the world?"
[Mary] "Roses Late Summer."
"What happens to the leaves
after they turn red and golden
and fall away?
What happens to the singing
birds when they can't
sing any longer?
What happens
to their quick wings?
Do you think there is any
personal heaven for any of us?
Do you think anyone
the other side of
that darkness will call to us,
meaning us?"
[]
"Maybe." Sweet Jesus talking his
melancholy madness
stood up in the boat
and the sea lay down,
silky and sorry.
So everybody was
saved that night.
But you know how it is
when something different
crosses the threshold.
The uncle's mutter together,
the women walk away,
The young brother begins
to sharpen his knife.
Nobody knows what the soul is."
"Beyond the trees
the foxes keep teaching their
children to live in the valley.
So they never seem to vanish,
they are always there
in the blossom of light
that stands up every
morning in the dark sky."
[John] She was a brilliant
poet from beatnik years.
I think she was
always a beatnik.
Mary Oliver's poems are
for me, a balm in the storm.
They speak the language
of my soul
and I think multiple
souls around the earth.
[loud applause]
[woman] 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.
She was our most famous
poet for a long time.
Very famous and yet
completely elusive.
I think of her
as a mystic.
She's radical.
[interviewer] What do you think
you have
done with your one
wild and precious life?
What I have done
is learn to love
and learn to be loved and
that didn't come easy.
[Mary] Ohio where I grew up
was important to me.
It being the initial place
where I learned to love the
earth.
The two things I loved from
a very early age were the
natural world and dead poets.
[]
I was a kind of solitary kid
and dead poets were my friends.
[Mary] I have a kind
of joke answer to
"Who do I read?" But I
mean it. I read Whitman
and Whitman
and Whitman.
[man] Walt Whitman created
this new voice
that was riding on the
waves of American speech.
Mary Oliver was one of
the first poets that pointed
to Whitman as an
important influence.
The tumbling down the page
of those long lush sentences
became part of her education.
[Mary] I started writing
probably when I was about 13.
I saw some poems I liked and
and I was trying to imitate
them.
You don't think at 13
about career
or profession
or stuff like that,
I just started doing it.
It was shocking.
I was in girl in Ohio
and I wanted to write poems?
Unheard of.
Even boys didn't do that.
Just to be a poet in America
is already q*eer enough.
It's hard to grow up
feeling invisible, feeling
that you don't fit in
the culture around you
and come out of that with
a strong sense of self.
[Mary] I felt different. I went
to school because I had to.
The only record I broke
in high school was truancy.
[interviewer] When you say
you felt different,
how did different feel to you?
[Mary] Not belonging.
I had two or three very good
friends during that time,
but I was always trying to
get them to go to the woods.
I very much wished not to be
noticed and to be left alone.
[haunting piano, distant wolf
howls]
[Ariana] The world is a cruel
and violent place.
It's in country songs,
it's in ancient songs.
A poem is a wayfaring stranger
and it's moving
through a world of woe.
[Mary] My mother was the blue
wisteria,
my mother was the mossy
stream out behind the house,
my mother, alas, alas, did
not always love her life,
heavier than iron it was
as she carried it in her arms
from room to room,
oh, unforgettable!
I bury her in a box in the
earth
and turn away.
[Mary] It was a very dark and
broken house that I came from.
I escaped it barely.
That was my strength, but
I wasn't all strength.
My father was
a demon of frustrated
dreams, was a breaker of
trust, was a poor thin boy
with bad luck. He followed God,
there being no one else
he could talk to;
he swaggered before God,
there being no one else
who would listen.
Listen, this was his life.
I bury it in the earth.
I sweep the closets.
I leave the house.
[David] When she was 17,
she left that house
and she hid out
in the woods for a week.
[Mary] I mention them now, I
will not mention them again.
It is not lack of love
nor lack of sorrow.
But the iron thing they
carried, I will not carry.
I give them
one, two, three, four
the kiss of courtesy, of
sweet thanks, of anger,
of good luck in the deep earth.
May they sleep well.
May they soften.
But I will not give them
the kiss of complicity.
I will not give them the
responsibility for my life.
You know, forget it.
Set it down, walk on.
It's an amazing poem.
You think that's being written
at a time in the culture when
there was so much
emphasis on investigating
childhood abuse,
on the kinds of traumas
that might have shaped us,
and Mary is saying,
"You don't need it.
Bury them and leave."
[car starting, travel music]
[woman] When Mary Oliver was
beginning, there weren't
that many paradigms for
what a woman poet
was supposed to be like.
[woman] Edna St. Vincent Millay
moved
to this small village
in upstate New York
after her celebrated youth
in Greenwich Village.
It was on the 700 acre
estate called Steepletop
that she wrote the main
body of her work
and it was here too,
that she died.
Now living at Steepletop
is Millay's younger sister
Norma Millay Ellis.
In her senior year of
high school, she wrote
to Norma Millay to ask if she
might come to Steepletop
and she left the day after she
graduated from high school.
[woman] One visitor came to
Steepletop for an afternoon
and stayed four years as
Norma's secretary. She spent
some time living at Edna
St. Vincent Millay's house
with Millay's sister,
helping her to catalog
and organize Millay's papers.
[Donika] There's an idea of Edna
St.
Vincent Millay being in the past
and then there's the real Edna
St. Vincent Millay,
known best as "Vincent."
[woman] She was the scandalous
and celebrated young
woman who was liberated
and flouting
all kinds of conventions.
Between Edna St.
Vincent Millay and Anne
Sexton and Sylvia Plath.
There's this aura of
problematic sexuality
and living on the edge
and that that's where
feminine genius was
supposed to reside.
Like it was supposed to be
risking itself in every sense
risking shame, social death,
actual death, insanity.
[Donika] Millay was hailed as a
kind of wunderkind early on
and then less so later.
[man] Miss Millay is an artist
of considerable
accomplishments.
She is also a woman.
She therefore fascinates
the male reviewer
but at the same time
horrifies him too.
[woman] Mary attended college
for two years,
one year at Ohio State,
one year at Vassar
and when she left Vassar,
she once again was
between Ohio
and Steepletop until in 1959
she moved to Greenwich Village.
[jazz music]
She enjoyed being part of
the culture in that moment.
Many of her Vassar classmates
were in the village.
It was a very alive time,
but I do think it was deeply
uncomfortable for her to be
that removed from
the natural world.
[woman] Mary Oliver moved
to New York City
but continued
visiting Steepletop.
One day when she was visiting,
Molly Malone Cook also was
there and Mary described
falling
head-over-heels
in love with her.
If you suddenly and
unexpectedly feel joy,
don't hesitate. Give into it.
There are plenty of lives
and whole towns
destroyed or about to be.
We are not wise,
and not very often kind.
And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has
some possibility left.
[woman] Molly was 10 years
Mary's senior, just this
charismatic,
stylish, sophisticated person.
She just appeared in her life.
[]
Perhaps this is its way
of fighting back,
that sometimes something
happens better than all the
riches
or power in the world.
It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it
in the instant when love begins.
Anyway, that's often the case.
Anyway, whatever it is, don't
be afraid of its plenty.
Joy is not made to be a crumb.
[Mary] M had will and wit
and probably too much
empathy for others.
She was quick in speech
and she did not suffer
fools. When you knew her,
she was unconditionally kind.
But also, you had to be
brave to get to know her.
[woman] Molly had been a
staff photographer
for the Village Voice
at its inception
and she was still living
in the Village
and really taking
photographs quite seriously.
[Mary] When M was a small
child, someone asked her
what she wanted to do
when she grew up
and she answered, I want to
see every face in America.
She was born in 1925
in San Francisco.
It was not the most fortunate
beginning, years later
she searched for
and found her parents.
But for many years she was
moved
through various temporary
homes, a childhood of mystery
and insufficiency.
It is not hard to guess the
reason she wanted to see faces,
to find someone, somewhere
who would be recognizable,
would look like her.
Molly was a very
strong character,
so Molly gave her the
belief that she was a great,
great talent, and was
gonna succeed and everything
and stick with me baby.
[Mary] Her world certainly
wasn't daisies or birds
or trees as mine was.
We each had our
separate natures.
Watching M when she
was taking photographs
and no less watching
the intensity
and openness with which
she dealt with friends
and strangers too, taught me
what real attention is about.
Attention without feeling,
I began to learn,
is only a report.
I was in my late twenties
and well filled with a
sense of my own thoughts,
my own presence.
I was eager to address
the world of words,
to address the world with
words.
[gentle piano, seagulls]
[man] Provincetown is probably
the most beautiful
small town in America.
A wonderful cluster of
white clapboard houses
with shingled roofs
next to the harbor.
Provincetown is at the
literal end of the country
where the light is so gorgeous
when you get in the harbor.
No wonder so many people
come here and find a new life.
[reporter] Cape Cod hippies
conduct a "paint-in" at the
famous
Provincetown art colony.
It was a place that
could absorb anyone
who couldn't fit in
anywhere else.
You know, it was like a place
for outcasts and misfits.
I came to Provincetown with
a book of poems in one pocket
and a bottle of wine
in the other.
It was a healthy environment
for the creative soul.
The bars were full
of writers and artists.
There was a lot of
drugs and alcohol
and promiscuity,
which was fine with me.
[man] It has been an artist
colony for 150 years.
That came about because
the Portuguese community,
the fishing community
that had settled there, had a
very welcoming kind of culture.
They were happy to rent
rooms, to take people in
and they really weren't
too concerned about their
sexual orientation.
[Frank] Our Provincetown
was pretty much a
Portuguese neighborhood.
We had Portuguese
superstitions.
My mother couldn't sweep
the floors if it was dark
because it would
bring the dead up.
We still heated with coal.
We cooked on a kerosene stove,
but we had roomers in our house
and these people were
from another world.
And they were colorful
and they knew things.
There was something
magical about it.
I hitchhiked to
Provincetown, this long ago
I had a girlfriend. And we
hitchhiked to Provincetown
because somebody said, "It's a
weird place, you'll like it."
It was, I did.
[woman] In June of '64 with
Molly,
she went to Provincetown
for the summer
and they just didn't leave.
[C. Steven] Do you know how many
people I know who came here
for the summer, or for a visit
and are here 50 years later?
[]
[woman reading as Mary]
Previously M had gone back to
New York for the winter,
but that long fall we kept
lingering, feeling our roots
settling into that magical
and beautiful town.
M was taking and printing
her own photographs.
I was writing poems at the
kitchen table and we were
young.
[]
Molly had one of the first
photo art galleries ever.
[woman] It's really this
electric moment in photography.
When you look at
the roster of people
that she was showing,
they're just titans.
This was really at the very
beginnings of photography
as fine art and there
just was not the market.
Eventually the gallery
became a bookstore
and someone who comes
through the bookstore in
those days is John Waters.
[John] It was called East End
Books
and I nagged them every
day if I could work there
and I had long hair and looked
freakish and everything
but Molly liked me and she said
"When it rains you can work."
Because that's when
it got crowded.
So wherever I was, I'd have
to run in when it rained
and work there. Mary then,
well she'd be in the back in a
pea coat in the
middle of summer.
I mean, I think she was
going through a lot
of adjustment there.
[]
[woman] Ohio and Steepletop had
a similar landscape. Streams
and meadows and forest that
she was very familiar with
and so to come
to Provincetown it was
like going to the moon.
She had never seen
anything like that before.
[Gabrielle] You could go not
very far
and be in the Beech Forest,
and like not see a soul.
[]
[woman] The period from
1964 until 1979,
Mary left Provincetown rarely.
And what she was doing
was just working
and getting to know this
place that was her home.
[Mary] I call it primary
sources.
Some people go to the library,
but I went to the woods.
She went into the
woods with her questions,
which is exactly what
the great proponents
of her tradition in American
poetry encouraged her to do.
Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, say,
"You don't need a spiritual
teacher, you need to go out
into the world and look."
[Mary] I drive people crazy
because I could sit for two
hours
and look at the clouds
and be very silent
and I'm having a nice time
and sometimes I'm with
people who say,
"This is kind of nuts."
[John] I would say to Mary, "I
know you're
crawling around the woods
talking to animals. They're
gonna put you in a mental
institution." And then she got
bit once by a badger.
I said, "That's what you get."
Sh e was down there, you know,
helping him build the
dam. Get out of there!
[C. Steven] I walked Beech
Forest with Mary one time.
And I had to respect not to
talk
and she was just looking,
looking, looking.
[Mary] My own nature is to like
to walk the same path every day
to see what I missed
the day before.
[David] There's a poem called
"The Clam," which is about
how a clam is like us and
how we are like a clam.
She takes this clamminess
and she finds all
of the common denominators
without ever imposing human
assumptions on what a
clam must be experiencing
and all she does is look at
the things that a clam has
that I also have.
It breathes, it has a
stomach like me, it has this,
it has that, and then at the
end she just backs her way
into the cathedral.
It tries very hard not to
die. It just opens me up.
And how do you
do that with words?
Because what words do,
by nature, is name things
and close them off.
And yet she does it.
Before I know it,
I'm suddenly a clam.
[]
[Mary] If you love something you
give it a lot of attention
and if you give something
a lot of attention,
you very often learn to love it
and that spiritual
investigation requires
that you pay attention
to the world
and paying attention
to the world
often leads you to
love the world.
Years ago, a reviewer
surmised that I must have
a private income
of some substance
since all I ever seemed to do
was walk around
the woods and dunes
and the long beaches of my
town.
It was a silly surmise.
Looking at the world,
whatever shape my
finances were in,
was the important
part of my life.
Indeed, I had almost
no income at all.
Poets, if they ever
make a living
from their writing,
do not do so when they are
first beginning to publish.
In the money economy,
I had none.
Nor did my partner, and every
evening there was supper
to think about.
-She had no money, like, none.
-Having to steal an egg
out of a nest of eggs in
order to feed yourself.
[Gabrielle] She was broke. So
she was working both as a
writing
advisor and secretary.
At the same time
she was working at the
marine specialties store
and she was doing typing
for many different people.
She was doing what you need
to do to be a working artist.
[telephone rings]
[man on phone] Is it a
bad time for you?
[Molly] No. I was coming in with
some
animal food.
[man] Oh God. Oh, how's Mary's
father?
[Molly] Not well at
all. He's real bad.
She's gotta stay for a while.
First through Mary,
actually, they started working
for Norman Mailer because
Mary started doing some typing
and then Molly stepped in to
say that she could take on more
of the enormous work
that was managing Mailer's
career in those years.
[Norman on phone] I'm worried.
What I'm worried about is I'm
not sure
how long I can keep doing this.
With every other
responsibility I have
on my mind, there's
you too, you know.
The money may just run out.
I want you to pay first
the people who work for me.
So you, Mary, the people
who work for me come first
and tradespeople second,
and the wives last.
-[Molly] Okay -[Norman] Okay,
beautiful. Bye-bye.
[Mary] If you want to be a
writer,
I would say give your second
best energy to your boss.
Writing is a really
hard taskmaster
and if you do not want
to do it as well as you can
do it, it's sort of like
a piano player.
I mean, who wants to listen
to a piano player who just
wants to play a little bit?
[Donika] "It is six a.m,
and I am working.
I am absent-minded,
reckless, heedless
of social obligations, etc.
It is as it must be.
The tire goes flat,
the tooth falls out,
there will be a hundred
meals without mustard.
The poem gets written.
I have wrestled with the angel
and I am stained with light
and I have no shame.
Neither do I have guilt.
My responsibility is not to
the ordinary, or the timely.
It does not include
mustard, or teeth.
It does not extend
to the lost button,
or the beans in the pot.
My loyalty is to the
inner vision, whenever
and howsoever it may
arrive. If I have a meeting
with you at three o'clock,
rejoice if I am late.
Rejoice even more if I
do not arrive at all."
[Mary] I am very disciplined
about working.
You do not accomplish anything
without discipline.
The creative part of your
mind is ready all the time.
And if you say to it, "Hey,
let's have a date tomorrow
at 7:30 in the morning,
I'll be there." It will be
there.
[]
[David] She was frustrated.
She was turning 40
and like all poets,
looking for a break.
What I observed in her
was this humbleness,
but it wasn't humbleness like
an artist often experiences,
which is to say, "I'm no good,
I should just give this up."
She was sure of her work
and never once to me
expressed any doubt in
what she was here to do.
[woman] She was writing poems
and sending them everywhere
and seeing who would take them.
One of the most important
places where she was publishing
during that period of time
was The New York Times.
[]
What was important to her was
who can open the newspaper
and find a poem that
might change their life.
[Mary] What about people who are
going to get a nice magazine
and read a business article?
How do you attract them to
poetry?
I was of the opinion
that most anybody
who starts a sentence
will finish that sentence
and so quite a number of
these poems are 36 lines,
but they're one sentence.
That was the spine
of how she was living
because she had a a personal
loan that was for $25 a month
and that's how much she
was paid by The Times.
She was seeking the
support of some publisher
who saw in her work
what she knew was there.
[Lindsay] "The Night Traveler"
received a review from Joyce
Carol Oates
and that really
changed everything.
[Joyce] She sees the true terror
of the country
as nature's pitiless
disregard for the individual,
with a prey or predator.
She cannot divide the world
into victim and oppressor.
She learned what a really
considered review could do
and it began really selling.
"I thought the earth
remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts,
her pockets full of
lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before,
a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and
the white fire of the stars but
my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the
branches of the perfect trees."
[woman] "All night
I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me,
the insects, and the birds
who do their work
in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell,
as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom. By
morning
I had vanished at least a dozen
times into something better."
I wrote for many I
wrote for about 30 years
before I ever gave a reading.
I mean, if you start when
I was a kid.
Trying to find my own voice
took a long enough time
and I didn't want to read
till I did that.
And the first book I did
that I felt was my own voice
was "Twelve Moons."
[Major] Reading that book,
I was so enamored. Even though
we were separated by gender,
even though there was at
least 33 years difference
between us, I took to her
because the deep kind
of lyric presence leapt
off the page for me.
I can hear that sense
of rapture in her work.
[Mary] People have forgotten
to be ecstatic.
I mean, you could
get ecstatic over
a box of matches.
They're kind of,
you know, amazing.
And it's the balance
with the rage, I suppose,
the emptiness.
Emptiness is never going to
get us to get up
and do anything.
But ecstasy might.
[David] Mary had an idea that
every poem she wrote, she
submitted
to three tests.
Does it have a spiritual
purpose?
Does it have a sincere energy?
and does it have a genuine body?
[]
[Mary] I think you have to be
in the world to understand
what the spiritual is about
and you have to be spiritual
in order to really be able
to accept what
the world is about.
We're all going to be
something else,
part of something else,
someday.
I mean, I certainly
believe for instance,
that stones are alive.
[woman] You believe stones are
alive?
[Mary] I believe everything is
alive.
[D. Graham] The move to a kind
of
delicious deep dive into
the natural world,
can be read as a certain
kind of escapism.
So when people are sort of
not down with nature poetry,
one way they can sort of
be like, "Eh, you know, really?"
Is like, "Hey,
are you noticing what's
happening there in the cities?"
[V] Well, I was snarky.
I was a New Yorker.
I lived in the world of cement.
I was so sarcastic about
Mary when I was younger
because I was so
sarcastic about the Earth.
I was so detached
and disassociated
and so poetry about the
Earth, I actually made fun of.
[David] She did not fit in. Her
poems,
probably, to editors,
felt antique
because they seemed
like late Romantic poems
of a hundred years before.
She had her grievances.
She really disliked being
categorized as a nature poet.
[Frank] She just thought
it was a silly idea.
I mean, my God, what's
a nature poet? You know?
Why the great
interest in nature?
One of the great concerns,
I think, is the fact that
we are moving so thoroughly
to an urban environment
and without experience
with the natural world,
you cannot appreciate the body
of literature which you have
inherited because all the
figurative language, all
the metaphors, have to do
with the natural world.
And so, there is a rift now
between people who wake
up and it's daylight.
They don't wake up
and see the sunrise
and how can they understand a
line which says, "It is the
east
and Juliet is the sun"?
She made me see the beauty
that she saw definitely,
and that's really great
because I'm not naturally
that's not my scene really.
I would say nature is planning
to k*ll you from
the day you're born.
I don't know what's
so great about it.
[man] Mary wants to
empty that self out
as if she could go into the
woods without having a history,
without having a
biography, to allow the reader
to step into that
space and be her.
Once you find the language
to describe the natural world,
it's hard to degrade it.
It's hard to pollute it,
but 'nature poet' can be a
box that one does not want
to merely be confined in.
[Ada] I have heard many stories
about her not wanting
to participate in
certain anthologies and
not wanting be to be labeled.
[Mary] I do refuse to be in
in women's anthologies
and people wonder why
and they take offense.
I'm certainly for equality,
but the tendency of
the feminist point of view
to separate, I can see nothing
for it except one thing it'll
sell.
Any marketing person would
say, "Hey, here's a good idea.
Let's do women cooking,
and then we'll do men cooking,
then we'll do dogs cooking."
Look, Mary was a feminist,
of course she was a feminist.
She was an independent woman
who loved who she wanted
to love, who wrote the poetry,
she wanted to write, who lived
where she wanted to live.
I mean, come on, what is
more feminist than that?
[Gabrielle] When I go and I talk
about Mary as a l*sbian,
it is true, I will still have
a lot of people come up
to me and say, "I never
knew that about her.
And I've read all of her books."
And I'm like, okay, you know.
But her love for Molly,
her love for
female bodies,
like her love for love
and eroticism,
was always present.
And yet it did also seem to me
that she talked
about it in a way
that was pretty different
than a lot of the other people
that I was reading at that time.
Part of that really has to do
with extremely complicated
feelings about privacy
and romantic love.
We live in a time where
it's really hard for us
to not connect
privacy and shame,
but she was a deeply
romantic person who felt
that love was like a close
to religious experience.
[Mary] We were talkers about
our work, our pasts, our
friends,
our ideas, ordinary
and farfetched.
We would often wake before
there was light in the sky
and make coffee and let our
minds rattle our tongues.
We would end in
exhaustion and elation.
Not many nights
or early mornings
later, we would do the same.
[John] They were definitely
a complete out couple,
completely everywhere,
but they weren't
l*sbian activists in any
possible way.
[Mary] It has not come to me
to write about it,
but I certainly
think about it a lot.
It's very, very hard to want
to write about a
particular subject like that
and have it work.
You have to have
something that impels you.
I would be pleased with myself
if I wrote a poem about A*DS
and did a good job of it,
but it hasn't happened.
[John] Of course, they
knew people that had A*DS.
I mean, half everybody
we knew died of A*DS.
But she didn't address
current events, ever
really. No, she was in
the woods like a crazy
person talking to animals.
There are poets who would
say, "Well, her responsibility
in that moment should have
been saying she was a l*sbian,
opening doors
for the rest of us."
When I think about the
civic duty of a writer,
there's immediately a part of
me that hates the word "civic"
and hates the word "duty."
And I know that's funny
because I'm the Poet Laureate,
but I really believe in
the resistance of an artist
to be fully an artist.
She lived a life like St.
Francis.
She wasn't interested
in going to the world.
She was interested in
opening up a space in herself
and going deep enough so
that you meet everybody else.
[]
[Gabrielle] She had someone
in the formative part
of her life, in Molly Malone
Cook, who took care of her.
That's a huge deal.
Molly ran the show. Definitely.
[Gabrielle] You have time, you
have space, you might be so
broke,
but this is the work
of your life and you
and your partner have
decided everything is
going to be done to protect it.
[]
[woman] These were still
really lean times.
She was 48 years old.
She had had various
visiting teacher positions,
but nothing consistent.
She really was still
struggling.
[Mary] I was at that time going
out
to the dump most mornings
to buy shingles.
I was shingling the house
and a friend of mine came by,
She said, "Ha, what
are you doing?
Looking for your
old manuscripts?"
The winners of the 1984
Pulitzer
Prizes were announced today.
They included Mary Oliver
for her book of poetry,
"American Primitive."
[woman] It was a big surprise,
you know, to her
and to everyone who knew her.
[John] Mary won the Pulitzer! So
deserving and so exciting
-[woman] And you didn't know?
-[Mary] I knew but
my job in the morning
was to go find some shingles.
[Frank] Molly was very happy
about it
and very happy to talk about
it.
Mary, typically just sort of,
yeah, shrugged it off.
[]
[man] "American Primitive,"
because it does win
the Pulitzer Prize, is when
Mary Oliver launches into
her celebrityhood.
And I'm sorry we don't have
enough chairs for everybody.
I have the opportunity this
evening of presenting to you
a really exciting poet.
[applause]
[Mary] Thank you.
I have to get used to this.
[woman] Mary Oliver has won the
Pulitzer Prize for her book,
"American Primitive," and in
1992, the National Book Award.
Mary Oliver won the National
Book Award for Poetry.
So I'm a scribbler, I'm a
catcher of whatever is given.
[reporter] It took Mary Oliver
more than 27 years of
scribbling,
writing and revising
to complete the works in
her award-winning book,
"New and Selected Poems."
[John] Think about it, not many
poets' careers blast off,
but her's sure did.
[woman] In the wake of those
two major prizes,
it was more like:
"This is what I'm doing.
It has a home, it's
going to be published."
There is nothing to me
so exciting as the fact
that somebody who's not
even born yet will be able
to have a whole set of
emotional reactions.
"The summer day.
Who made the world?
Who made the swan,
and the black bear? Who
made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean the
one who has flung herself out
of the grass, the one who is
eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws
back and forth instead of up
and down who is gazing
around with her enormous
and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms
and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings
open, and floats away.
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--"
-[man] "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 it you plan
to do with your one wild
and precious life?"
It's great every single
time. It almost I'm almost
I'm kind of like
verklempt. Which is wild.
How, how?
I don't know how it all works.
Whatever that life whatever
that energy is, whatever the
intangible, inexplicable energy
is, that makes us go.
You can feel that
and that's power.
Who made the world?
Ugh, who made you?
What do you forgive
the world for it's beauty?
Everything. Can you forgive
yourself, for your own beauty?
When I read Mary's poetry,
I assent to every line.
I say "Yes, yes, yes."
And besides her text
itself is full of
huge, imponderable,
unanswerable questions
like "What am I supposed to do?"
If you grow up writing
poetry, you don't really expect
that anybody's going to
pay attention to it.
Whoever thinks that
someone might write you
a fan letter about a poem,
People come over to me
and start crying
and saying, "You saved my life."
I'm sure she gets a thousand
more of that kind of thing.
And I'm sure she did. She
really spoke to people.
[]
[woman] I don't think a poet
like her comes along very often
and I think that
poet does get found
by the people who need her.
[man] I love the way
that you all love Mary.
[Gabrielle] I mean, it was like
flies to flypaper.
Let's just be honest.
Let me be the person to say
that people were turned on
by Mary Oliver.
[applause]
[David] There was that famous
picture
of her sitting on a
sea wall somewhere
with her sleeves rolled up.
It's like the
Walt Whitman picture of
him in his loose pirate shirt.
[Gabrelle] When I saw this photo
of Mary Oliver,
the way like she's looking out,
she's a little bit cruising you
in that photo, or a lot.
I looked at this person
just looking out at me
and I was just like, oh my God,
I want that. Not even in
like a sexual way, like I want
to be able to do that.
When we talk about q*eer
family,
one of the things about family
is that you just have
someone to emulate.
[John] It was then Mary's career
was what this couple was about.
Molly was like a police
dog if a tourist came
and tried to knock
on her front door.
And Molly always was "No!"
to everything.
Molly wouldn't let them get
anywhere near her.
[John] She was a very tough
agent,
but I think she certainly
looked out for her.
[Gabrielle] Really nothing in
the outside world got to Mary
unless it got to Mary
through Molly.
[John] It's weird. The more
accepted and famous
and more she sold,
the less critically good
the reviews were.
And I always wondered
if people were mad
She was the number one poet.
-It seemed like they were.
-[William] Lots of poets are
in love with the ordinary,
but should the ordinary
seem so ordinary?
It's as if you've been
promised a miracle,
yet all that lies
on the tablecloth
before you is a dead mouse
on a garbage can lid.
You know, Molly would
get really would fume about
something like that, and
Mary would just
she'd go, "huh."
The conundrum with
poetry is that sometimes
when you gain the people,
you can lose the poets.
[crowd applause, music]
[Donika] I was having a
conversation with
some poets about Mary
Oliver some years ago now,
a nd one of them said, "If
you've read one Mary Oliver
poem,
you've read them all." Which
was a wild statement to me.
I was that felt like a
like a perfect
kind of dismissal.
For some people that
simplicity is suspicious,
but also so many of us
know we can't do it.
I think at a certain
point I was like, okay,
I want to see more with Mary.
Like I really did want to see
more.
And also knowing a little
more about her, I'm like,
I know there's a lot
more to her life
than just waking up
in the morning
and going out for a walk.
Like, what is the storm?
But again, like I haven't
read all her work.
I read a lot at the beginning
and then I was like,
"Okay, I get this."
I'm getting a little critical
now.
[Ruth] I was shocked researching
that New Yorker piece.
I was shocked to discover
that Mary Oliver had never
received a full length
book review in
The New York Times.
And that struck me
as such an indication
of the ridiculously
low level of respect
that she was getting from
the poetry establishment.
[Gabrielle] It's not just that
people said, "Oh, her poems
aren't good."
It was like teaching a student
a Mary Oliver poem would like
somehow ruin poetry.
Because like then people
might start writing like
Mary Oliver. First of all,
you wish, like, try it.
[man] On the surface it looks
awful easy, what she was doing,
but it's not easy.
She's going to the deepest,
most contradictory places
where life and death usher
from the same source.
And then she's speaking
with clear language
about that mystery.
[]
[man] "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.
[]
[woman] People think of her
walking the beaches
of Provincetown
without troubling anyone
or having troubles herself
and that certainly wasn't
the life that she led.
Everybody thinks Mary was
this little earth mother.
Mary did not suffer fools
and she caused trouble.
She was sh*t-stirrer.
You wouldn't think she would
chain smoke. You'd think
she's this healthy person
that's in the woods
breathing the frog's air
or something, but no.
[David] She smoked cigarettes
like she ate
turtle eggs off the beach.
You know, she would
take one with great care
and smoke that cigarette,
which I begged her to stop.
I remember when she brought
me to Sweet Briar College
where she taught for a while
to do my spoken word show
and worked in the word
"as*h*le" into her introduction
of me, in front of her
horrified poetry purists.
[laughter]
Teaching young writers
has also become a passion
for Oliver, and she's decided
to extend her stay at Sweet
Briar for at least another
year.
[woman] I don't think I've read
a single poor student response.
They're extraordinary.
[man] In the early 1990s,
Mary Oliver published one
of the great poetry craft
books,
the "Poetry Handbook,"
and it's still a bestseller.
I'm Natalie. I'm a published
poet
and this is
'books that changed my life,'
part four.
I just picked up this book
on the advice of a friend.
This is a good introduction
to the different styles
and the different forms.
It has really good
tips for beginners.
Just wanted to shout that out.
[Mary] You've gotta know what
words
sound like.
Have you ever wondered
what's the difference
between a stone and a rock?
[Mary] The "K."
[woman] What advice would you
give to upcoming poets as
myself?
[Mary] Be interested in the
whole world and not just
writing.
Read a whole lot.
Most important,
set yourself a schedule
of writing every day.
I've written everything I
know in that little book
because I didn't want
to teach anymore.
[woman] She joked saying the
hope was that the
books could go out
and do the teaching and
she could stay at home.
-[man] Hi there, Ms. Oliver.
-[woman] Dear Mary Oliver,
-[man] Dear Mary Oliver,
Do you guys remember
how I'd start each class?
You'd usually do a poem.
And 90% of the time it
was probably
-like 94%. -We decided the whole
class would
write letters to Mary Oliver.
Like eighth grade authenticity.
Dear Mary, writing
and reading poems has become
an outlet for us lately as they
provided blessings and
stanzas to live by.
And we have learned
to appreciate poems
and fully understand their
magical capabilities.
Poetry is important
because it sets you free.
Have you ever lived till poetry
pours out of your heart?
It's in everyone.
I've been reading your work for
awhile and it makes me smile.
I like the way
you talk about life
and its virtue and meaning.
Your poems have inspired me
to do things I never
thought I could do.
Your poems have inspired me
to accept myself for who I am,
something I never
thought I could do.
What I'm trying to say
is thank you.
I wish you a day as beautiful
as the poems you write.
I have little chills right now.
I mean I remember
what I was going through
in eighth grade when
I wrote this, and reading it
I remember what I'm referencing.
[David] We had a conversation
once about teaching
and she told me, "You
know, it might be better
for you if you quit your
job and moved to the woods
and wrote poetry."
[Mary] In all our time together,
we were rarely separated.
Three or four times
I went away to teach,
but usually M would come with
me
and we simply made our home,
temporarily, somewhere else.
And while I always loved the
stillness I found in the fields
and the woods, our house
was a different thing,
and I loved that too.
[woman] Dear Paulus, thank you
for your Christmas greetings.
On Christmas morning, cold
and windy, I ran to the beach
to fetch home an injured gull.
I expected him to slip the
latch
and leave this world
pretty quickly.
He's pretty bashed up.
Yet he is still here.
Can't fly, can't walk.
But utterly responsive
and all together receptive
to our attentions.
[man] "In the morning when I
came downstairs in the
half-dark,
he was eager for me
to lift the shade
and turn him around so
he could begin looking.
He would swing his head slowly
from east to west, and back,
and again, gazing slowly
and deeply. During the
colorful winter sunsets,
the descent of the light,
he also turned his
attention entirely from us,
and into the world."
[Donika] "Dear Paulus, Molly has
a developing lung tumor.
She waits patiently
and without argument.
Molly looks out at the harbor
and says, cheerfully, "I'm
home.
Bring me some toast
and a peach, sliced."
And with great care I do."
[]
[John] The feeling was no. I
mean that can't happen to
Molly.
[David] Molly was suffering
from emphysema
and was not spending
much time out of bed
and she said, "This is the
way it is with great age."
[Mary] I used to go out at
night with a flashlight
and sit on a little bench
right outside the house
and scribble poems.
I was just so busy
during the day.
[D. Graham] "The broken part
of the wing hung
now by a single tendon;
we clipped it away.
One withered foot literally
fell from him, along
with the first section
of leg bone,
so he was a one-winged,
one-legged gull.
But still patient, attentive."
[John] I would go over there
every day. I lived
you know, half a
block away, basically.
[woman] She did not have
Alzheimer's,
but if you can't get
enough oxygen
in your brain, it's just
about the same thing.
I was sitting on
the couch in her room
with a wonderful friend,
very helpful
during that period of time,
John Waters, the filmmaker.
And Molly looked at John
Waters and said, "Where's Mary?
Where's Mary Oliver?"
[]
[man] "He was, of course,
a piece of the sky.
His eyes said so.
This is not fact;
this is the other part
of knowing something,
when there is no proof,
but neither is there any
way toward disbelief.
Imagine lifting the lid from
a jar and finding it filled
not with darkness
but with light.
Bird was like that.
Startling, elegant, alive."
[]
[Mary] She was style,
she was an old loneliness
that nothing could
quite wipe away;
she was vastly knowledgeable
about people, about books,
about the mind's emotions
and the heart's.
She lived sometimes in
a black box of memories
and unanswerable questions,
and then would come out
and frolic be feisty, and
bold.
Many years ago, we did
not have much income.
We had love and work
and play instead.
We were talkers.
It was a 40 year conversation.
[]
[man] The winters were
they were tough.
I spent like three or four
winters there over the years,
but then I couldn't
stay there forever,
it's so desolate.
[Gabrielle] It's also a space
really riddled with elegy.
There's a lot of
ghosts there too.
I want to read two poems
that are about my partner,
Molly Malone Cook,
or about us.
"There are these: the blue
skirts
of the ocean walking in now,
almost to the edge of town,
and a thousand birds,
in their incredible wings
which they think nothing of,
crying out that the day is
long, the fish are plentiful.
And friends, being as kind
as friends can be, striving
to lift the darkness.
Forgive me, Lord of
honeysuckle, of trees,
of notebooks, of typewriters,
of music,
that there are also these:
the lover, the singer,
the poet asleep in the
shadows."
[woman] Did she change?
Well, everybody changes
when their partner
dies for their whole life.
Mary spent some time feeling
a little unmoored,
I would say.
[woman] My question is of
a personal nature,
and please tell me if it's too
personal.
I too am a grieving widow
of a partner.
And I didn't know if you felt
comfortable talking at all
about your grieving process?
[Mary] Well, first you're
crazy for about a year,
and do everything in excess.
You know, I'm not I'm not
over it.
The amount of alcohol and
cigarettes.
[John] The drinking was crazy
too, but she was headstrong,
nobody told Mary what to do
ever, ever, except Molly.
[church choirs sings]
[woman] How did her death change
your life?
[Mary] Very, very lonely.
I tried the church and that did
not work.
[woman] Mary did not do well
with groups [laughs]
She turned to the church in the
direct
aftermath of Molly's death.
But it was not a lasting
relationship.
Joined the church, she
joined the church 'cause she was
after the woman preacher.
That's why she joined the
church.
And the poor preacher
thought she was saving a soul
of a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet
and then realized she
had the hots for her.
That's what happened.
Everybody knows that.
[C. Stevens] This is from a
letter to her friend, the poet
Pat Fargnoli.
"Dear Pat, exhaustion leads one
to unexpected places and I'm
going to A.A.
Do you know anything about
that?
Many people show up that
I wouldn't have expected.
Not that many people here
in town would've expected me.
Lesson in humility."
People in the program here in
Provincetown
all knew who she was.
But anonymity is anonymity.
But then I, I don't know what
happened.
She stopped coming to the
meetings.
She made startling choices
how to follow up on Molly,
who was untoppable, in my book.
Molly had really been the
guardian at the gate for
so many years, and she
protected Mary's solitude,
protected her from
invasive sides of fame.
[man] She went through a hard
time
and she looked around for
someone to be a lover.
That was when Anne
started coming around
Right from the beginning,
everyone in town who was part
of the A.A. program, who
knew Mary's situation
and knew Anne, was saying
"This is not good."
[woman] It was a bad vibe.
Molly, I do think built a life
with,
but also for her.
And that was not my sense
about Anne. It really wasn't.
And I think that in that
way Mary is also a good
cautionary tale.
You can be the most
famous poet in the world.
Everybody can love your poems,
and you can be involved with
someone
who's really bad for you.
You could hear the truck
coming down the road, it was
Anne wanted to
have a house in Florida.
So I flew out and I spent
maybe a week with Mary.
We were packing, you know,
and I couldn't read her
emotionally.
She was resolute.
I did not see any joy.
But I, I don't want to try to
speak about them too much.
[Frank] Very much so. We
talked about it a lot.
As a matter of fact, some of
our later conversations
down in Florida, she said,
"I made a big mistake."
I don't know that she regretted
it. I think she missed it.
[C. Steven] Mary wrote
in a book of prose,
"I don't know whether I'm
going to heaven or hell,
but I've been, I've been in
heaven for the last 50 years.
Thank you Provincetown."
[melancholy piano music]
[man] That was one of my
frustrations with Mary's poems.
She was just presenting
herself in the light.
Everyone's entitled to reveal
what they want to reveal,
but not acknowledging
or wrestling with one's own
shadow, feels somehow false.
Like it's not a full picture,
of a life.
[]
[Mary] My father, for example,
who was young once
and blue-eyed, returns
on the darkest of nights
to the porch and knocks
wildly at the door,
and if I answer,
I must be prepared
for his waxy face,
for his lower lip
swollen with bitterness.
And so, for a long time,
I did not answer,
but slept fitfully between
his hours of rapping.
[Donika] One of the things
that's really hard about
writing
about traumatic
experiences, is that
you have to look at it.
And if one is a poet like
Mary Oliver, you have
to go in earnestly
to look at it.
I do know from my
own experience that
that pressure does
become inexorable.
You know, you can sort
of have your defenses up
and at a certain point, you know
it comes calling, it's due.
[]
[Mary] But finally there came
the night when I rose out
of my sheets and
stumbled down the hall.
The door fell open
and I knew I was saved
and could bear him,
pathetic and hollow,
with even the least of his
dreams frozen inside him,
and the meanness gone.
[Ariana] There's something about
art. It takes a lot of energy.
And some of that energy,
unfortunately, is from
wild suffering.
That energy pushes something
through a person into the world.
[]
[Mary] And I greeted him and
asked him into the house,
and lit the lamp,
and looked into his blank eyes
in which at last
I saw what a child must love,
I saw what love might have done
had we loved in time.
[]
[Maria] Here's how I first met
Mary:
When I was First Lady
in California,
I kept trying to get her to
come
and speak at this women's
conference that I was doing.
I had discovered her,
like anybody discovers her
through her poetry.
And then I started
hounding her to come
to the women's conference.
Every time I would call her,
she would say, "No."
I said to her, "Look, you know,
'The Journey'
just upended my life.
It's the most incredible
thing I ever read.
My life has never
been the same."
And she was like, "So?"
Then I'd ask her again.
I was like, but Mary,
"I guarantee you'll sell
30,000 books."
She said, "I don't care. No!"
And she always just said
to me, "I don't travel,
I don't leave home.
I don't speak in conferences.
I don't do that."
And I said, 'Yes you do.
Yes, you can do that."
I think I spent six years
trying to get her to come.
I know Mary Oliver's
poems very well.
But on the night before
my cancer surgery,
my dear friend asked me
to pick a poem
out of her deck of poem cards
that would be the guide
for my operation.
And the card was "The Journey."
And I thought I knew this poem.
The first day I came out
of my cocoon of cancer,
I spoke at this huge mega
conference in California.
I was still bald.
I had just finished my last
chemo and I had agreed to speak.
And I get there
and there's 20,000 people
and I'm like, what am I doing?
And I just got up and I
gave a speech about cancer
and about sexual abuse
and about the journey of
what the cancer had done.
And when I walked off stage,
I was walking downstairs and
I saw this woman walking up
towards me who was weeping
and it was Mary Oliver.
And she threw her arms around
me and she said, "Thank you."
I was like, "No, thank you!
You set me on my path.
Like, you were
part of me living."
And she goes, "No, no, no.
You have set me on a path."
[]
[Maria] If I close my eyes and
think about that day,
there was just so much
laughter.
I had developed
a friendship with her.
Oh my God, look, look,
I would've walked right
under this and by it.
[Mary] I'm sure people do.
How do you know she's not dead?
[man] Maria, tell us where we
are?
Well, we're in the
middle of the woods.
I was the guest editor of this
"O Magazine" edition on poetry
and she was the poet
that I admired the most.
And I wanted to interview
her for the magazine.
I'm Maria Shriver,
and I'm standing here
with the legendary Mary Oliver.
So I flew down to Florida
where she was living.
[man] That's great, Mary.
-[camera clicking]
-Gorgeous.
[Mary] Ooh, what a shame
the weather is like this.
We could be in
Provincetown, right?
I'm going to have
to smoke a cigarette.
Okay, then we can pause.
[laughter]
I felt that she was very
comfortable with me,
which is perhaps why
she said what she said.
[Maria] And then you started
this new book of yours.
"What can I say that I have
not said before?"
-Yeah.
Is that something that
you worry about?
And I don't even think she
probably thought it through.
I want to be a little braver
and more honest about
my own life and -and -um -
difficulties there.
And you know,
I was sexually abused.
There's a lot of damage.
You know
that's the first time I've
ever said that out loud.
But that's, you know that's -
Tell me about that.
Well, that's why I wanted
to be invisible, I'm sure.
I had been interviewing
people at that point
for 30, 40 years.
So I knew well enough not
to go, "Oh my God, what?!"
-But I was
-You were sexually
abused as a child?
Very, very little,
and it wasn't until I was
in my forties that I
was able to figure out that
it wasn't a giant.
I was very little.
[]
[Mary] Children forget. I
mean, they don't forget,
but they forget the details.
They just don't know why they
have nightmares all the time.
Just think about
that, how scary that is,
that your body is going
through something
that you can't even remember.
When you're young,
you block it out, particularly
if it's your father,
because you can't remember.
It's so long term,
it's so multi-layered.
[Mary] It would've been
a very different life.
Whether I would've written
poetry or not, who knows?
But I did find the
entire world, in looking
for something.
I got saved by poetry
and I got saved by the
beauty of the world.
[]
[V] Mary was very clear that
it wasn't going to define her.
The fact that she really
didn't address it till her
seventies, she'd already
determined who Mary Oliver was.
Mary, I always tell you
that "The Journey" is my
all time favorite poem.
It's hard to craft your
own journey when voices are
trying to pull you back.
I read it as though it
had been written for me,
and I'm sure millions
of other people did too.
[woman] Like, uh, many of your
fans, sorry, my voice is a
little -
[voice falters]
The one poem that
I was really hoping you
might read was "The Journey,"
which means a lot
to my family and my brother
who couldn't be here, but who -
-[Mary] I will read it.
-[woman] Thank you.
[Mary] Thank you for asking.
Of course, I will.
[Mary] "One day you finally knew
what you had to do,
and began, though the voices
around you kept shouting
their bad advice
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles. "Mend my life!"
each voice cried."
[Oprah] "But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried with its
stiff fingers at the very
foundations, though their
melancholy was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little, as you
left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do
determined to save
the only life you could save."
[]
[woman] You know, she said, "I
had two choices when Molly
died."
[Mary] I would either go buy a
little cabin in the woods
and go inside with all
my books, write poems,
and see nobody and
shut the door, and
that would be that. Or I said
I will unlock all the doors.
[woman] And so she really
accelerates her public readings
in the
wake of Molly's death.
[V] It is a wild
and precious privilege to
introduce to you tonight
for a singular
and heartfelt experience.
Please welcome our
national treasure
and the guardian of Earth,
Mary Oliver.
[applause]
You know, she never became
impossible to criticize,
but she became super
impossible to ignore.
[loud applause]
Thank you.
-[loud applause]
-Thank you
[David] Here you have
someone who is very close
to living a hermit's
life, who then goes out
to these auditoriums
and fills them up.
Mary became a kind of icon for
the hermit within each of us.
You know, Mary was a
genuinely humble person,
and so this is a little
bit difficult to say,
but I don't think that she was
surprised by her popularity.
People who don't know
anything about poetry
and who don't need to know
when they are in a
state of being torn open
by life, and they need
someone to speak to
that state of the soul,
it's Mary Oliver.
[Lucy] What is the meaning of
life? Where can I go for
solace?
How do I find happiness?
How do I cope with sorrow?
It's a Mary Oliver poem
that people find
themselves held by
and they don't need a critic
to explain to them why.
[upbeat, jazzy music]
[man] Mary Oliver's first
book of poems
was reviewed in this
publication by James Dickey,
who dumped all over it.
The last laugh
has been Oliver's.
"Forty-two years after Dickey's
review,
She is far and away this
country's bestselling poet."
Dwight Garner,
The New York Times.
The public at that point
was also really hungry
to know about her.
[woman] What about you
would surprise us?
[Mary] I don't -I don't know.
I was pretty sad yesterday
after the football game.
[TV announcer] The Giants have
won the Super Bowl.
[audience laughter, applause]
[woman] That was surprising.
You have said
what a poem is not.
You say, "A poem
is not the world."
Oh, I'm changing my
ideas about that.
I'm in trouble. I went a little
crazy at one reading
a few months ago and
started shouting
that I wanted my poems
to be inflammatory.
We're all better people
for literature.
Meanwhile, the world burns.
[Mary] Our enjoyment of the
natural world is, in the long
run,
political.
The poem that I
think about the most is,
"Was it Necessary to Do It?"
And it's a poem about
an ant being stepped on.
"I tell you
that ant is very alive!
Look at how he fusses
at being stepped on."
The reason this poem
matters so much to me
is because so many
people that I know,
know what it is to be the ant.
Whether it's people of
color in this country,
whether it's women, whether
it's folks from the LGBTQIA+
community, whether
it's disabled people,
and the assumption is that
either the ant does not exist
because it is not seen, or
that the ant is easy to k*ll.
And so what she does in the
poem is says, you can tell by
how the ant fusses
at being stepped on,
which means the ant is not dead.
The ant is fighting for its
life.
[Mary] The thing I'm most
worried about actually is
what I consider a most
serious ongoing devastation
of the Earth, which we need
both spiritually and materially
and we're not dealing with it.
I worry about little children.
Are they going to know what
the Earth looked like?
[]
[David] As I was leaving,
she kind of blew kisses
and said, "I love you"
and goodbye.
But the last thing that
she said was, "No moping.
No moping!" To me.
You could look at every
poem that she's written
and say, is the
underlying message here
"No moping"?
"Meanwhile the world goes on."
Meanwhile,
everything is happening.
Meanwhile, the wild geese.
[Mary] "You do not have to be
good.
You do not have to walk on
your knees for a hundred miles
through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the
soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair,
yours, and I will tell you
mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun
and the clear pebbles
of the rain are moving
across the landscapes,
over the prairies
and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese,
high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are,
no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself
to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild
geese harsh and exciting
over and over
announcing your place
in the family of things."
You can read it a hundred times
and hear it differently
every time.
Who is the you? And what
does good even mean?
It's a wild goose.
It's the wild geese.
We think of wild as chaotic,
but wild is harmonious
with the wilderness
which is where we all came
from.
We're born wild.
[Lucy] I think people feel a lot
of pressure to be good
by external metrics.
One of the things she
learned by being dedicated
to nature was that that
question doesn't follow
deer and it doesn't follow bees.
Why are we putting
this on ourselves?
[]
[Mary] How many people here
love dogs?
-[applause]
-[Mary] Yay. Yay.
Aren't they something!
Who needs language?
[]
[Stephen] What I get from
her poetry is a sense
that you belong
here in this world
and the evidence is how
you are compelled
by the beauty of it.
That beauty of the world
is an accusation
that you are withholding
your own beauty,
by being good
as opposed to being yourself.
[]
[Gabrielle] Mary kept finding
the light
and realizing she
did not have to be good.
You could not contain her
any more than you could
contain the season outside.
The cycle continues.
[Mary] The fear of death,
as long as death is understood
to be a cessation,
it's quite logical.
But if one understands it
to be a change,
then it becomes
quite interesting.
[]
[woman] How do you know
when a poem is done?
[sigh]
[Mary] Well, I don't know
that you ever know,
but in some way you have made
a completion of a thought
or a mood,
or whatever you're doing,
and it's time to go on.
[gentle music]
[man] A cottage of darkness.
The concept of death is one
that is so impenetrable,
but for the poet
to shrink it down
to a cottage, makes it
something we can emotionally
handle.
[man] Here's a poem for today
by Mary Oliver entitled
"When Death Comes."
"When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes
and takes all the bright coins
from his purse to buy me,
and snaps the purse shut;"
[Helena] "when death comes
like the measle-pox;
when death comes like an
iceberg
between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door
full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like,
that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon
everything as a brotherhood
and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time
as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity
as another possibility,
and I think of each life
as a flower, as common
as a field daisy,
and as singular,
and each name
a comfortable music
in the mouth, tending, as all
music does, toward silence,"
"and each body a lion of
courage,
and something precious to
the earth. 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."
[Helena] "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 and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply
having visited this world."
[]
[man] What a preparation, what a
freedom, to not go into fear.
"Eternity as
another possibility."
Some reader, someone is facing
this moment right now
and I feel as though
there's such consolation
in thinking about a passage
and thinking about
this moment right here
while we are
alive and breathing.
[news anchor] A major American
poet, Mary Oliver, has died.
Oliver authored more than 15
poetry and essay collections.
[man] She died today of lymphoma
at her home in Florida
at 83 years old.
[woman] Her work will live on.
We know she believed we
all will, just as a beloved,
buried dog will sprout
a rose bush next spring.
There are these talismanic
artists who, as much
as they meant to us
while they were alive,
as they're leaving the planet,
we turn toward the fullness
of their living in this new
way.
And we see, oh, you've
offered us a way to be,
you've never demanded
that we respect you.
You weren't shoved down
our throats at school.
You were just there, shining.
The world is just
waiting waiting
for you to pay attention.
Poetry, especially Mary
Oliver's poetry, invites you
to pay attention to
the beauty of the world
and to see in that, you're
not divorced from it.
You're your own grasshopper.
You know what I mean?
[man] Mary Oliver was the real
thing.
A beautiful bohemian,
a g*y woman who didn't
fit in her own minority,
an unabashed eccentric who
helped me understand poetry.
[]
There are a lot of stories
that I could tell you
that you didn't know
to ask me about.
She was very private
and I really protect my
conversations with Mary.
If I thought of something that
she wouldn't
want me to tell you,
I wouldn't tell you.
One more thing:
when she went into the woods
during that week when
she was on the lam,
she met somebody in the woods
whose name was Lenny,
and he was also on the lam.
He was like she was
17-year-old, 18-year-old kid.
Something had happened, he got
into some kind of trouble
and he was afraid
to go back into town
and they were there together.
Two very different people.
Years later she said, "I wonder
what happened to Lenny?"
And I said, "You know
Mary, there's a machine
where we could find
that out fairly quickly."
He had died only
a few days before.
He had gone back to town
and lived his life there.
He had been in the service.
He had many grandchildren.
He went back into the world
after spending that week
in the woods with her.
And she went off
to live her destiny.
For Mary, the woods are
neither good nor bad.
The woods are just the place
where we gain the space
to consider
what it is that we want.
[]
[Stephen] My wife sent me
this the other day.
-We send each other Mary Oliver.
-[woman] Oh, what'd she send?
I'll show you. She put it on
the family chain. Here it is.
"Teach the children."
Do you know this?
"We don't matter so much,
but the children do.
Show them daisies
and the pale hepatica.
Teach them the taste of
sassafras and wintergreen.
The lives of the blue sailors,
mallow, sunbursts,
the moccasin flowers
And the frisky ones inkberry
lamb's-quarters, blueberries.
And the aromatic ones
rosemary, oregano.
Give them peppermint
to put in their pockets
as they go to school.
Give them fields and the woods
and the possibility of the
world salvaged from
the lords of profit.
Stand them in the stream,
head them upstream,
rejoice as they learn to love
the green space they live in,
its sticks and leaves and then
the silent, beautiful blossoms.
Attention is the
beginning of devotion."
She's pretty good.
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Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World (2026)
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