This is hard to say, because Unitarian Universalists generally treat Thou Shalt Adore the Poetry of Mary Oliver as a commandment, except that we don’t do commandments, but I need to confess. Oh wait, we don’t do confession either. (Though we ought to. That’s for another post.)
Never mind. The point is, I think Mary Oliver is mediocre. In fact, it’s gotten to the point that I cringe when the lovely images are drawing to the inevitable conclusion, the moment when Oliver says “Look” or “Listen” and then starts asking us rhetorical questions. It’s like coming to the end of a fable by Aesop.
I am not a person who believes that poems should have morals tacked on to the end. In my experience, the best poems, the ones that eventually turn my life inside out and, like Rilke’s Apollo, inform me that I must change it, are rarely the ones that tell me in plain language what I ought to do. They are more likely to make me say “huh?” I have to read them many times before I dig out their deeper meanings, and when I hold one of those meanings in my hand I know it’s the first of many, that that poem will keep revealing more to me the more times I read it. Oliver’s poems are, in a word, obvious. When she says, or implies, “Look!” I want to say, “Hey, you’re the poet. Don’t tell me to look. Just give me something to look at, something so compelling that I don’t need to be told what to do, and scoot yourself out of the way so that I can see it.”
I once came across an essay on the internet that said better than I can why she isn’t a very good poet and, damn it, is too good not to be a very good poet, but the internet being what it is, I have no idea where to find it again. It expressed my central frustration with Oliver: that someone who can evoke the experiences of the senses so well with words, who seems so perceptive and grounded, who can see the world with clarity, and yet stops short of creating really complex art, is very disappointing.
However, the failings of her poetry make it an excellent source for liturgy. In a worship service, just as the hymns must be fairly simple to sing, the readings have to convey their meaning the first time, to listeners who don’t have another chance to go back and read them again or hear them again (though in our contemplative midweek services, we sometimes do each reading twice). They can be layered, but they also have to be very accessible. They can’t have a very big “huh?” factor. This is why I seldom use my favorite poems in services. Those require absorption; they require analysis and reflection, and many rereadings; then they take off the top of your head, to quote one of my favorite, profoundly “huh?”-inducing poets, Emily Dickinson. You often can’t get them on the first go-round. Or you might pick up something of their wisdom, but you’ll grab on to the easiest bit. Like that last line of “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” by Rainer Maria Rilke, which sounds like a moral and seems easy to grasp. But having grasped it, we still need to spend more time with the poem in order to have any sense of why, how, a headless torso can see us so penetratingly that we know we must change. At least, I did. Rilke’s language is easy (a German speaker once told me it is notable for its simplicity) but his meaning is not. Spend a little time with this poem and you may see what I mean.
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
Of course, you can use readings in a Sunday service that will have meaning on first hearing and then also repay further reading and reflection. But those are harder to find. The poems that offer most on the surface are seldom the ones that offer much more on reflection–that are, in short, great poems. Oliver’s poems are good liturgy for the same reason they are mediocre poetry. They deliver a poignant thought or a morsel of good advice for living, they do it with graceful language, they offer up images the mind can easily hold, and they have very little in them to distract the listener with “Wait, I didn’t get that bit.” They lead one with silken inexorability to a conclusion. That’s not what I look for in a poem, but it’s exactly what I need when I’m sitting in a worship service, or shaping one.
14 comments
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July 1, 2011 at 9:01 am
Joy
Perhaps the essay you are trying to remember is one by Jough Dempsey entiled “You Do Not Have to be Good, (But it Helps)–A Look At Mary Oliver” http://plagiarist.com/articles/33/
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July 1, 2011 at 9:03 am
Amy Zucker Morgenstern
Hm. I’m not sure! That might be the one, though most of it doesn’t ring a bell. In any case, it’s interesting and funny–thanks!
I like this: “Just because you use the words ‘mountains’ and ‘rivers’ in your poem does not mean that they’re going to be in there. Those are just words. You have to do something with them if you want to make poetry.“
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May 7, 2018 at 9:53 am
K.L. Allendoerfer
I have some of the same thoughts as Amy about Mary Oliver, but I really disliked this Dempsey essay. “Assuming for a second that this is true, who needs to be told this?” Well, I do, and Dempsey’s contempt for people like me (who need to be told this) is hurtful and off-putting. I don’t mind when critics criticize poetry thoughtfully, but it’s gross when they are that dismissive and contemptuous of readers.
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July 1, 2011 at 10:33 am
sorrygnat
I liked your article. All of a sudden the name Mary Oliver crept up, and then it was whistled from post to post, and I got it: Somehow she was the Icon of the Day. It’s too soon for me to think about whether she’s good, not good, or whatever, but give me a good Billy Collins or Dorianne Laux, or Denise Levertov, or, or, or. Behind the star machinery is what gets me. I suppose we can use it all: words of grandeur, words of sludge. Somewhere “out there” these words fall upon souls who need them. I think there are a lot of writers “out there” who are incredible, undiscovered, discovered, and I loved the Rilke poem. High regards.
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July 1, 2011 at 12:13 pm
Amy Zucker Morgenstern
We need all the wise words we can get, and you’re right, there is so much great stuff out there sitting in a tiny literary magazine or in the poet’s own notebook. Most of us (I include myself) don’t read enough poetry to do more than fall back on the best known most of the time. I don’t even read most of the poems in the New Yorker, despite being a subscriber, and I like fewer than half the ones I read, but now and then one shatters me.
I should have credited the translator of “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” who is Stephen Mitchell. Hm, not sure I’d have used that one if I’d noticed; he’s of a school of translation I don’t like much, the “fast and loose” school (this is not what they call themselves 😛 ). A friend recommends the Robert Bly version.
Thanks for tipping me off to Dorianne Laux, whom I hadn’t heard of. Beautiful.
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July 19, 2012 at 1:43 am
David Cooper
She is so mediocre that she won a Pulitzer Prize! Like the members of the Pulitzer board, I’m just a thoughtful reader with an opinion. Tastes and judgments vary. –AZM
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April 21, 2018 at 9:42 pm
Judith Schonebaum
Really smug!
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April 21, 2018 at 9:49 pm
Amy Zucker Morgenstern
I am sorry it comes across to you that way.
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May 7, 2018 at 9:37 am
K.L. Allendoerfer
I feel the same way about Billy Collins. Maybe more so. I’ve gotten to the point that if I never hear/read any more Billy Collins, it will be too soon. He doesn’t come up as often as Mary Oliver in UU services, at least. I am sympathetic to the problem of finding accessible material for services. It’s hard! What gets me is when people start quoting Mary Oliver at committee meetings. I think these poets would all remain fresher if they weren’t used so often and in mundane contexts.
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May 7, 2018 at 9:40 am
K.L. Allendoerfer
I don’t mean to say that you do this, Amy. It has just been my experience at some UU functions, where I think the time would have been better spent shortening the meeting rather than reading a poem, lighting the chalice, checking in, etc etc etc.
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July 27, 2020 at 8:02 pm
Scott Rohde
I don’t really agree with you that Mary Oliver makes good liturgy. I don’t mind plain-spokenness but I do mind a certain pretension to be promising more than is really there—it just make me irritated, and this, to me at least, makes it antithetical to any liturgical use.
Something William Stafford said at reading once (not a favorite poet, perhaps, but I found some things he said worthwhile) comes to mind, something about the value of hearing poetry even before you understand it. So I’m wondering really how true it is that only very “accessible” poems are appropriate for a Sunday service. I feel I would prefer to hear something with some depth, even if that depth wasn’t immediately fathomable, to hearing something that makes me say “huh?” not because I don’t immediately get it, but because I don’t get why anyone finds it particularly meaningful.
I even begin to wonder if Unitarians are in general averse to anything that smacks of the inscrutable, and whether those of more traditional religious persuasions, who are used to hearing difficult passages of scripture—passages that religious scholars might spend hours pondering the meaning of—mightn’t be more tolerant of “difficult” language. While I doubt how true this is—many traditional religious types I’m sure like to dwell on easy platitudes—the thought did come to mind.
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July 12, 2022 at 7:47 pm
Maureen
To put it rather too forcefully, I can’t stand Mary Oliver (and garden-variety English major here, no laurels, but 45 years working with words, etc.). This past Sunday two women were gushing about her after a Catholic Mass, and not two hours later a renowned poet invoked her during an online confab seen around the world. Her name comes up often in Centering Prayer and/or “seeker” circles–I don’t need to explain–and any mention seems to conjure a sort of reverence that is assumed to be widely shared. So here I am, insecure and up too late, asking Google, “What if I don’t like Mary Oliver?” Pitiful. I’m just heartened not to be alone, and I learn a lot by reading sincerely penned thoughts such as yours. Also, I’m not familiar with your site, but it looks very interesting at a glance; will take a look around. Thank you.
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July 18, 2022 at 11:39 pm
Amy Zucker Morgenstern
Welcome, Maureen! I’ve felt since posting the above that I put it a little too forcefully myself. I don’t think she is a mediocre poet so much as I think her worst poems are her best-known and most-repeated. If you read more widely among her collected works, they do not usually fall into this unfortunate pattern of telling us what to think. So do explore beyond the “greatest hits.”
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September 28, 2022 at 6:57 pm
Maureen Brown
Thank you so much for your reply. The very day I received it, I also received a message from a Catholic retreat house that was heralding its “sunset,” that is, it was closing for good. I had to laugh when, with almost comedic timing, it finished with a Mary Oliver poem. Since then I’ve heard her invoked at a secular retreat center and in any number of other instances, the latest just today, by email. I took your advice and looked back at American Primitive, one of two volumes I picked up years ago (secondhand), and I have to say that the work in that is good. The second volume I have, the name of which eludes me now, was not very good at all, in my opinion. The poem I read today in the email could have done with several revisions. And so on. But I take your point about her lesser achievements making for good liturgy, and being useful to many because of “first time” accessibility. I think I can understand better now just why leaders or facilitators of various stripes turn to her, and this helps me be less reactive and feel perhaps more generous when these inevitabilities occur — though it is still with some enjoyment that I recall what a New York Times critic said was the best thing about a certain Oliver volume: that no animals had been harmed in its making. Thanks again for responding to me. Maureen
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