You do not have to be good….

~ Elan Jenkins

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.

My mother introduced me to that poem, “Wild Geese,” as I believe so many other mothers do with their daughters (and children). Mary Oliver possesses a unique quality that inspires us to share her words with a new person, a new generation. In short, Mary Oliver's poems are an act of love, a sharing of them, an act of care. Wild Geese is one of her most famous works, but, like most of her poems, it teaches us about our place in the world and our role in it. She invites us to acknowledge that everything is moving, everything has purpose, even if that purpose is just to ‘be’. “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely/ the world offers itself to your imagination…over and over announcing yourself in the family of things.”

For Oliver, like so many other poets and writers (specifically, Wordsworth comes to mind), the natural world is seen as a teacher, full of insights on how to live. But Oliver asks something more of her audience; to reflect on their place in the ‘family of things’. In “The Summer Day,” she asks us, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/With your one wild and precious life?” In some ways, I believe that her work seeks to answer this question, to show us life and nature, and to beg us to see our value and place within it.

Mary Oliver was raised in the Midwest, born in Maple Hills Heights, Ohio, in 1935. Her family situation was less than ideal, dysfunctional, and abusive. But, Oliver found safety and peace, even within such a tumultuous childhood, in the forests around her home. It was there she would write and explore. In an interview, she states, “I got saved by poetry, and I got saved by the beauty of the world,” an idea which is very much mirrored within her works. One of her greatest literary influences was Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose home she briefly lived in. During this time, she met her long-time partner, Molly Malone Cook, a photographer. After meeting, they moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she lived, along with Hobe Sound, Florida, until the day of her death. The move to Cape Cod proved to be a great inspiration to Oliver’s writings. It was a practice for her to walk and write. I think that is one very important thing to glean from Mary Oliver’s process: to find what works for you. She was dedicated to her creativity, maintaining it in a way that suited her and her lifestyle, something which I think is a great takeaway for fellow creatives. She states in an interview, “I just began with these little notebooks and scribbled things as they came to me, and then worked them into poems, later.” This practice was routine, something that helped flex her creative muscle. As she says in that same interview, “We have to have an appointment, to have that work out on the page, because the creative part of us gets tired of waiting, or just gets tired.” In walking and writing in this way, she was ‘listening convivially,’ meaning listening to the world.

Mary Oliver's work is universal. It speaks to the soul of who we are as people and as experiencers of the world. She mostly uses the “I” in order to include the reader in the experience, to place them somewhere, and show them something they can learn from. She says of this, “It was about an experience that happened to be mine, but could well have been anybody else’s.” In some ways, I like to think of Mary Oliver as a translator of nature. She shows us what we can learn if we just watch and listen to the world and the natural environment, how it can really tell us a lot about who we are and what we think.

In some ways, the beautiful part about reading Mary Oliver is that she has the same questions and struggles as us all. She too is asking how to live her life. How should she be placed in the family of things? She comes across as mainly an observer, but there’s something about how it’s written that implicates her, and therefore the reader, into the scene. This is where her interest lies, in “the intersection between the human and natural world.” Mary Oliver speaks on common things, like flowers, birds, water, etc., but she also talks about emotions like loneliness, sadness, misplacement, tying the two together. There is a sense of belonging, even within our own sense of feeling misplaced. As I mentioned in the introduction of this profile, my mother first introduced me to Mary Oliver. There is something motherly about reading her work, and often I feel my mother speak through her work. In one poem, “Don’t Hesitate,” she writes, “Joy is not meant to be a crumb.” It feels comforting, like advice given from woman to woman, a storytelling tradition.

Oliver says something similar about the poetic form, “It’s the fact that it [poetry] has been communal, for years and years and years, and we’ve missed it…People are more apt to remember a poem, and therefore feel they own it and can speak it to themselves as you might a prayer… And that’s very important, because then it belongs to you. You have it when you need it.”

There will always be something so self-absorbed about existing; we are always more aware of ourselves than others are. Oliver puts us in conversation with the bigger picture, usually the world, the sea, a flower, sometimes even a reptile, to get us out of our heads and into the world. In “I Go Down To The Shore,” she writes, “I go down to the shore in the morning / and depending on the hour the waves / are rolling in or moving out, / and I say, oh, I am miserable, / what shall — / what should I do? And the sea says / in its lovely voice: / Excuse me, I have work to do.” This serves as a lovely example of what Oliver’s work sets out to do.

Her work is like medicine for the soul and an eye-opener for the mind. Her connections to nature and insight into the world and human condition continue to speak to many generations. That is the work of a good poet, to teach and keep teaching. Though Mary Oliver's life remained quite private, she gave us glimpses into the universality, yet also the personal nature, of our feelings and experiences.