“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” —Mary Oliver
I wish we could have met.
It would have been a meeting of the minds. In writing, Mary Oliver could create her own world with nature as her teacher. Just as do I. She began writing poetry at age 14. I began my first poetry booklet at age nine in a pale yellow binder. I would write in my best cursive hand with green ink in my pen.
My first photograph was using a Brownie box camera at the same age. One of her favorite adjectives was “perfect” which I seem to use every day in many situations. The lunch was perfect. The sunrise was perfect. The garden was perfect. That sentence was perfect. Not to even consider all the imperfections of society. Always be positive. My Father would say, “Keep your sunny side up, Babydoll.”
I have quoted her so often on her wise and knowing thoughts.
Mary Oliver was born September 10, 1935 in a suburb of Cleveland. Always walking, forever observing, she studied at Ohio State University and Vassar College without graduating from either. Her first collection of poems “No Voyage and Other Poems” was published in 1963. Her fifth collection of poetry “American Primitive” won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984. She was Poet In Residence at Bucknell University.
Mary was author of 15 poetry and essay collections. They spoke of her worship of the outdoors and her muses were the owls and butterflies, frogs and geese, changes of the seasons, the sun and the stars. Oliver would observe mushrooms growing in a rainstorm or an owl calling. She was awed by the singing of goldfinches or in the poem “White Flower” overcome by a long nap in a field.
“Never in my life had I felt myself so near that porous line where my own body was done with and the roots and the stems and the flowers began,” she wrote. Mary was awarded the National Book Award in 1992 for “New and Selected Poems.” In 1998 she received the Lannan Literary Award for lifetime achievement.
The Harvard Review described her work as an antidote to “inattention and the baroque conventions of our social and professional lives. She is a poet of wisdom and generosity whose vision allows us to look intimately at a world not of our making.” Other awards and honors include honorary doctorates from The Art Institute of Boston, from Dartmouth College, from Tufts University, and from Marquette University. An honorary membership into Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard University. A Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.
She often carried a small hand-sewn notebook for recording impressions and phrases. Once when she found herself in the woods without a pencil, she decided that when she returned she would leave pencils in some of the trees so that such a situation would not occur again.
Mary Oliver’s partner of 40 years was Molly Malone Cook who died in 2005. Diagnosed with lung cancer in 2012, Mary was treated and given a clean bill of health. She ultimately died of lymphoma January 17, 2019 at her home in Florida at age 83.