THE RETURN TO “THE CHILD”:
NATURE, LANGUAGE AND THE SENSING BODY
IN THE POETRY OF MARY OLIVER
A Thesis Submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Faculty of Arts and Science
TRENT UNIVERSITY
Peterborough, Ontario, Canada
© Copyright by Erin Holtz Braeckman 2013
English (Public Texts) M.A. Graduate Program
September 2013
ABSTRACT
The Return to “The Child”: Nature, Language and the Sensing Body in the Poetry of Mary Oliver
Erin Holtz Braeckman
Despite – or perhaps because of – her popularity as a best-selling poet, the work of Mary Oliver has been minimized and marginalized within the academy. Nevertheless,
Oliver’s readership is an expansive and devout one made up of a wired yet insular North
American public in search of reconnecting with the natural world. I propose that through
Oliver’s poetry readers access the affective, sensory responses to nature first encountered during childhood. This return to “the child” is deliberately used by various publics to share communal goals. Drawing from such frameworks as ecocritical and trauma theory,
I explore environmental memory, ecstatic places, and the sensuousness of nature and language to consider ways in which diverse publics claim and use Oliver’s work. I provide a close reading of selections of Oliver’s poems to argue that her work’s appeal speaks to a revived perception of the necessity of nature to the human spirit
Keywords: Mary Oliver, Nature Poetry, Poetry Therapy, Ecstatic Places, Environmental
Memory, Language, Childhood, Senses, Attentiveness.
ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“I would love to live Like a river flows, Carried by the surprise Of its own unfolding”
– John O’Donohue
The unfolding of this thesis is one I owe to many people in my life – both past and present. Thank you first to Professor Margaret Steffler for your unconditional commitment to this project over four years, to Professor Charmaine Eddy for your insight during the stages of final revisions, and to Professor Rita Bode for doing me the honour of joining this committee of truly inspirational women.
This thesis is also dedicated to Andy Milner, who first validated me as a writer by exclaiming that he always left marking my essays to the last so that he could read them on his porch with a cup of tea, and to the late David Glassco, whose passion for “the word” has left such a memorable impression on me and my own love of poetry.
Lastly, I owe my gratitude to my wonderful parents for their enduring support, to my loving husband for his selflessness and sacrifices, and to my darling son: all that is beautiful in here is a reflection of you.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii Table of Contents iv
The Return to “The Child”: Nature, Language and the Sensing Body in the Poetry of Mary Oliver
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Our “First Language” 15 The Technologized World and Its Discontents 15 The Trauma of Internalization 19 The Return to Nature 23 The Child and the Poet: “Unacknowledged Legislators of the World” 31 The Poem as Therapy 35
Chapter 2: The Arrival of “the Child” 44 The Natural World: Attentiveness as Communion 45 The Sensory Life of the Poet – and the Poem 50 Transcendence: The Ecstatic Places of Environmental Memory 52
Chapter 3: The Sensual Body of the Poem 56 The Liaison Between Language and the Natural World 57 In Pursuit of the Sensing Body 58 Language as Metaphor 60 A Scribe to the Speaking World 62 The “Text Of Civility” 63 “The Forgotten Waves of Childhood” 65 The Mystery of “Where Others Don’t Care to Look” 69
Conclusion 75
Works Cited 80
iv 1
The Return to “The Child”:
Nature, Language and the Sensing Body
in the Poetry of Mary Oliver
Introduction
American poet Mary Oliver is, according to The New York Times, by “far and away, this country’s best-selling poet” (Garner). Oliver has been a gatekeeper to her private life since her first publications nearly fifty years ago, and gives very few interviews and public readings. Despite her popularity and reputation, her presence throughout the public sphere has been a quietly prolific one – that is, until her name and writing were carried on a consequential, and controversial, wave of media frenzy.
On June 1st, 2012, English teacher David McCullough gave a commencement speech to the graduating class of Wellesley High School in suburban Boston,
Massachusetts. The shock value of McCullough’s “you are not special” theme soon earned airtime on television and radio news programs and was splashed across national headlines – both on the internet, and in print (transcripts of McCullough’s speech can be found on numerous websites1, and a viral video recording has had, to date2, 1 869 079 hits on YouTube alone3). Although his commencement message has been received with mixed emotions, McCullough’s speech is in fact nothing short of a call-to-action, as it addresses what he sees as a generation of students who, after having been enabled and
1 Fox 25 News in Boston and the Boston Herald are examples of these sites. 2 April 17, 2013 3 To view the current number of hits and the “You Are Not Special Commencement Speech from Wellesley High School” YouTube video, visit
(“Commencement speech”). After citing inspiration from greats such as President
Roosevelt, who, according to McCullough, “advocated the strenuous life,” and Henry
David Thoreau, who “wanted to drive life into a corner, to live deep and suck out all of the marrow”), McCullough quoted from a contemporary source, stating that “[t]he poet
Mary Oliver tells us to row, row into the swirl and roil” (Commencement speech”).
The reference is to Oliver’s “West Wind, poem 2,” in which she implores the young to live emphatically with passion, intuition, and a trust in love – themes she explores through powerful images of nature and the metaphor of rowing on a river towards, and not away from, the plunging cliff of a waterfall. Although her message, which evokes the powerful, is a poignant one for a graduating class about to step out on its own, for many, an obvious and more traditional choice for McCullough’s message would have been any other of America’s famed writers – Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, or even Maya Angelou – if only for the sake of matching the ranks of Roosevelt and
Thoreau and all that their names alone represent historically, politically, socially, and publically. Yet, thematically speaking, McCullough’s inclusion of Oliver in his address is a fitting one, for her own message of intuition, passion, and trust is a defining character 3 sketch of those – like Roosevelt, Thoreau, and Oliver herself – who find purpose in the world through their own private convictions. Thus, conventionality aside, Oliver’s significance is that she poses challenges to her readers that are framed by the ways in which her poems connect individuals with the natural world. As New York Times book reviewer Stephen Dobyns writes, it is such poems that “sustain us rather than divert us” as they “go so far to help us forward” (“Praise and Awards”) – a sentiment that
McCullough clearly shares, along with doubtless others, whether they encounter Oliver’s work in a book of poetry or hear it referenced in the media. In either case, Oliver has obviously reached and is continuing to create a public, a readership, an audience, reminding readers and listeners again and again to be attentive to and grateful for the
“one wild and precious life” (“The Summer Day” ll. 18-19) that links the individual members of her audience.
In the process of researching this thesis, I came upon a card used as a place- marker in one of Oliver’s poetry books borrowed through interlibrary loan (see page 14).
The work of art on the notecard seemed a fitting piece for the themes Oliver writes about, depicting the “V” of Canada geese on an autumn day as they land in a field of gold waiting to be hayed. Inside the card was a handwritten thank you that had accompanied a gift that the sender “personally assisted in preparing.” “It is from a river which flows by our ancestral land,” the note stated, “and each year at a certain time our people can select fish for their own use.” The card was dated twenty-five years ago, and I wondered if over those twenty-five years such reverence for nature and tradition had become a buried artefact, lost and replaced by a hasty “doing” rather than a conscious “living,” due to what renowned journalist and founding Chair of the Children and Nature Network, 4
Richard Louv, calls culture’s limitless “faith in technology immersion” that has sent us drifting “ever deeper into a sea of circuitry” (Louv 3).
Ironically, the more society plugs in, the more it disconnects. As a result,
Western society is breeding a public of insularity – and not merely of the mind; as Louv argues in his most recent book The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of
Nature-Deficit Disorder, the more people lose touch (literally and metaphorically) with the outer world and natural surroundings, the more negative the impact on the senses, on psychological, physical, and spiritual health, and on relationships – including what he terms “multispecies” relationships (3) – the interconnection with all living things. It seems there was a time – arguably for centuries – when the seemingly simple act of catching and preparing a fish was one of communion, and the sharing of it a hospitable, honoured offering. It is hard to even imagine that time when standing in the middle of downtown traffic, surrounded by three dimensions of concrete and drones of people face- down in their smartphones as the “wild” and the “precious” slip through the cracks underfoot. However, as William Butler Yeats proposes in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and William Wordsworth in “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” despite the “roadway […] and pavements gray” (“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” l. 11) and
“’mid the din/Of towns and cities” (“Tintern Abbey” ll. 25 – 26), nature always remains somewhere in “the deep heart’s core” (“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” l. 12). Events such as the Industrial Revolution and the Technological Revolution that have brought individuals together as much as they have pushed them apart – that reflect a cultural irony of seemingly requiring to disconnect in order to connect – emphasize an historical trend and human tendency, whether driven by nostalgia or not, to return: to simplicity, to the 5 sphere of childhood, to the natural world. The lives and works of Wordsworth, Yeats, and Oliver reflect this tendency – and are a testament to it.
I have thought many times of the receiver and senders of the notecard I found in
Oliver’s book of poems. In fact, it did not surprise me at all at the time that a reader of
Oliver’s would have friends who wrote thank-you notes, friends who honoured their ancestors, friends by a river who fished and prepared their catch with the ceremony of tradition; friends who, as Oliver gratefully confesses in “The Gift,” “take this world so seriously” (“The Gift” l. 15). Who was Oliver to these gift-givers? Who was she to the receiver? Had he or she been reading Oliver when the notecard arrived in the mail? Why use it as a bookmark? Had it reminded him or her, as it did me, of something – some quality, some sentiment, some light – in Oliver’s poetry? Had others been privy to it, too? What did they think? And what does this mean about Oliver’s audience? For, in a way, that small gesture of tucking an intimate “thank you” inside the very public space of a library book has made me and all of its other readers a collective of sorts – a readership, connected not only through Oliver’s material but through our encounter with the ways in which it circulates within our private spheres and speaks to the garden, the forest, the river within our own “deep heart’s core.”
“Every day,” writes Louv, “our relationship with nature, or the lack of it, influences our lives. This has always been true. But in the twenty-first century, our survival – or thrival – will require a transformative framework for that relationship, a reunion of humans with the rest of nature” (Louv 3). This movement back to nature entails, as Louv suggests, a parallel shift back to “a time when you took in more of the 6 world […]. You were new and the world was new” (13). To be new, then, is to be like a child; freed from association, each encounter is a novelty for the senses and the mind.
Oliver’s poetry facilitates and acts as this encounter – this “reunion” – with nature. By using language as a medium to “[take] in more of the world” (Louv 13),
Oliver offers readers access to the sensory responses evoked while interacting with nature during a time when readers “were new and the world was new” (Louv 13). Poetry thus functions as the “transformative framework” Louv stresses is so imperative to the revival and redemption of the human relationship with the natural world. For a public of insularity, this reconnection with nature also holds the opportunity to return to a more essential self – a self closer to pure perception and instinct. Oliver’s contemporary appeal gestures to this revived perception of the necessity of nature to the human spirit.
Canadian poet Patrick Lane attests to this point in his raw, confessional memoir,
There is a Season. As a post-treatment narrative about his forty-five years of alcoholism and drug use, Lane’s account can in many ways be likened to accounts of those in a society suffering through similar symptoms of dependence as “Virtual, Internet and
Digital Media Technology Abusers” (Hough) – in other words, those, as Lane offers, who stare sightlessly through the “cold mask” (Lane 7-8) of addiction. Although a lifelong gardener – a passion Lane attributes to his love of nature as a child when “[n]othing [yet] was translated into the human” but was merely “a listening […] a smell, a touch, and a sight” (11) – when Lane returns back home to his garden as a recovering addict, it is as if he is seeing, smelling, hearing, and touching it for the first time. “I feel I am some delicate creature come newly to this place […] though I know it well” (5) Lane admits, commenting that “[t]hese first weeks back from the treatment centre are a blessing. I am 7 not thinking of what I will do, I am just trying to feel where I am. Perhaps because of this new body I have […] I am feeling the garden in the way a child feels things […].
My presence here is that new” (7-8).
As Lane suggests and as Oliver’s poetry assumes, childhood is an entry-point back to nature through the sensing body. This is where the child and the poet intersect, divining from the world around them a purpose for language. The terms “the child” and
“the poet,” which I use throughout this thesis, are thus not intended to generalize or essentialize, but rather to allude to the specific qualities of both: “the child” references, as
Louv suggests, a time when we “were new and the world was new” (Louv 13), while “the poet” represents the ability to access this time.
It is through reading the poetry of Oliver that countless people claim to have regained this access to a “new” world, connecting once again with the ways in which the senses attend to and engage with nature. A perfect example of this readership is the
“Dear Mary” blog – cited as “A Blog of Tributes and Testimonials for Mary Oliver’s
Work” – which is a compilation of posts from readers (friends and strangers both) who submitted a “thank you” upon hearing of Oliver’s February 2012 diagnosis of a serious illness. Each message reveals a reader attesting to the profound relationship of Oliver’s audience with her poems, and how her writing has, quite literally, changed, sustained, and enriched readers’ lives. As one blogger writes,
My file cabinet overflowed with poems I loved, all in folders of my
favorite poets. One day, overwhelmed, I threw them all out with
the newspapers, all but your poems from House of Light. I have them
before me now. 8
I think how many times I've said, ‘That is the most beautiful thing in
the world’: my first granddaughter's face on the day she was born, her golden
eyelashes glinting […].
Then your words, over and over again, stopping my heart in its
tracks […]. Your words I keep and treasure, with thanks. (Spidel)
Perhaps feeling, as Lane suggests, as if they “have come out from some shadowed place into light for the first time” (5), Oliver’s readers are offered the opportunity to “climb inside” (11) the child they once were and recognize, with “heart[s] surg[ing] with sudden blood” (3), that – like Yeats and Wordsworth – the natural world “live[s] in [them] still”
(3). It is in this way that each of Oliver’s poems act as a crucible of sorts, as a container for transformation, allowing readers to engage with the natural world through the written word as if “for the first time” (3). Observing and writing with the newness of a beginner’s mind thus enables Oliver’s audience to read with a beginner’s mind, a beginner’s body, a beginner’s senses, the world re-presenting itself with wonders as simple as the glinting golden eyelashes of a new babe (Spidel).
Yet, despite this power and impact on her readership, Oliver’s presence in the literary world is a subtle one; although her poetry can be found tacked up in high school classrooms and quoted in public commencement speeches, it also has a private life, taped to boudoir mirrors, taking up permanent residence on bedroom nightstands, and bookmarked with note cards4. These intimate settings indicate more than just the
4 These have been noted from my own observations and research of Oliver’s readership. 9 readability, appeal, and accessibility that have popularized her poetry; they speak to the ways in which simplicity and detail – both in her writing and observations – are relevant to the often compromised, disenchanted lives of North Americans today.
Despite her popularity, there remains relatively little literary criticism published on the poetry of Oliver. In fact, much like her work, Oliver herself has been noted as a poet who stands “quite comfortably on the margins of things” (Poetry Foundation), but such comfort should be questioned. Author and journalist Rohan B. Preston once noted in a 1993 Chicago Tribune review of Oliver’s work that pastoral, meditational poetry is currently treated in a condescending manner as “rhetorical…metaphysical fluff” (“Oliver
Shares”) – as the “Hallmark greeting card” of the literary world, so to speak. Writer
Marla Marcum argues this point further, claiming that nature poetry produced by contemporary women’s writing is a particularly vulnerable target for criticism because it strives to circulate outside of “dominant cultural forms” and the “logic of patriarchy”
(“Being Good”) that inform and enforce them. Oliver’s work has not escaped this reductive dismissal as simplistic and somehow less than literary; in fact, as Marcum goes on to discuss, one particular review of Oliver’s work (written by critic John Dempsey) can be read as a representative response of white male critics to women’s nature poetry in general (Marcum). In his review, Dempsey claims that nature poems are “facile, easy to write, and make the kinds of observations only an idiot need spelled out in poetry” (“You
Do Not Have”). Dempsey then goes on to accuse Oliver’s writing of being “spineless,”
“vague,” “’first-level,’” “lazy,” “unnecessary,” “anaemic,” and “weak” (“You Do Not
Have”) – all frighteningly misogynistic terms prescribed by patriarchal systems to traditionally describe supposedly female traits. 10
Despite Dempsey’s scathing review and other negative assessments, Oliver has earned much critical acclaim, and the public life of her poetry has garnered her an audience of readers from a diverse, often marginalized, range of communities – from lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) to New Age. Complimentary to this contemporary reading of Oliver’s work is the writing and theory of those who share a marginalized readership with Oliver, which includes a similar sense of easy accessibility and a popularity that can be measured by the volume of public response. Consequently, such popularity sets the poetry, criticism, and theoretical approaches on the margins of the academy. Responses and readings from these margins provide the most perceptive and relevant commentary on Oliver’s works.
Ecologist, philosopher, and Lannan Literary Award winner David Abram, like
Oliver, observes from these margins: his exploration of “the depths of the imagination” and “the ways in which sensory perception, poetics, and wonder inform our relation with the animate earth” (Alliance for Wild Ethics) sits squarely outside of scientific convention. His perspective and beliefs are remarkably close to Oliver’s. Abram’s approach to environmental science has most definitely been a marginalized one – so much so that it has earned him the title of “visionary” (Alliance for Wild Ethics), which is not unlike the label applied to Rachel Carson5 when the world first read Silent Spring fifty years ago6. Abram’s message, however, is much too relevant to poetry, human development, and the world today to minimalize or dismiss it.
5 Worthy of note is that, until her unexpected illness (which has never been disclosed), Oliver was slated to speak as the 2012 Rachel Carson Distinguished Lecture at the Center for Environmental and Sustainability Education. 6 Carson is still referred to as a “visionary” today. See the recently published United States Fish and Wildlife Service government document titled “Remembering Rachel” at
The work of Louise Chawla, like Abram’s, holds a perspective that is only beginning to be recognized in earnest. As professor of Planning and Urban Design at the
University of Colorado, Chawla has devoted her research to the concept of childhood memory in relation to natural environments. Her most recent work with UNESCO evaluates the impact on children of growing up in industrialized countries and urban centres, and the ways in which these locales are failing the needs of youth. Working with a team of child-environment specialists, urban planners, architects, anthropologists, psychologists, educators, environmentalists, and geographers, Chawla explores how the process of urbanization impacts young lives and the ways in which children feel alienated or disconnected in their communities. In her book Growing Up in an Urbanizing World,
Chawla works with the principles of the Habitat Agenda, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and Agenda 21 of the Earth Summit to emphasize how active child participation in the improvement and implementation of urban design can create cityscapes that accommodate children and nurture their desire to connect with their environment. Her background in child development paired with environmental psychology make Chawla an expert on the interdependence of the natural world with language and the senses – a thematic focus in my reading of Oliver.
Much like Chawla, Ann Cvetkovich is an accomplished intellectual committed to an area of study that sits on the margins of the mainstream. Nevertheless, Cvetkovich’s insights are foundational to an emerging area of study: trauma. As professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas, her contemporary, popular theories are informed by those of queer and lesbian studies. It is from this entry-point 12 that Cvetkovich’s research proves invaluable to my own exploration of a trauma culture’s response to and use of the poetry of Oliver7.
Often at the expense of academic credit, these aforementioned writers, like Oliver, are popularized by their affect and accessibility, thus providing a complimentary frame through which to analyze Oliver’s poetry itself. Their readerships, the “jury which sits in judgment upon” (Shelley “Defense”) them, as Percy Bysshe Shelley might suggest, are their peers8, their publics. Chapter 1 of this thesis, entitled “Our ‘First Language’,” explores this relationship between writer and reader, and locates “the child” and “the poet” in a cultural context of nature, language, the sensing body, and technology.
“Chapter 2: The Arrival of ‘the Child’” and “Chapter 3: The Sensing Body of the Poem” are extensions of this theoretical framework, offering close readings of selections of
Oliver’s work. Throughout my thesis, however, one constant remains: for both poet and reader alike, communion can be found both on a page and in the natural world. As one of
Oliver’s readers put it in a “Dear Mary” blog posting entitled “Sense of Oneness with the
Natural World,” “many of us have fallen in love with the world because your poems opened up a path” (Browning). For many others this path was an entry-point back to nature through the body, stripping away years of conditioning and cultural pretence to a time when they “were new and the world was new” (Louv 13).
As for the notecard that fell into my lap from the marked page of my library book,
I scanned the image and the message and put the original back where I felt it belonged. If the ways in which poetry circulates within our private and public spheres collect us as
7 The ways in which this public responds to and uses Oliver’s writing is often during or as a form of therapy – concepts which I explore later in Chapter 1. 8 This is an allusion to the rest of this Shelley quotation (from his “A Defence of Poetry”), in which he states that the jury judging a poet, “belonging as he does to all time, must be composed of his peers” (Shelley). 13 readerships, then surely the artefacts that accompany them do so as well: the dog-ears and underlines, the margin notes and stamped dates, the initials on the inside covers – all the ways in which we mark poetry reveal the ways in which it marks us in return. It didn’t feel right to keep the notecard lest I jeopardize the experience of finding such a treasure for the next reader, and all of the questions and insights and readings that come along with it. Whether in a library book, a store-bought edition on the shelf, or online, how readers connect with and claim poetry for their own can be revealed in something as ordinary as a bookmark – which, I’m sure Oliver would agree, is a small miracle of life’s great mystery.
14
15
Chapter 1: Our “First Language”
In an article for The Guardian, American poet and essayist Adrienne Rich wrote that living in the world today means enduring “manipulated fear, ignorance, cultural confusion and social antagonism [huddled] together on the faultline of an empire”; yet, even within such an empire, poetry has the capacity not only to “[reach] into us for what's still passionate, still unintimidated, still unquenched” (“Legislators of the world”), but “to remind us of something we are forbidden to see” (“Legislators of the world”). As
Nigerian post-colonial writer Ben Okri describes in A Way of Being Free, “[p]oets need to live where others don’t care to look, and they need to do this because if they don’t they can’t sing to us of all the secret and public domains of our lives” (1). In their conviction to “sing” – perhaps in order “to cheer [their] own solitude” (Shelley) in the darkness, like
Shelley’s nightingale in “A Defence of Poetry” – poets have the ability to transpose and translate what Oliver contends is the “music” and “choreography” (“Shriver Interviews”) of words into “transfusions of poetic language [that] can and do quite literally keep bodies and souls together” (Rich). Before exploring this power of the poem, however, it is worth evaluating that which threatens to pull “bodies and souls” apart in the first place.
The Technologized World and Its Discontents
Although we may live in a post-Industrial Revolution world, poetry has not lost its relevance. As Chawla argues, we face this world in much the same way as the
Romantics did with the advent of technology: “[t]o each of us, as to Wordsworth,”
Chawla explains, “lies the task of securing a sense of order within a chaotic society” 16
(“Place” 7) – a society where award winning poet and author Kim Rosen argues “the opportunities for fragmentation of awareness are thick and fast” (“Saved by a Poem”).
Technology has proven not only to decrease people’s interaction and involvement with the natural world (Chawla, “Place” 7), but, in accordance with Marshal McLuhan’s core insight that the medium is the message, to change how we think. As Canadian journalist and Walrus contributor Jeet Heer explains, “each new technology humanity has invented, from the wheel to the alphabet to the Internet, creates new mental habits and new patterns of thought […] our tools aren’t separate from us but rather interact with us and alter, be it ever so slightly, who we are” (“Divine Inspiration”). This submission to the process and progress of technology, as maintained by Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, has led to “the loss of the invisible richness of the present […] accompanied by a concomitant internalization of human awareness” (255).
In the increasingly more information driven, hypertextualized world of North
America, it is difficult to locate these sites of “invisible richness,” let alone cultivate the attentiveness required to devote attention to such sites in order to garner any sense of appreciation, inspiration, or praise. “I try to praise,” Oliver herself has confessed, stating
“[i]f I have any lasting worth, it will be because I have tried to make people remember what the Earth is meant to look like” (“Shriver Interviews”). However, as Abram explains, “[o]ur fascination is elsewhere, carried by […] [the] media – [by] newspapers, radio broadcasts, television networks, computer bulletin boards – all these fields or channels of strictly human communication that so readily grab our senses and mold our thoughts” (258). To “remember” what is “missing” (Oliver, “Branches” l. 14), what the 17 natural world originally looked like before becoming a “cage” (Oliver, “Mountain Lion” l. 28) strung with hydro lines and highways and horizons of concrete and smog, means finding relevance in actively engaging with nature in an ever more virally virtual world.
The concept of interaction itself has become internalized; even communication has been reduced to blogs, tweets, posts, emails, and texts – all very solitary, sedentary, sedated forms of “interaction.”
To access a state of sensory awareness in a disjointed and disenchanted North
America where the mind is live-streamed constant input – music through ear buds, messages on smartphones, downloads from the internet – hardly seems possible at times, especially when the demands of a modern society pressure its citizens to remain
“plugged-in” and “online” lest they miss a link, an update, a new status. Interestingly, at the core of this internalization is language, which, through written text, continues to marginalize its origin as an oral culture through the ever more dependant use of personal technology such as social media and handheld devices. As Abram argues,
[t]oday the speaking self looks out at a purely ‘exterior’ nature
from a purely ‘interior’ zone, presumably located somewhere
inside the physical body or brain. Within the alphabetic
civilization, virtually every human psyche construes itself as just
such an individual ‘interior,’ a private ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness’
unrelated to the other ‘minds’ that surround it, or to the environing
earth. For there is no longer any common medium, no reciprocity,
no respiration between the inside and the outside. There is no longer 18
any flow between the self-reflexive domain of alphabetized awareness and all that
exceeds, or subtends, this determinate realm. Between consciousness and the
unconscious. Between civilization and the wilderness. (257)
The internalization of our attention has arguably become a cultural condition. But that is not the only area of our lives that has become internalized; our lifestyle, too, has largely become internal – has literally been moved indoors. In fact, recent studies by human ecology specialists Robert J. Griffore and Lillian A. Phenice and social science experts
Sarah L. Holloway and Gill Valentine have found that children in contemporary society who either live in highly urbanised locales or spend a significant amount of time in the virtual world of electronic media (Griffore and Phenice 167) often fail to achieve the full emotional, intellectual, and social abilities developed by those children who have greater access to nature develop (Holloway and Valentine; Louv). Unfortunately, this new phenomena is so widespread that it now has a diagnosis: “nature deficit disorder” (Louv
2). Perhaps this is where modern Western society, by default, will differ most from how the Romantics responded to the paradigm shifts brought forward by the Industrial
Revolution; while the Romantics, such as Wordsworth in The Prelude, wanted to “keep
[…] in touch with […] childhood and [the] subsequent adult identity realized within the natural world” (Nichols), new generations born into the world today run the risk of not even knowing the natural world as a child at all, thus denying the possibility for environmental memory. As anthropologist, educator, and physician Maria Montessori argued in 1909 – foreseeing this cultural condition well ahead of her time – “civilised life is made by renunciation of the life of nature; it is almost the snatching of a man from the 19 lap of earth; it is like snatching the newborn child from its mother’s breast” (The
Montessori Method 153); it is the stripping away of a birthright.
The Trauma of Internalization
“As technological civilization diminishes the biotic diversity of the earth,” Abram argues, “language itself is diminished” (86). In other words, without a bodily, sense- connection with the natural world – be it through the “internalization” of a culture or its environmental exploitations that “drive more and more of the land’s wild voices into the oblivion of extinction” (Abram 86) – one loses his or her language as it “[becomes] increasingly impoverished and weightless, progressively emptied of [its] earthly resonance” (Abram 86). In a “nature deficit” society where language is gradually more type-based and formatted into a ready-made, disposable medium (texting, tweeting, and posting now being a continuously unscrolled upload of acronyms, short-forms, and mergers of typographic symbols), words are in jeopardy of going mute, of severing their ties with oral culture, thus becoming ever more detached from the physical and entrenched in the virtual, the internal. As Robert Bringhurst explains, writing
is a technology[…]. Any society that wants this technology can obtain
it, but only those prepared to pay the price, in social self-absorption
and bureaucratic overhead, can keep it. And like other potent
technologies, writing radically alters every society into which it is
introduced. It involves, after all, a kind of ritual mutilation of the
intellect, a sort of cerebral circumcision. (13)
20
Thus, written language distilled even farther into the form of type characters prescribes a still more mentally circumcised public, as communication passed between computers is condensed into a series of numerically programmed synapses. As Abram questions, “[i]f our own language is truly dependent upon the existence of other, nonhuman voices, why do we now experience language as an exclusively human property or possession” (91) that is “devoid of any meaning besides that which we choose to give it?” (91). Although the first form of writing for humans may arguably have been the footprint (Abram 96) – an impression that placed individuals “in distant contact with the Other” (Abram 96), with nature – it is as though language today has taken on the encryption of the virtual rather that the natural world. Verbal and emotional abbreviations such as “gr8,” “lol” and the ever ubiquitous winky-face ( ;) ) are evidence of this as they enter not only everyday lexicon, but its defining reference collection: the dictionary – the seeming be-all-and-end- all of vocabulary relevance and pop-culture commentary. In fact, most online dictionaries now cite an ever growing catalogue of textspeak (or text speak)9 entries – a register that, with the ever rising popularity (and upgrading) of personal handheld technology and social media devices, will surely rival in notations the number of hours users spend typing them.
Although many would argue that, as the Germanic languages family tree and the
Oxford English Dictionary would suggest, language is always inevitably evolving and it would not be where it is today if it were not for such evolution, textspeak has arguably
(and literally) brought more loss with it than gain. Even though, as philology and linguistics expert Rev. Wulfstan Clough observes, trends in the English language mark a
9 Textspeak (or text speak) is a developing dialect that condenses language into phonetic abbreviations or substitutive characters. 21 major shift every five hundred years (Saint Vincent College), the current textspeak revolution is impacting more than just text – it is changing one’s relationship with it as well. As Clough claims, oral language and everyday speech is now mimicking the speed at which textspeak is used. In other words, communication – language – is being sifted down into a fractured version of its form and context, compromising its corporality, its connection to the senses, and its origins in the natural world.
This gradual collapse of oral language, which has been linked in Western civilization to the prevalence of television, radio, and newspapers [Encyclopaedia
Britannica “oral tradition”], as well as the performative traditions that pivot on it refer back not only to the continued internalization of society through the dominant medium of text-based technology, but to the systematic codifying and legislation of a culture10. This regulation is arguably based on what drives consumer demands for such technologies: a capitalist agenda mobilized by money-making trends. As a result, spontaneity, imagination, expression – “the child” – become stifled in favour of sense-less, face-less structured systems of communication that Cvetkovich would argue are different facets of a culture of trauma.
In her cultural criticism An Archive of Feelings, Cvetkovich treats trauma as a social rather than a clinical condition; as a “cultural discourse that emerges in response to the demands of grappling with the psychic consequences of historical events” (18).
Trauma theory seeks to identify its surfacing from a history that includes colonialism,
10 This is not to downplay or ignore the cultural relevance and prevalence of such oral language mediums as, for example, rap, spoken word, and performance poetry. What is interesting to note, however, is that these mediums are often accessible to the general public through such media as those – internet, radio, television – which threaten to compromise oral language in the first place. Though one may argue that some of these mediums do accommodate the oral, it is in a passive, removed sense; even in cases of “live” performances, one is always only listening to or watching a digitized or projected version, and is denied the engaged, participatory contribution as a present audience member. 22 genocide, slavery, migration, diaspora, war, and economic exploitation (36); in fact, as
Cvetkovich claims, “trauma is one of the affective experiences […] that characterizes the lived experience of capitalism” (17). It is imperative to acknowledge capitalism as a key factor in the current depreciation and internalization of oral language – not only in society’s use of it but in its relationship with it. This relationship can be traced back, as
Abram asserts, “to the shapes and features of the land” (172) – a land that is itself ever more exploited by the demands of consumerism and industry. While consumers
“internalize” both their language and their lifestyle, becoming a public of insularity, the capitalist society which drives them to do so is stripping them of their innate connection to the natural world.
This alienation from nature has contributed to the North American view of the self as incorporeal (Abram 45), a shift that signals the public’s failure to recognize that without a physical “encounter, without any glimmer or sensory experience, there could be nothing to question or to know. The living body is thus the very possibility of contact, not just with others but with oneself – the very possibility of reflection, of thought, of knowledge” (Abram 45) – of language. In other words, without corporality, there would be no sensing self; the body, like language, cannot exist exclusively as an “internal” medium.
Poetry has the potential to challenge this culture of internalization by virtue of its use of language affectively. It is within this “affective life” or “archive of feelings”
(Cvetkovich 10) of the poem that a reclamation of language and its roots in the natural world can surface, as the reading of poetry holds the possibility of reconnecting with the body, and through that body with the natural world. 23
The Return to Nature
In a luminous passage from her groundbreaking pedagogical theory The
Montessori Method, Montessori meditates on an observation that is as relevant to contemporary society as it was at the turn of the twentieth century, concluding that, despite human progress “man […] still belongs to nature, and […] he must needs draw from it the forces necessary to the development of the body and of the spirit” (The
Montessori Method 153). Without this connection, Montessori concluded, adults jeopardize a “sensitiveness which the habit of seeing miracles often makes us lose so we no longer feel the mystery” (Daily Montessori). These “miracles” of the “mystery,” which Montessori implies we are so conditioned to as adults, are what connect both children and poets intimately with their worlds through an attentiveness to potentiality and possibility (Chawla, “Place” 11). As Chawla argues, “both the child, by necessity, and the poet, by personality, stand somewhat apart from their world, as observers rather than full enlisted participants” (“Place” 11). This ability to observe and attend to the potentialities and possibilities – to the miracles and mysteries – is the very sum and substance of Oliver as a poet and of the poems that she writes. As Oliver has said, many adults spend their days “seeking the answerable,” therefore “demeaning or bypassing those things that can’t be answered […] and denuding one’s life of the acceptance of mystery and the pleasure of mystery and the willingness to live with mystery” (“Oliver with Coleman Barks” 3:19-3:37).
It is this surrender to the “mystery,” this commitment to encountering nature with an enduring sense of wonder – as if new to the world each day – that enables Oliver to 24 fully access and write from the sensory space of the child. This ability can be compared to Abram’s explanation of the process of becoming “conscious of the unseen depths that surround us” (Abram 260), during which
the inwardness or interiority that we have come to associate with
the personal psyche begins to be encountered in the world at large:
we feel ourselves enveloped, immersed, caught up within the
sensuous world. This breathing landscape is no longer just a
passive backdrop against which human history unfolds, but a
potentized field of intelligence in which our actions participate.
As the regime of self-reference begins to break down, as we awaken
to the air, and to the multiplicitous Others that are implicated, with
us, in its generative depths, the shapes around us seem to awaken, to
come alive […]. (260)
Interestingly, it is in a similar way that the child’s egocentric development, evolving sensory exploration, and close physical proximity to her surroundings both inform and intuit her relationship with nature. Mirroring this is the poet’s surrender to the interiority of her psyche that enables her to revisit the world through the acute spheres of egocentric development, evolving sensory exploration, and close physical proximity to her surroundings.
Oliver’s poetry is best known for this sensitive attentiveness – an approach to relating to the world which, as she claims in her poem “Yes! No!,” “is our endless/and proper work” (ll. 15-16). In Our World she attributes her own ability “to see, with searching attention and compassion” (Random House) to her life-partner of more than 25 forty years – acclaimed photographer Molly Malone Cook – as well as to a childhood spent in pastoral Ohio in the 1930s and 40s, where her “searching attention” was cultivated through endless hours spent outside in neighbouring forests and farmlands.
Consequently, Oliver is an observer – a role that Montessori insisted children have an astonishing capacity for through their very intimate engagement with both the natural and sensorial worlds. By embracing this spirit of observation through nature and the senses Oliver is able to inspire what Dylan Thomas once claimed as the “mystery” of being “moved by words” (1066) that a writer and reader return to in a poem.
This return to the “mystery” – to what Okri terms as “all the forgotten waves of childhood” and “yearnings of our lives” (4) – which both poet and audience return to through the mediums of writing, reading, and performance also includes encounters with what Chawla calls fatalism. Chawla explains that transcendence in childhood and in our environmental memory to ecstatic places11 often includes witnessing “a chilling, searing glimpse of nature’s monstrousness which consumes life as prodigally as it creates it”
(“Ecology” 37). Children do not tend to discriminate against this “monstrousness”; in fact, oftentimes they celebrate the grotesque as much as they do beauty. Their interest in, curiosity about, and fascination with degeneration, deformity, decomposition – even death – in the natural world is no new phenomena, but rather an innate quality of exploration in the developing child that can be traced back through centuries of child culture (Stephens). As Professor Susie Stephens of Middle Tennessee State University
11 In her article ”Ecstatic Places,” Chawla ties her use of the word “ecstatic” to its contemporary meaning of experiencing intense emotion, as well as to its ancient Greek meaning of standing outside of one’s self (“Ecstatic Places” 18). As Chawla explains, “[w]hen we stand outside ourselves, we stand in the place that surrounds us,” in a landscape in which we are “enthrallingly attuned to[…]every particular” (“Ecstatic Places” 18). In keeping with Chawla’s terminology, the use of the word “ecstatic” will refer to this affective, attentive response inspired by the natural world, both in relation to place and memory. 26 writes in “The Grotesque in Children’s Literature,” “grotesque references have always been a component of [children’s literature], which suggests that there may be something important about these usages that transcends simple entertainment” (Stephens).
One approach to explaining the relevance of the grotesque in child culture is through ecopsychology – a concept proposing that children are born with an innate sense of relatedness to their natural surroundings (Griffore and Phenice 167). Whether grotesque or beautiful, descriptions and depictions of nature in children’s literature play upon and cater to a child’s attraction to the environment. This connection is driven by inquisitiveness and the desire to engage with what Oliver calls the “mysteries” of the everyday: poking at a regurgitated owl pellet with a stick in search of undigested field mouse bones holds no less of a miracle than beholding a flickering constellation of lightening bugs against the darkness of a hot summer night. Whether it be the silence of the ruffled female sparrow who has broken her neck on the glass pane, or the sultry chorus from the sodden trenches of the frogs as they sing to the rest of the marsh, the acrobatics of water striders or the sticky luminous globes of beaded pine sap, the natural world is often where “others,” besides children, “don’t care to look” (Okri 1). Even the mundane and the minute rarely escape a child’s attention, wonder, imagination, or desire to connect with nature. According to Montessori, these qualities enable a child’s often
“lofty visions of the cosmic task of creatures so humble as the earthworm [that] stirs the mind as it speaks to the essential truths and mysteries which govern our common existence” (Rose Hill 2).
As Shelley suggests, it is poets, too, who approach the world with an attuned awareness: “A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one,” Shelley 27 contends, “[f]or he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present” (“Defence”). Though Shelley perhaps overstates his point here, he identifies the importance of commitment to the “present”; whether grotesque or beautiful, it is from the present moment that the ecstatic places of both childhood and environmental memory evolve, both from “shivers of fear as well as delight” (Chawla, “Ecstatic Places” 18).
However, it is this appreciation of and insight into the potentiality of life, tinged with a sense of fatalism and the “essential truths and mysteries” (Rose Hill 2) of an interconnected relationship with the natural world, that the poet and the child share with both each other and that world. Thus, it is through the senses – through their “first language” and “personal tie with all the rhythms of the natural world” (Oliver, Rules 3) that the child and the poet intersect.
Poetry, like culture, can be defined as “a style of relating” (Chawla, “Place” 13).
Consequently, as Chawla explains in “The Place of Poetry,”
[w]idely known creative artists…have particular power to influence
their culture, including its manner of relating to the environment.
They distinguish themselves by their receptivity to their environment,
and by their media-magnified responsiveness to it. If childhood
environments consistently leave an enduring mark upon artists, […]
then the environments known by the children of one generation must stamp their
qualities upon the culture of the succeeding generation […]. (13)
Poetry, therefore, can itself function as a counterpublic, as a sphere in which such faculties as memory – or, even more specifically, environmental memory – can be 28 recalled across peoples and generations. As Oliver offers, “art is one of the things that could save us. We don't have to rely totally on experience if we can do things in our imagination [...]. It's the only way in which you can live more lives than your own. You can escape your own time, your own sensibility, your own narrowness of vision” (Ratiner
2). In other words, the “forgotten waves of childhood” (Okri 4), the attentiveness to nature and the senses through language that have popularized Oliver’s poems as
“transformational tools,” have the potential to be accessible to all of her readers.
Her vast online following and citations are an indication of the impact Oliver’s poetry has had on those in search of returning to the earth and reconnecting with the self through “the child.” From Buddhist12 and Zen13 temples, schools and educational institutions14, to centres for ecological15, spiritual16, and personal development17, Oliver’s works have taken the form of prayer, meditation, therapy – even sermons. Reverend Fred
Hammond goes so far as to say that Oliver is “the unofficial poet laureate of Unitarian
Universalists” (“Theology”) – a creedless, liberal religious sect dedicated to spiritual growth through a personal search for truth and meaning18. As Hammond explains, the reason why Oliver “has won the hearts of many Unitarian Universalists” is that she is
“able to speak to our deep longing to be connected to this natural world,” to offer “a sense of communing with nature in a raw earthy sensual manner that our world at our
12 Cambridge Yoga Centre:
Oliver’s popularity among Unitarian Universalists (most notably in her programmed reading at the 2006 General Assembly Ware Lecture at the Annual Meeting of the
Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations) is her poetry’s alignment with the community’s principles of celebrating the mystery and wonder of life through earth- based teachings on the interdependent rhythms that harmonize nature (Unitarian, “Our
Unitarian).
According to Michael Pollan, writer, activist, and professor of journalism at
University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, it is through connecting with these rhythms that one has the opportunity to realize that “the mystery and wonder of life” (Unitarian, “Our Unitarian) are “acting subjects” (Pollan xv): it “is simply another failure of imagination” to believe otherwise, Pollan explains, as “nature is not only to be found ‘out there’; it is also ‘in here,’ in the apple and the potato, in the garden and the kitchen, even in the brain of a man beholding the beauty of a tulip […].
My wager is that when we can find nature in these sorts of places as readily as we now find it in the wild, we’ll have traveled a considerable distance toward understanding our place in the world in the fullness of its complexity and ambiguity” (xxiv). For the
Unitarian Universalist congregation on “a quest toward different ways of knowing, [of] seeking […]” (Davis 605), Oliver’s poetry offers an entry-point to the “’in here’” that
Pollan speaks of, as well as to what writer Todd Davis describes as a sustained “voice of joy, of true ecstatic fervor […] in a postmodern age that celebrates irony and cynicism”
(605)19 – both arguably sites of trauma.
19 Interestingly, it is not uncommon to read reviews of and responses to Oliver’s work in the same inspired, reverential tone as found in Davis’s comments here. This is evidence of the affect of her poetry, the 30
Oliver’s poetry affirms not only the value, but the necessity of nature to the human spirit; to what Okri terms “the widening of the world towards a vaster, more wondrous reality” (13) in an attempt to stand in the mystery – to embody “the child.” As
Montessori observed, a child does not “satisfy the physiological needs of his body by
[simply] moving his legs and breathing fresh air” (The Montessori Method 155); rather,
“the best means of invigorating the child is to immerse him in nature” (The Montessori
Method 154). Montessori went on to state that “it is also necessary for his psychical life to place the soul of the child in contact with creation, in order that he may lay up for himself treasure from the directly educating forces of living nature” (The Montessori
Method 155) – forces that cultivate “a peaceful equilibrium of conscience” (The
Montessori Method 159) as well as “the virtue of patience and […] confident expectation, which is a form of faith and of philosophy of life” (The Montessori Method 159). With an emphasis on “the good and the hopeful” (Oliver, “Shriver Interviews”) while celebrating life as “an amazing gift” (Oliver, “Shriver Interviews”), Oliver divines the
“marvels of creation” in nature that children are innately “inspired with a feeling for”
(The Montessori Method 159), thus travelling back through environmental memory to a space “of trust and confidence in living creatures, which is […] a form of love, and […] union with the universe” (The Montessori Method 159).
In her attentiveness to what Montessori named as the “intimate communications with nature which have an influence […] [on] the body” (The Montessori Method 153) as well as on the mind and spirit, Oliver enables those “heavy […] with thoughts as small as
meaning it carries for her readers, as well as the enlightened consciousness she is celebrated for having as a popular “mystic” (Davis 605). 31
[one’s] life/would ever be” (“Over the Hill” ll. 25-27) to reclaim language as an extension of the senses, as a means of reencountering the natural world.
The Child and the Poet: “Unacknowledged Legislators of the World”
As Shelley states in his “Defence,” “[p]oets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” (Shelley), making poetry “[t]he most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution” (Shelley). Although such statements could be considered romanticized and grandiose, Newcastle University professor and Romantics specialist Michael Rossington claims that these proclamations were driven by Shelley’s personal mission “to educate an
English audience in the recovery of a literary and philosophical inheritance” (Rossington
3) before it was lost altogether. Shelley’s conviction is thus relevant today – particularly for those in the public sphere who consider the current changes taking place in the
English language as nothing short of vandalism20. There could perhaps be no better call- to-action for poets than the gradual decline and internalization of oral culture, as the very art and survival of poetry hinges on performance, recitation, and the life a poem takes on with each new reading and the varied inflections, pauses, tones, and pacings that it may take. It is this “life” of a poem, this interpretive, malleable medium that, as Rich suggests, “remind[s] us of something we are forbidden to see” (“Legislators of the world”); of a wonder, intuition, and imagination that has become stifled and sterilized.
Stripping individuals of what author and activist Parker J. Palmer terms is their birthright
20 This is a sentiment shared by many, as is evident through any internet search. Among others, see Zoe and Steve Vaughan’s MSN article, “The big question: is text speak destroying the English language?,” at
“process that dissects life and distances us from the world” (Palmer 17).
Oliver’s work challenges these processes first with the “music” and
“choreography” (Oliver, “Shriver Interviews”) of words and then with the transfusions of sound and movement written in what Oliver claims is our “first language” (Rules 3) – the breath. This most vital, reflexive, and metrical of biological processes – breathing – is, according to Oliver, “our own personal tie with all the rhythms of the natural world, of which we are a part, from which we can never break apart while we live” (Rules 3). It is through this “first language,” then, that poetry has the power and potential to, as Rich suggests, “keep bodies and souls together”; to return one to one’s beginnings, to one’s intimacy with nature, to a time, as Louv suggests, when one was “new and the world was new” (Louv 13); to, ultimately, “the child.”
This “first language” is in many ways a child’s earliest form of communication, the subtleties, for example, of an infant’s intake and intensity of breath being initial indicators of stimulation, engagement, responsiveness, and mood. Bodily rhythms not only align an individual with the rhythms of his or her environment, as Oliver suggests, but also function as precursors for learning language. In fact, as Abram explains,
[w]e do not, as children, first enter into language by consciously
studying the formalities of syntax and grammar or by memorizing
the dictionary definitions of words, but rather by actively making
sounds – by crying in pain and laughing in joy, by squealing and
babbling and playfully mimicking the surrounding soundscape, 33
gradually entering through such mimicry into the specific melodies
of the local language, our resonant bodies slowly coming to echo the inflections
and accents common to our locale and community.
(75)
Our first relationship with language is thus a kinesthetic one. – a relationship that twentieth-century French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty explained in his
Phenomenology of Perception as a mutual exchange between the living body and its surrounding environment (Merleau-Ponty). This preverbal stage of the breath, with “its own coherence and articulation,” is hence what establishes “the very soil and support of that more conscious exchange we call language” (Abram 74). As Abram asserts, children learn and appropriate a new phrase or word corporally – how its tonality and texture
“tastes” and feels in the mouth, how “it influences or modulates the body” (75). In other words, language is in and of itself a sensuous experience.
It is this same sentiment we find echoed in Thomas’s famous “Poetic Manifesto,” in which he recalls his earliest encounter with both language and poetry in the form of nursery rhymes. Thomas remarks that,
[t]he first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could
read them for myself I had come to love just the words of them,
the words alone. What the words stood for, symbolized, or meant,
was of very secondary importance; what mattered was the […] shapes
of sound […] made in my ears; […] the colours the words cast on my eyes.
(1062) 34
The sensory quality – the “music” and “choreography” (Oliver, “Shriver Interviews”) – of nursery rhyme poems that Thomas alludes to has intuitively appealed to and resonated with generations across cultures (Bett 12), as it plays to the kinesthetic, biological relationship that Oliver, Abram, and Merleau-Ponty assert that children have with their native language. As Henry Bett claims in Nursery Rhymes and Tales - Their Origin and
History, these generations – regardless of cultural context – date back to nomadic times when nursery rhymes began to “spread over the world with the migrations of races” (12).
In anthropological terms, the evolution of oral traditions such as the nursery rhyme suggests that language is learned, related to, and relevant in universal ways.
Therefore, when Oliver speaks of one’s “first language” – of the breath being as elemental to the composition of a poem as it is to one’s connection with the natural world
– she is referring to a concept that in effect encompasses much more than rhyme, rhythm, and repetition; what one also has the prospect of encountering in a poem is the echo not only of those earliest verses of the cradle, but of those earliest progressions of emotional and physical development that are cultivated in and carried from the cradle. This is the definition of the return to “the child”; to what is felt rather than what is conceptualized in language, the senses, and the natural world; to a quality of perception, a lack of preconception or association, and a loss of self-consciousness (Chawla, “Place” 11) that a poet and reader have the potentiality of sharing in a poem. These are the “forbidden,”
“secret and public domains”21 that Rich and Okri allude to; these are the literal and metaphorical spaces – some forgotten, others seemingly outgrown – that, as Chawla
21 To clarify, I am using Okri’s quotation here to reference the developmental stage where, for many young children, there is an overlap between private and public spaces, between the interior and exterior “self.” Social convention often dictates what is appropriate “overlap” beyond childhood; for example, expectations are that one wears clothing willingly, censors speech, etc. 35 argues, “both child and poet […] [take] on [in] the task of creating the personal world in which they […] live” (“Place” 11). Chawla goes on to state that the
[c]hild and poet are also alike in the sensuality of their encounter
with their world. Children must engage with the world physically
to grow. Their active movement brings them into intense physical involvement
with it. The poet is renowned for sensitivity to the
sensual touch of the world. (“Place” 11)
From the playground to the poem, the ways in which both the child and the poet interact with, attend to, and interpret the private and public venues of their lives are parallel:
“[c]hildren do it in their play,” Chawla contends, “poets in their art” (“Place” 11).
Whether play or art, child or poet, “the one is no less serious than the other” (“Place”
11)22. The poem as an affective, sensory medium, then, thus has the potential to access a time when a reader was “new and the world was new” (Louv 13) – a time when those same emotions and senses were first emerging.
The Poem as Therapy
As Diane Ackerman states, “[m]uch of our experience in twentieth-century
America is an effort to get away from [the] textures [of life], to fade into a stark, simple, solemn, puritanical, all-business routine that doesn’t have anything so unseemly as sensuous zest” (Ackerman xviii). As a result, according to Okri, “[w]e no longer see the world. We’ve stopped looking. We no longer marvel at something beautiful. We’ve
22 It is not my intention here to generalize “poetry” or “the poet,” but rather to point to, and explore throughout the rest of this thesis, how affective poetry has the ability to transport readers back to an emergent state of sensory being. 36 stopped noticing. We can’t really remember the last time we experienced the quickening of the unknown” (8-9). As Oliver questions in her poem ”Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches,”
Do you think this world is only an entertainment for you?
Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides
with perfect courtesy, to let you in?
Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass!
Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over
the dark acorn of your heart!
No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint
that something is missing from your life! (ll. 7-14)
One response to the need – to the necessity – to “return to feeling the textures of life” (Ackerman xviii) Oliver gestures to in her poem is through poetry therapy. The concept of poetry as therapy is not new; in fact, it has been traced back to the chants and incantations of primitive humans, to medicinal usage in ancient Egypt, and to the pagan worship of the Greek god Apollo (National Association for Poetry Therapy; Mazza 5). A search for “poetry therapy” – an official branch of bibliotherapy – will yield many results on the internet (where, ironically, the oral and written unite); from the National
Association for Poetry Therapy to the Journal of Poetry Therapy, from YouTube tutorials to training and certification to online forums, blogs, and communities dedicated to poetry therapy, the medium abounds. Rosen attests to this power of the poem, to the possibility of taking poems so deeply into oneself that they become “healers from the inside out” 37
(“Saved by a Poem”). As Rosen explains, there is a physiology to a poem, its rhythm, shape, sound, and meaning harmonizing biochemically with one’s body – emotionally, physically, and spiritually – in a way she describes as “’Shamanic’” properties that reference back to their roots in song and chant (“Saved by a Poem”). “It is the quickest route home to the inner self that I’ve ever experienced,” she asserts, “[a]nd yet so many people, especially in America, are ignoring it” (“Saved by a Poem”).
Nevertheless, poetry is circulating, is creating a discourse: as author Greg Cook wrote in an essay for the Poetry Foundation, poetry therapists and those who believe in the remedial benefits of the word comprise “a sort of subculture” (“Mary Oliver Saved
My Life”), a counterpublic that, in accordance with social theorist Michael Warner, has come “into being only in relation to texts and their circulation” (Warner 50) – texts, in this case, being poems. Though such central psychoanalytic figures as Freud, Jung,
Adlerian, and Gestalt have researched the properties of poetry as a successful therapeutic medium (Mazza 12), poetry therapy lies predominantly outside of the public sphere’s hegemonic discourse. In the spirit of creating a space for circulation and transformation
– not, as Warner notes, simple replication (88) – poetry therapy provides those participating in its discourse and performance with a communal sphere, a counterpublic, to share and heal through text.
One of the most present poets circulating within this sphere is Oliver – a poet, as
Cook claims, who is “mentioned again and again by poetry therapists” (“Mary Oliver
Saved My Life”) for her “’generous human sensibility’” and accessible themes centred on the natural world (“Mary Oliver Saved My Life”), as one of Cook’s interviewees states.
In a public where one’s relationships to both nature and language have become sites of 38 trauma, Oliver’s poetry thus offers a return to “the child,” a transcendence to possible spaces of environmental memory and ecstatic places. It is in these revisited – perhaps even reimagined - private and public spaces that one has the potential to discover his or her first experiences with nature, language, and the senses before the trauma of being policed and bound by codes, legislation, and law (Okri 4).
According to Cvetkovich, it is “the persistence of the everyday” (22) that is at the heart of the lived and inherited encounters with trauma in North American. This recognition allows for the possibility to understand “traumatic feelings not as a medical problem in search of a cure but as felt experiences that can be mobilized in a range of directions, including the construction of cultures and publics” (Cvetkovich 47). In considering Unitarian Universalism (which was consolidated in 1961) as a collection of self-professed liberal heretics (Harris) – as a counterpublic – responding to the “amnesiac powers of national culture” (Cvetkovich 16) and the consequential environmental devastation, it is evident why such a congregation would turn away from “irony and cynicism” (Davis 605) to the “wisdom in the flora and fauna of this earth that is more profound, more revealing about how we are to live and breathe our days here”
(Hammond)23.
It is with attentiveness and gratitude that Oliver is “redeemed by her love for the earth again and again” (Davis 605) – a “communion [her audience] yearn[s] to read about in their poet's missives” (Davis 605) from the natural world. In an age in which poetry sales and readerships are on the decline (Davis 605), the fact that Oliver’s audience is
23 For more references to Oliver’s poetry in a selection of Unitarian Universalist sermons, see the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations “WorshipWeb” site at
Healing Institute describes as “[t]he simple act of breaking usual unconscious patterns of behaviour, sounds, sights, and rhythms” (Ross 156). As Ross further explains, “[n]ature can help us experience a sense of connection with our surroundings, a greater awareness of our bodies, and some relief from mental chatter or emotional unease […]. Connecting with the deeper rhythms of nature allows us to reconnect with our own instinctual rhythms” (Ross 156). Traditionally, according to environmentalist Greg Garrard,
American culture has emphasized a “working rather than an aesthetic relationship with the land” (Garrard 49) – an attitude that has, through this same drive for industry, further distanced and desensitized the public from its “instinctual rhythms” (Ross 156), from the modernist, nature-for-nature’s-sake encounter with the environment that Oliver’s poetry is formed from and returns others to24.
Though Oliver speaks through nature to a trauma culture of those psychically, socially and collectively dealing with the consequences of living through disturbing events, she also speaks from one as well. In a recent interview with Maria Shriver, Oliver confessed that, as a child, it was with words that “I could build a world I could live in. I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation […]. When you're sexually abused, there's a lot of
24 Like transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau before her, Oliver falls into alignment with an American lineage committed to the natural world. Emerson’s “Nature” and Thoreau’s Walden sought to reconnect readers with nature during the Industrial Revolution – not unlike Oliver’s own timely offerings to a public immersed in the distractions of technology and media. 40 damage—that's the first time I've ever said that out loud” (“Shriver Interviews”). As
Oliver went on to reveal, it was her “insufficient childhood” (“Shriver Interviews”) and desire to remain “invisible” (“Shriver Interviews”) that led to the comfort and companionship she found in nature: “as much as I possibly could,” Oliver admitted, “I stayed where I was happy. I spent a great deal of time in my younger years just writing and reading, walking around the woods” (“Shriver Interviews”). This walking- meditation ritual in the natural world would later carry not only Oliver’s writing process, but her life with partner Molly Malone Cook. Davis notes that “[t]hrough Cook's protection and intervention, Oliver was allowed to be ‘disengaged’ from the world of politics or ideology, to live a supremely private life unencumbered by the concerns of the academy” (Davis 624). However, as Chvetkovich asserts, “[b]ecause trauma can be unspeakable and unrepresentable and because it is marked by forgetting and dissociation, it often seems to leave behind no records at all” (7) – whether intentionally or not.
Though it was not until the early 1990s that Oliver openly acknowledged her lesbianism, and her confession to being a child victim of sexual assault came nearly twenty years after that, her poetry can be read as a record; as an “archive of feelings” that became her
“salvation” (Oliver, “Shriver Interviews”); as an “[example] of how affective experience can provide the basis for new cultures” (Chvetkovich 7). In this case, it is a culture, a public, a counterpublic of lesbian readers.
Poetry as testimony can serve, in Chvetkovich’s terms, as an exploration of the ways, as a cultural text, it acts “as [a] repository[y] of feelings and emotions…encoded not only in the content of the [text itself] but in the practices that surround its production and reception” (7). Although Oliver’s poetry does not overtly focus on trauma, it does 41 provide a possible “point of entry into a vast archive of feelings, the many forms of love, rage, intimacy, grief, shame, and more that are part of the vibrancy of queer cultures”
(Chvetkovich 7). The fact that numerous lesbian websites25 are host to countless blogs, biographies, articles, postings, and citations in honour of Oliver and her poetry speaks to her appeal to and connection with women’s communities and counterpublics. As Tina
Gianoulis writes at glbtq.com – a website cited as “the world’s largest encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer culture” –
Oliver's poetry has gained a loyal following of readers who, like
Oliver, seek to put aside human alienation from the natural world […]
[for] a sense of connection with nature. This seeking to understand
and feel oneself a part of the forces of nature speaks compellingly to
many lesbians, who view a spiritual connection to animals and the
earth as part of a woman's birthright. (“Oliver, Mary”)
It is through nature that Oliver is able to reconnect a “trauma public” suffering from estrangement to their “birthright,” to that space that Oliver, as a child and as a poet, returned to and has occupied ever since. Though “[q]ueer readers may not find themselves explicitly mentioned in Oliver's work,” Gianoulis explains, “they will feel their most tender dreams exposed” (“Oliver, Mary”).
In its own quiet, unobtrusive way, Oliver’s writing thus resonates as a voice others can adopt when they’ve lost their own. Chvetkovic identifies this voice, this
“speaking out,” as a
25 For example, The Ga Voice (
testimony about incest [that] supplies a point of comparison with
shifting constructions of the politics of coming out within gay
and lesbian communities. Discussions of the ‘epistemology of
the closet’ as central to the paradigms that construct both
homosexual identities and psychoanalytic discourse suggest new
ways to think about the value of coming out as either gay or an
incest survivor. Indeed, many narratives by survivors of incest and
sexual abuse indicate that the trauma resides as much in the secrecy
as in the sexual abuse – the burden not to tell creates its own network
of psychic wounds that far exceed the event itself. By the same token,
the work of breaking the silence about sexual abuse, like that of coming out, has
to be understood as an ongoing process and performance, not
as a punctual event. (94)
The idea of disclosure as performance lends itself to the form and function of poetry.
Locating “narratives” of trauma in Oliver’s work is not explicit; her poems, therefore, can be read for provision rather than purpose; for the ways in which they extend a practical versus aesthetic means in their creation as and for therapy. “I want to write poems that will comfort, maybe amuse, enliven other people,” Oliver confided in her interview with
Shriver. “I don't mean,” she went on, “that the world is all great and wonderful. But I'm careful […] to keep the emphasis on the good and the hopeful” (“Shriver Interviews”).
According to Chawla, the poet, like the child, “take[s] on the task of creating the personal world in which [she] will live” (“Place” 11) – much like Oliver who built “a world out of words” that would become not only her “salvation” (Oliver, “Shriver Interviews”), but 43 others’ as well. It is in this way that Oliver’s poetry has a secondary performative quality: firstly, through the actual reading of her poems she articulates a voice that once
“very much wished not to be noticed” (Oliver, “Shriver Interviews”), defiantly challenging what Chvetkovich underscores as the often “unspeakable and unrepresentable” (Chvetkovich 7) nature of trauma; and secondly, it is through entering into those childhood spaces of sanctuary in the natural world that she is able to present an offering to those in search of the same – “not of what is dead, but of what is already living” (Eliot 947), as T.S. Eliot might have written.
In view of “the child,” according to Montessori, “as the one cosmic agent through which our full progress as human beings is possible” (Rose Hill 1), it follows that
Oliver’s poetry serves as a call-to-action to those who eventually “turned from this world” (“The Sun” l. 32). Oliver’s readership thus has access to an opportunity for rebirth in the full-circle reclamation that one “still belongs to nature” (Montessori, The
Montessori Method 153) in not only one’s first encounter through the senses but through one’s “first language” (Oliver, Rules 3) as well. Aside from providing therapy, testimony, trauma and transcendence, Oliver’s poems are an offering of transformation for those, as Shelley once wrote, “who feel that they are moved and softened”
(“Defence”) by them, as if by the song of a bird. As Okri might argue, it is here, within this unloosened magic (Okri 6), where the arrival of the child resides.
44
Chapter 2: The Arrival of “the Child”
My first encounter with the work of Oliver was a poem entitled “The Summer
Day,” copied and handed to me as a B.Ed. student. It was Oliver’s confronting question, just as I was about to step over the threshold of being a student to standing at the front of my own classroom, that made me still and silent: “Tell me,” she challenged, “what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?” (“The Summer Day” ll. 18-19).
For many – including myself – who had been caught up in the whir of academia for five years, the cerebral clutter of critical thinking that had deepened our insights but weakened our eyes had made us nearly forget we had a life both wild and precious. Yet, what had pulled me into being a teacher in the first place was the desire to share the luminous wonder of this very thing. This mystery was something I had trusted as a child, had felt as a child; in fact, I believe my love of teaching is in part because of its tie to my own childhood and its intimacies with nature. As Wordsworth wrote, “Nature never did betray/The heart that loved her” (“Tintern Abbey” ll. 122-123): the leafy palm of my mother’s garden had been my sanctuary long before the temple and tomes of the ivory tower.
Since that class when, only months before graduation, “The Summer Day” landed in my hands, I have continued to read Oliver’s work – for her inspired writing and humbling insights, for her guidance and grounding with the hard questions, and for her gentle reminders to stay attentive and grateful, even to and for the smallest of things.
Each reading of her poetry brings with it an extension – to my senses, to my thoughts, and to my childhood as I reach back to the young girl in her mother’s garden. For me as 45 a reader, I imagine Oliver’s pen as a little like a diviner’s rod, able to source out and tap into a voice, a language for all that nature is saying, just below the surface, and the ways in which it is speaking to me.
“Poetry, imaginatively,” Oliver once wrote, “takes place within the world. It does not take place on a sheet of paper” (Rules 67). For Oliver, poetry is a means of divining the poetic: the miracle of the mundane, the complexity of the simple. As she reflects in
“Of What Surrounds Me,” there must be a field, a sky, and a source of water “For the heart to be there. For the pen/to be poised. For the idea to come” (ll. 10-11)26. This enduring presence of the natural world both within and beyond Oliver’s poetry is woven throughout her extensive volume of writing – spanning 1965 to the present. What has been written about her work during this time – mainly studies centred on nature and
Christian spirituality (Burton-Christie, Davis, Graham, Johnson, Mann) lends itself to a new reading of her poetry as, in and of itself, a return to “the child.”
The Natural World: Attentiveness as Communion
Although thematically her work has earned her the honorary ecocritical title of
“environmentalist,” Oliver insists that her poetry “doesn't document any of the sane and learned arguments for saving, healing, and protecting the earth” (Winter Hours 99) –
“arguments” that are typical to ecocriticism as an apocalyptic genre (Garrard 2).
Carson’s Silent Spring – which was published three years before Oliver’s first book of
26 In an interview with Steven Ratiner, Oliver was complimented for the “utter consistency” (Ratiner 1) of her New and Selected Poems in that it read “as if it were a single collection, one long unfolding” (Ratiner 1). Oliver replied that that was in fact her intention, stating “[i]f I started over, I think I just would write one book and keep adding to that book” (Ratiner 1). In keeping with Oliver’s desire that the New and Selected Poems series be read as a concise repertoire and reflection of her life’s work, both volumes one and two have been used as primary resources for cited poems in the close readings for this thesis. 46 poetry (No Voyage, and Other Poems) – is widely recognized as “the founding text of modern environmentalism” (Garrard 2), so formative was it to the ground-breaking movement and the criticism that was to evolve from it. While Oliver’s earliest works were being penned during this revolutionary shift in social conscience, she insists that her poetry “neither begins nor ends with the human world” but rather “begins and ends with the act of noticing and cherishing” (Winter Hours 99). Rather than politicizing her poetry with the ethics, science, and ideology central to environmentalism, Oliver uses the poem as an extension of the sensing body in a state of attentiveness within the natural world.
This is not to say that the “noticing” and “cherishing” Oliver refers to is absent from ecocriticism; in fact, as Garrard points out, for ecocritics the wilderness does hold a
“sacramental value…founded in an attitude of reverence and humility” (Garrard 59).
While Oliver’s work shares this quality with environmentalism, studying her poems strictly through its traditionally apocalyptic lens would result in a topical reading of the
“reverence and humility” that are thematic to her poetry. For example, in her poem
“Lead,” which describes the sudden death and disappearance of the loons nesting in a nearby harbour, Oliver writes:
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing, 47
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is. (ll. 8-19)
Although these lines, as does the title, imply a social critique tethered to a call-to-action,
Oliver’s last statement is where the crux of the poem lies, as she affirms
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world. (ll. 26-30)
Rather than an apocalyptic commentary on the lead poisoning suffered by shore birds,
Oliver’s poem peels back the hardened rind that the haste of a harried culture has sealed around attentiveness – the common thread throughout the tapestry of her work which has popularized her as having “the vitality and second sight of a mystic” (Davis 605)27.
It is here, in this poem among others read time and time again in her repertoire, that one encounters “the child,” for, as Chawla asserts, the “similarity between child and poet is a sense of potentiality, a sense that the world shimmers with possibility. For a child, all is potential because all lies ahead” (Chawla, “Place” 11). In “Lead,” “the rest of the world” (ll. 30) still lies before both Oliver and the reader, as does the “reverence and
27 It fact, it is this very quality of Oliver’s that has put her on par with the proliferating mystical poets Kabir, Rumi, and Mirabai, as crowds of thousands are drawn to her poetry readings (Rosen) for a glimpse of discovery and awe that mystery can present again, as it did during childhood. 48 humility” that nature makes available to her audience in the everyday if only, through attentiveness, they allow themselves to “break open” (ll. 29) to it once again. Thus, there is more ecopsychology, the theory that children are born with an innate connection with the natural world (Griffore and Phenice 167), than ecology in the works of Oliver.
Oliver’s own relationship with nature has been a life-long love affair – one that started in her childhood with pen and paper in hand as she read under woodland canopies and waded waist-deep through the flickering, humming grasses of her home’s surrounding rural farmland in Ohio. As a child, Oliver discovered her first and lasting impression that idle hours spent strolling through a field or forest are a meaningful and productive day’s work: when walking, she explains in an interview with Steven Ratiner,
“I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious […]. This is not a walk to arrive; this is a walk that's part of a process” (Ratiner 2). The natural world and the creative process have become inseparable from each other in both her life and art, so much so that, as Davis observes, “it is clear that the poet's vocation consists of attending to the world, which for her is a sacred home” (605).
This attention to the natural world, the conviction that it is a sacred home, reflects some of Oliver’s greatest influences, including Whitman, Rumi, Hafiz, Emerson, Shelley,
Keats, and St. Vincent Millay28. Like these poets, Oliver is noted for her perceptivity, a perceptivity that, as Ratiner describes,
thrive[s] on the simple necessities of her daily routine: time to be
alone, a place to walk and observe, and the opportunity to carry
28 Interestingly, after failing to finish a degree at both Vassar College and Ohio State University, Oliver found herself working as secretary to Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sister, Norma, and brother-in-law, painter Charles Ellis, as they sorted through the paperwork Edna – a lyric poet and nature lover of the time – left behind after her death. 49
the world back to the page. Like Emily [Dickinson] before her,
Mary Oliver focuses on the luminous particularities of experience, savoring the
simple and the astonishing occurrences of the natural
world for the wisdom embedded in beauty and for the mysteries
hovering just beneath the glittering surfaces. (1)
These mysteries – the ones that she believes “don't compromise themselves” (Oliver,
“Shriver Interviews”) – are what Oliver has dedicated her life and writing to. Thus, her classification as an “earth scholar” (Davis 619) has stemmed from her ability to recognize and celebrate how “the possibilities of communion with the world have less to do with analytical thinking and more to do with a felt sense of the body” (Davis 619). Oliver describes this sensory affinity with nature – with her “extended family” (Ratiner 3) as she has referred to it – as one that emerged simply from its availability to her as a child:
for whatever reasons, I felt those first important connections, those
first experiences being made with the natural world rather than with
the social world. I think the first way you do it, the first way you take meaning
from the physicality of the world, from your environment, probably never leaves
you. (Ratiner 3)
Oliver returned to this concept of her earliest associations with nature from a different perspective in a later interview with Maria Shriver, commenting that “when we lose the connection with the natural world, we tend to forget that we're animals, that we need the
Earth. And that can be devastating […]. So I try [in my poetry] to do more of the ‘Have you noticed this wonderful thing? Do you remember this?’” (“Shriver Interviews”). 50
Rather than a nostalgic pining for a Romantic return to childhood and what specialists Jill and Peter de Villiers term the “‘life of sensations’” (de Villiers 11), Oliver invokes the present moment – albeit the present moment of the past – through a return to “the child,” thereby accessing those most preliminary and pure sensory encounters that first pioneered one’s developing associations with the natural world.
The Sensory Life of the Poet – and the Poem
Oliver has been careful in her writing to avoiding academic pretence for the sake of the sensory life of the poem. Ironically, Oliver mourns time and again how language, ultimately, serves as a cumbersome, ineffectual means for creating what she truly seeks in the medium: an articulation, an extension, an incarnation of the sensing body. Oliver endeavours, then, to craft her compositions with words that shift from the literal to the sensual; that not only evoke what she terms a “felt experience” (Ratiner 4) in the reader, but act as one in and of themselves through the shapes, sounds, and rhythms of meaning that they take. As Oliver states in her poem “Everything,” “I want to make poems that say right out, plainly,/what I mean, that don’t go looking for the/laces of elaboration, puffed sleeves” (ll. 1-3), but rather “honor/both the heart of faith, and the light of the world;/the gladness that says, without any words, everything” (ll. 16-18). The idea of poetry free of device seems as paradoxical as speech without language, yet both concepts point to a “pre-literate” theme and reading that reoccurs, though not overtly, throughout
Oliver’s work. In fact, Oliver transports her readers back into a sphere of “pre-literacy,” back to a relationship they held with the natural world that was stripped of language’s pretence, existing solely in the senses. 51
The idea of relating to the world through a life of pure sensation is very much a
Romantic one (de Villiers 11), as is the desire for it. However, as both the de Villiers’ and scholar Linda M. Austin point out, although the Romantic poets wrote retrospectively about childhood and the pre-literate, pre-sexual, un-socialized, sensory self (de Villiers;
Austin), the actual act of writing such poems was, and is, not a nostalgic one. The very composition of a poem itself is enabled through a poet’s innate ability to access “the child” as a pre-literate, pre-sexual, un-socialized, sensory self. The creation from and return to “the child” in the writing and reading of a poem rather than exclusively its content, whether a Romantic reflection on childhood or not, speaks, perhaps subconsciously, to a “common psychological profile” of “the loss, awe, and estrangement framing the adult's sense of childhood” (Austin).
Rather than feeling detached from childhood, Oliver suggests that she was “born” to stay a child; as she writes in her poem “Mindful,”
It is what I was born for-
to look, to listen,
to lose myself
inside this soft world-
to instruct myself
over and over
in joy,
and acclamation. 52
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,
the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant-
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,
the daily presentations. (ll. 11-25)
Responding to the world from within the realm of the senses, the realm of “the child,”
Oliver gestures to the ways in which she “lose[s]” herself – as she did so many times in her youth – in attentiveness to the details of even the humble, the unassuming. It is here where one can recall Okri’s assertion that “[p]oets need to live where others don’t care to look” (1); in other words, it is poets who – as the title of Oliver’s poem suggests – need to be mindful, to remember how to fully attend to and engage with the world through the senses.
Transcendence: The Ecstatic Places of Environmental Memory
Our senses “connect us intimately to the past, connect us in ways that most of our cherished ideas never could” (Ackerman xvi), writes Ackerman. Oliver’s poems are a testament to this concept, as is the research of Chawla who, in her work with writers and poets such as Pablo Neruda, Sheila Scott, C. Day Lewis, Phyllis Theroux, and Maya 53
Angelou, proposes that one element that links the sensory spheres of the child and the poet is that of transcendence. By definition, Chawla describes transcendence as
[m]emory of a dynamic relationship with the outer world, of a
profound continuity with natural processes. It transcends social consciousness
through a feeling of one-to-one communion with
the environment. It often inspires long descriptions richly evocative
of all five senses, detailing everything in the setting. Most commonly,
it involves elation, a sense of exuberance or enveloping calm, of timelessness,
boundlessness, and radiance.
(“Ecology” 37)
Many of Chawla’s subjects reported their transcendental memories of ecstatic places as being evoked in childhood “by environments as small as a patch of weeds at the edge of a sleeping porch [Phyllis Theroux], or during freedom as brief as an escape into solitude during a school outing [Sheila Scott]” (“Ecology” 40). This “intense responsiveness to the environment and identification with it” (“Ecology” 38), along with “a sense of relationship with nature as process” (“Ecology” 38), often leaves a blueprint of “enduring inspiration” on a child (“Ecology” 38) concludes Chawla. As Oliver herself contends, “[I am happiest when] walking in the woods, because I do feel like I vanish and become part of the natural world, which for whatever reason has always felt safe to me” (“Shriver
Interviews”). The “sense of belonging to a place” (Chawla, “Ecology” 40), the sense of sharing a communion with nature that is “safe” enough to “vanish” (Oliver, “Shriver
Interviews”) within, is – as is evident with Oliver – where the child and the poet encounter the world, and each other. 54
The transcendence of this communion that both the child and the poet experience in their encounters with the natural world is the act and art of attentiveness, shifting from a physical connection with the environment through the breath to a deepening metaphysical one through the body. The child, in the present moment, and the poet, through the present moment of the past – through a return to “the child” – very much reflects the longing for a “‘life of sensations’” (de Villiers, 11) and the detached yet sympathetic observer of the natural world (Chawla, “Place” 7) which characterized the
Romantic era and its writers. Figures such as Wordsworth and Jean-Jacques Rousseau popularized the concept of childhood as a distinct, redemptive state of not only living in the world but of perceiving, thinking about, and feeling it (Chawla, “Place” 8). This return to “the child” in their writing through the nostalgia of loss demonstrates the ability poets have, as Chawla argues, to access an inner space that evokes the ecstatic places of environmental memory. “In contrast to memories of nostalgic affection, which were often filtered through a sociable ‘we,’” Chawla explains, “ecstatic places [are] always recorded by a solitary ‘I’” (“Ecstatic Places” 21), through a memory heightened by a state of being in which one was free from surveillance, constraint, distraction, or transgression
(“Ecology” 38).
Transcendence, the capacity to reconnect with environmental memory and ecstatic places, is quite conditional on this freedom and solitude – opportunities that physician and educator Montessori contended provide young children with the essential ability to “explore and absorb the environment as their impulse drives them” (Rose Hill
1), in turn cultivating a love, joy, gratitude, worldliness, and spiritual essence from which to build their lives (Rose Hill 1). In accordance with Chawla’s theory of ecstatic places 55 and environmental memory, transcendence is hence mirrored in a child’s “developing consciousness of the world” (Chawla, “Ecology” 36) – a consciousness that “involves [a] dynamic […] relationship with [his or her] place” (Chawla, “Ecology” 36). This sense of
“place” is often “so intense that it burns itself into memory to animate adult life”
(Chawla, “Ecology” 36). It is through her own enduring and endearing relationship with place – with the natural world – that Oliver accesses the ability to observe, attend to, and celebrate the potentialities and possibilities, the mysteries and the miracles of the everyday. As Oliver herself has stated, life is “a mystery…we're never gonna know”
(“Shriver Interviews”) – a sentiment reflected throughout her work and her dedication to
“finding” wonders rather than “finding them out.” Though children are often charged with an appetite for answers to all that piques an inquisitive nature, they, too, can be content to observe, to marvel, and to exercise what Montessori claimed was an astonishing capacity for concentration and focused engagement with both the natural and sensorial worlds - a quality adults are perhaps too quick to overlook amidst the momentum of such places as a playground.
Ecstatic places, in which the “freedom to lay claim, to make a place its ‘own,’ to touch and explore without fear of transgression” (Chawla, “Ecology” 38), “beckon[s] fascinatingly” (Chawla, “Ecology” 38) and is the space Oliver travels to in her poetry, a state of being where, through an attuned attention to the senses of “the child,” she is able to fully engage with the present moment. Both in style and theme, Oliver’s poetry does not mourn or express nostalgia for loss, but rather celebrates an acknowledgement of all that is.
56
Chapter 3: The Sensual Body of the Poem
“[A] poem has two lives,” comments Oliver in an interview with Maria Shriver, referencing one of her contemporaries, Library of Congress Poet Laureate Consultant
Donald Hall; “there is the statement that you're making, and there is the poem's sensual body” (“Shriver Interviews”). The challenge lies not exclusively in making a poem’s mechanics sensual, nor in making a statement mechanised, but in finding a marriage of the two; in “us[ing] words […] more like music […] that ha[s] a choreography” (Oliver,
“Shriver Interviews”). Oliver elaborates on this premise further in her book Rules for the
Dance, stating that style, apparatus, and method are best when
leaned upon in such a way that the poem takes on particular and
distinct habits of language, of tone and phrasing, and sometimes
of scansion displacement, which themselves become almost reliable
and characteristic…. Dancing with Mr. Emerson is not much like
dancing with Mr. Blake; certainly it is not like dancing with
Mr. Pope or Ms. Dickinson. (Rules 79)
In other words, poetry is a dance, its “choreography” and “music,” as Oliver asserts, made up of as much precision as play, as much discipline as license both in the writing and reading of it. It is this quality that makes poetry a participatory medium; the musician brings a piece of choreography to life as much as its dancer, just as the writer shapes a piece of poetry to life as much as its readers. This was an early attraction of poetry for Oliver, who confides “I looked at words and couldn't believe the largess of 57 their sound - the whole sound structure of stops and sibilants […]. All such mechanics have always fascinated me. Still do!” (Ratiner 2).
Echoes of Thomas can be heard here, along with the enduring discovery carried from childhood that words, though “seemingly lifeless, made only of black and white” have the potential to rouse “out of their own being” the “love and terror and pity and pain and wonder and all the other vague abstractions that make our ephemeral lives dangerous, great, and bearable” (Thomas 1062). This sense of potentiality that both Oliver and
Thomas attended to, from a young age, in the language and mechanics as well as the writing and reading of poetry – in the “sensual body” of the poem – is the same sense that
Chawla claims is the plane of possibility on which the child and the poet encounter each other (“Place” 11), connecting the present moment with the past. It is therefore through a reconnection with one’s “first language” that one can revisit his or her earliest impressions of language and the senses, of language on the senses, and of the senses on language.
The Liaison Between Language and the Natural World
Thematically celebrated in the works of Oliver is the symbiotic liaison between language and the environment. As Abram elaborates,
[w]e regularly talk of howling winds, and of chattering brooks.
Yet these are more than mere metaphors […]. If language is not
a purely mental phenomenon but a sensuous, bodily activity
born of carnal reciprocity and participation, then our discourse
has surely been influenced by many gestures, sounds, and 58
rhythms besides those of our single species. Indeed, if human
language arises from the perceptual interplay between the body
and the world, then this language ‘belongs’ to the animate
landscape as much as it ‘belongs’ to ourselves. (82)
Abram’s argument that language imitates nature – that humans have essentially devised a system of communication modelled on the sensing body in its natural setting – suggests that the very tools with which a poet crafts a poem have organic significance separate from those defined in a dictionary or those composed through content and context on the page. Thomas reflected this same sentiment when he wrote that words can be likened to
“the noises of wind, sea, and rain” (1062), while Seamus Heaney claimed that the very act of writing poetry itself is “a dig for finds that end up being plants” (Heaney 1097).
The ways in which the “shapes and patterns” (Abram 140) of language reflect the natural world gesture to the meaning words hold beyond the literal and the metaphorical; language is thus an extension and externalization of the sensing body’s experience of nature. Consequently, the “sensory life of the body” (Abram 80) is informed, structured, and ordered by one’s language, its “verbal contrasts” (Abram 255) directly influencing what phenomena one attends to or ignores and how one differentiates tones, textures, and tastes (Abram 255–56).
In Pursuit of the Sensing Body
In her poem “Forty Years,” Oliver reminisces about her lifelong pursuit to capture on the page the “sensory life of the body” (Abram 80). As she explains,
I am stopped as the world comes back
wet and beautiful I am thinking 59
that language
is not even a river
is not a tree in not a green field
is not even a black ant traveling
briskly modestly
from day to day from one
golden page to another. (ll. 18-26)
Oliver’s “little curls little shafts/of letters words/little flames leaping” (ll. 6-8) ultimately fail her; that is, language cannot evoke the fully actualized experience of a sensory encounter. What Oliver searches for in her writing is essentially the innocence, intuition, intimacy, and imagination of youth – before words, as Thomas claims, become
“[encumbered] by [the] trivial or portentous association[s]” (1062) that accumulate with age, knowledge, and experience. As Oliver mourns in “Stars,” it is language that “keeps making its tiny noises” (ll. 1-2) inside of her head, threatening to exclude her from the
“yawning spaces” (l. 8) “where nothing, ever, is spoken” (l. 9); it is language and its
“refined anguish” (“Toad” ll. 16-17) that passes over that which has the privilege of distancing itself from the adult world to live “intimate with the dust” (l. 14); it is language that leaves her often “without words/sufficient to say” (“Long Afternoon at the
Edge of Little Sister Pond” ll. 3-4), or with only the hope that, “when the mysteries present themselves” (“Mysteries, Four of the Simple Ones” ll. 20) she will have the ability “to pluck from the basket the brisk words/that will applaud them” (ll. 21-22). 60
What Oliver in turn comes to terms with is that, though with pencil in hand, “haltingly calling up/the light of the world,” nothing will “[appear] on paper/half as bright” (“White
Heron Rises Over Blackwater” ll. 13-16) as the actual light of the world, conceding, as she struggles to capture a white heron in verse, “ah yes, I see him./He is exactly/the poem/I wanted to write” (ll. 29-32). For Oliver, the world itself is “the poem,” and language is the medium in which the poet endeavours to capture it.
Language as Metaphor
Linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson state in their seminal work, Metaphors We Live By, that “[t]he essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (Johnson and Lakoff 5). Language, they argue, is itself a form of metaphor, is an extension of the ways in which the human conceptual system perceives and relates to the world (Johnson and Lakoff 6)29. Children thus attain their understandings of the world by association, through this act of understanding one experience by comparison with others (Johnson and Lakoff 5) that
Johnson and Lakoff define as a metaphorical relationship with the world. This relationship, as scholar Laurie Ricou explains, is shared with the act of writing, in which one “may see convincing confirmation of the popular equation of child and poet. Seeing a cake, or the letter ‘O,’ as the moon, is exactly the sort of transformation that makes poetry possible” (Ricou 7). Oliver makes this observation herself, illustrating the child’s natural tendency to look metaphorically at the world, describing words in “Forty Years” as
29 This Romanticized approach to language and metaphor differs from current Post-Structuralist linguistic theory, in which the relationship between language and the outside world does not exist. 61
fascinating
discursive full of cadence
its pale nerves hiding
in the curves of the Qs
behind the soldierly Hs
in the webbed feet of the Ws
(ll. 10-15)
There is a resonant echo here of the voice narrating Heaney’s poem “Alphabets” (see page 73) that describes in seemingly metaphorical language how a young schoolboy first learning how to read and write in fact learns on a metaphorical level: a ‘Y’ is a “forked stick” (ll. 6) just as Oliver’s “Ws” have “webbed feet.” As Ricou suggests, it is this metaphorical way of relating, of “transform[ing],” of seeing one concept in another that is shared by both the child and the poet.
Although, for Oliver, language fails to fully represent the sensing body, it does act as an extension of the ways in which one makes associations; in fact, language, arguably, possesses its own sensory life. This life, as writer David Booth comments, can be observed in the ways that language “tickle[s] the tongue, tease[s] the ear, create[s] images in the mind’s eye, delight[s] us with [its] trickery, and amuse[s] us with [its] puzzles and complexities” (Booth 92). This sensual body of language is perhaps what gives words the “music” and “choreography” (Oliver, “Shriver Interviews”) with which Oliver claims to write in her own metaphorical attempt to understand the world through the use of another way of experiencing it. 62
A Scribe to the Speaking World
Oliver’s poetry is written from an innate sense of “relatedness” to her natural
surroundings (Griffore and Phenice 167) that is foundational to the ecstatic places of her
youth. Thus, she is able to transport herself back as an adult to the sphere of “the child,”
to a sense of self and perception coloured with elation, exuberance, calm, timelessness,
boundlessness, radiance, and, at times, fatalism (Chawla, “Ecology” 37). As Ratiner
observes, Oliver’s poetry is therefore
an extended investigation into the nature of the self. But in
her vision, the self is a much more open and encompassing
concept than the succinct identities to which we affix our
names. The “Mary Oliver” of these poems has rain passing
through her, contains swans and gannets, pine groves and
waterfalls, and the uncanny sense that, at any moment, the
world is poised on the verge of speech. (1)
This quality aligns Oliver with Wordsworth, whose “poems often present an instant when
nature speaks to him” (Nichols). This idea of the “speaking” world is one elaborated on
by Abrams, who suggests that nature speaks through its “expressive, gesturing
landscape” (81), and by Bringhurst, who asserts that “[t]he entire natural world stands as
proof” (13) of this. Within the “sensing body” of Oliver’s poetry, a common dialogue is
shared between the human and nonhuman worlds, a discourse founded on our “first
language,” the breath – the origins of our ability to respond to and reciprocate with our
surroundings that “reverberate[s] with affective, gestural significance, the same 63 significance that vibrates through our own conversations and soliloquies” (Abram 80).
The “expressive body” (Abram 80) of the natural world offers Oliver a site for exchange, a voice to scribe on behalf of “the flora and fauna in its wordless awareness” a message of “peace and wholeness about life that we humans have somehow lost” (Hammond) yet which we still carry, nonetheless, in the breath; in “the child.” As Abram concludes, language “does not set us outside of the animate landscape but – whether or not we are aware of it – inscribes us more fully in its chattering, whispering, soundful depths”
(Abram 80), leading us from infancy into adulthood.
The “Text Of Civility”
Oliver’s aptitude is seeking the “expressive intention,” the “active” and
“meaningful” – indeed, the language – of the natural world; to
lie down by a slow river
And stare at the light in the trees-
To learn something by being nothing
A little while but the rich
Lens of attention. (“Entering the Kingdom” ll. 8-12)
Time and again Oliver sheds the cluttered, chaotic, and convoluted “thoughts as small as
[her] whole life/would ever be” (“Over the Hill She Came” ll. 26-27) for the opportunity to embrace and engage with “being nothing” in order to “learn” the world again, to know the world and the equally “attentive, conscious beings” (Abram 81) which engage with it as much as she does. For example, in “Terns,” Oliver comments that to sacrifice “the questions/that weigh so in your mind” (ll. 31-32) and “the shining proofs you think you 64 must have” (l. 12) is to “[hold] the world/in the clasp of attention” (ll. 17-18), a
“devotion” (l. 17) and “submission” (l. 21) that enables one to recognize that “nothing you ever understand will be sweeter, or more binding,/than this deepest affinity between your eyes and the world” (ll. 13-14).
Through the use of Oliver’s poetry in his homilies, Hammond has observed that
“[b]y paying attention [Oliver] is able to perceive the world around her as the voices of creation. Each plant, beast, bird has a message” (“Theology”), “has a peace and wholeness about life that we humans have somehow lost” (“Theology”). As Oliver herself notes in part four of her poem “Rain,” “I do not want anymore […] to lead/children out of the fields into the text/of civility, to teach them that they are (they are not) better/than the grass” (ll. 16-19). It is this human-made, adult-imposed censor, this oppressive “text/of civility” that Oliver implies excommunicates children from nature through the stripping away of humility and the otherwise “dynamic sense of relationship with their place” (Chawla, “Ecology” 36). This estrangement also compromises the dimensions of freedom, solitude, belonging (Chawla, “Ecology” 38) and attentiveness that facilitates communion with nature, and the environmental memories that emerge as a consequence.
This “text/of civility” also plays a role in how the exploration of today’s children is censored, structured, or sheltered in a way that not only devalues the public and private spaces of a child’s learning and imagination, but may in fact curb or desensitize them.
Oliver alludes to this imposition in “Just Lying on the Grass at Blackwater,” writing
I lie down in the fields of goldenrod, and everlasting.
Who could find me? 65
My thoughts simplify. I have not done a thousand things
or a hundred things but, perhaps, a few.
As for wondering about answers that are not available except
in books, though in my childhood I was sent there
to find them, I have learned
to leave all that behind
as in summer I take off my shoes and my socks,
my jacket, my hat, and go on
happier, through the fields. (ll. 11-21)
Just as in her childhood when she would “vanish” (Oliver, “Shriver Interviews”) into nature, Oliver takes time here to find purpose not in doing, but in undoing; in shedding layers for senses, answers for questions, text for thought, the material for the organic, submission for autonomy. This is, in the truest sense of Chawla’s research, environmental memory: a resurrection of one’s childhood through a reencounter with the natural world and the senses. However, for children alienated from this undoing by the
“text/of civility,” ecstatic places and their resulting environmental memories may be few and far between.
“The Forgotten Waves of Childhood”
It is author Okri’s hope that, through language, poets can revive “all the forgotten waves of childhood” (3-4), all the sensory ways in which individuals first encounter the natural world. As Okri explains, 66
creation speaks to [poets]. They listen. They remake the world
in words, from dreams. Intuitions which could only come from
the secret mouths of gods whisper to them through all of life, of
nature, of visible and invisible agencies. Storms speak to them.
Thunder breathes on them […]. Flowers move their pens. Words
themselves speak to them and bring forth more words. The poet
is the widener of consciousness […]. Out of the mouths of poets
speak the yearnings of our lives. (3–4)
Oliver’s own poetry travels back to the ecstatic places of nature – of the lifelong
“intuitions” the natural world invokes – that Okri alludes to here. However, although
Oliver’s nature poems are celebrated for this return to “the child” as the sensing body, her poetry is not transparently nostalgic; rather, it is very much an organic extension of experience.
As Oliver writes in Rules for the Dance, “[t]hinking is an exercise that proceeds from experiencing, and the physical world is our arena of experience. We see, hear, smell, taste, touch – and begin the meditation” on the “abstract, general, and philosophical [that] is woven with the living fibres of grass, red roses, nightingales, snowy evenings, and dawns” (73-74). Oliver’s ability to intensely, intently attend to nature allows her to explore not abandonment, but “unburden-ment” from self- consciousness, from an identification with the ego that adults often succumb to. It is, as
Abram suggests, through this simple “shift of attention that one may suddenly come to hear the familiar song of a blackbird or a thrush in a surprisingly new manner” (Abram
81). Oliver’s gift as a self-proclaimed “praise poet” (Oliver, “Shriver Interviews”), then, 67 is her capacity to observe the wonder and worth of the common, the miracle and mystery of the unremarkable through the frame of acknowledgement (Oliver, “Shriver
Interviews”) – of attention – so that, as Abram claims, the “familiar” becomes “new” again – becomes a first encounter to rival those of childhood: untampered, untempered, and untamed.
As Hammond recounts after reading Oliver’s poem “Spring,”
[s]he captures for me that sense of the sacred that I experienced
as a child watching the black bear knocking apples off the
branches to feed her cubs. We would watch from my
grandmother’s kitchen window in hushed silence the bear
caring for her young. There was this sense of awe, this sense,
as Mary Oliver later states in the poem, of also being ‘dazzling
darkness’ ‘breathing and tasting’ all of life’s glory. (Hammond)
The transcendence Hammond experiences through environmental memory is indicative of how nature has a lasting impression on the senses – if only evoked by a language that inspires the same wonder, curiosity, mystery, and connection with the present moment of the past. For Oliver, these mysteries “are not the exceptional things but rather the drab every day things that she is mindful of [and that bring] her such delight. The world is filled with wonders and it is her life long task to find them” (Hammond). Consequently, through the sensing body of her poetry Oliver recognizes that being attentive to these mysteries and the possibility “of communion with the world [has] less to do with analytical thinking and more to do with a felt sense of the body” (Davis 619). In “This 68
World” Oliver’s marvel at the simplicities and complexities of nature, as well as her felt sense of the body, are both palpable and prosaic:
I would like to write a poem about the world that has in it
nothing fancy.
But it seems impossible.
Whatever the subject, the morning sun
glimmers it.
The tulip feels the heat and flaps its petals open
and becomes a star.
The ants bore into the peony bud and there is the dark
pinprick well of sweetness.
As for the stones on the beach, forget it.
Each one could be set in gold.
So I tried with my eyes shut, but of course the birds
were singing.
And the aspen trees were shaking the sweetest music
out of their leaves.
And that was followed by, guess what, a momentous and
beautiful silence
as comes to all of us, in little earfuls, if we’re not too
hurried to hear it.
As for spiders, how the dew hangs in their webs
even if they say nothing, or seem to say nothing. 69
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe they sing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe the stars sing, too,
and the ants, and the peonies, and the warm stones,
so happy to be where they are, on the beach, instead of being
locked up in gold.
(ll. 1-26)
Oliver’s thematic celebration of the natural world – from its seemingly inconsequential workings to its elaborate theatrics – resonates with the curiosity and wonder of “all the forgotten waves of childhood” (Okri 3-4), as if each day she encounters the world anew for the first time. This same transcendence, Oliver proposes, is available to anyone – “if
[they]’re not too/hurried” (ll. 18-19) to be mindful of and perceptive to the fine details that, as in a stippled drawing, give colour and shape and definition to not only the world but the senses as well. As Oliver confesses after stopping to watch a flock of migratory birds fly overhead in her poem “Snow Geese,” “[w]hat matters/is that, when I saw them,/I saw them” (ll. 36-38); in other words, what matters is that the eyes of one’s eyes are opened, to paraphrase e. e. cummings; that one truly sees simply out of appreciation, for, according to Oliver, “[a]ppreciation is a very valuable thing to give to the world”
(Ratiner 4).
The Mystery of “Where Others Don’t Care to Look”
Like “the child,” Oliver is neither selective nor censored in this appreciation, for there are no qualifiers or measures in nature that determine what she gives her attention to and what she does not. Rather, Oliver is often found searching for the mysteries in not 70 just the beautiful, but the grotesque – “where others don’t care to look” (Okri 1), as Okri suggests. Oliver explores the attraction of the grotesque in the natural world, treating consequential concepts such as fear, terror, death and decomposition as organic processes
– both in nature, and in humankind. In fact, Oliver not only stares down the “chilling, searing glimpse of nature’s monstrousness which consumes life as prodigally as it creates it” (Chawla, “Ecology” 37) – a characteristic of fatalism that, as Chawla asserts, is first encountered in childhood – but dares to celebrate it. In challenging social convention by reclaiming the mystery of the grotesque as a beauty rivalled only by beauty itself, Oliver overwrites the “text/of civility” (“Rain” ll. 17-18) that threatens to sterilize and desensitize the curiosity and compassion of childhood. As a result, “the skull of winter”
(“Beyond the Snow Belt” l. 3), “the little aluminum/ladder of [the owl’s] scream” (“Little
Owl Who Lives in the Orchard” ll. 17-19) and “the dark burred/faintly belching/bog” filled with “hummocks/that sink silently/into the black, slack/earthsoup” (“Crossing the
Swamp” ll. 6-8, 19-22) all become opportunities for transcendence, for, just as the
“unabashed,” “lurid” stench of the skunk cabbage before the first spring bulbs bloom,
“[w]hat blazes the trail is not necessarily pretty” (“Skunk Cabbage” l. 11).
Oliver does not shy away from “beads of blood/scarcely dry on [a] hooked beak”
(“Nature” ll. 4-5), a “diatribe” (l. 9) of scent scouring the nose like a “flat [board] of […] anger” (“A Certain Sharpness in the Morning Air” l. 13), nor from picking up a creature so “revolting” and “ugly/[she] sigh[s] with a kind of horror,” only to tenderly stroke it in its last moments before the “gray pouch slowly/fill[s] with death” (“The Sea Mouse” ll.
38, 3-4, 43-44). The reverence with which Oliver treats each of her encounters with nature is contained in her conviction that it is “misery to be afraid of death” and 71
“wretchedness […] to believe only in what can be proven” (“I Looked Up” ll. 7-8), suggesting that both fear and empiricism indulge an ignorance, a blindness to the shadow of life on the other side of the light that “civility” casts upon beauty, for “even the purest light, lacking the robe of darkness,/would be without expression” (“A Certain Sharpness in the Morning Air” ll. 25-26). It is as if through the lens of an innate capacity for empathy and compassion Oliver is able to shed the sheath of civility from the adult world, accessing “the child” in her transcendence in order to not only look “where others don’t care to look” (Okri 1) but to truly see, to faithfully observe with an undiscriminating eye. Her commentaries on finding a bird’s nest lined with a rabbit’s fur
(“The Rabbit”), on observing her dog devouring the carcass of a fawn (“Beside the
Waterfall”), on the experience of curling up with a dead fox found in the well of an old tractor’s tire (“I Found a Dead Fox”), and on the scavenging habits of vultures as they circle around death like “large dark/lazy/butterflies” (“Vultures” ll. 1-3) are testaments to her capacity for attentiveness and inclusivity; for finding humility, inspiration, and dignity in that which others often turn away from.
“[I]f I can do something for people,” Oliver once stated, “I would say ‘don’t forget the mystery, love the mystery, be glad of it, don’t want answers all the time”
(“Oliver with Coleman Barks” 3:19-3:37), or else one may miss the fact “that the petals pooled with nectar, and the polished thorns/are a single thing” (“A Certain Sharpness in the Morning Air” ll. 23-24); that beauty is coloured by the grotesque as much as answers are by questions. Despite the labels of “beautiful” and “grotesque” and the “civil” prejudices and conditions attached to both, it is, as Chawla proposes, the sense of potentiality and possibility that, in their ability to “show us the falseness of our 72 limitations, the true extent of our kingdom” (Okri 2), unite the child and the poet
(Chawla, “Place” 11). In seeking an immediacy with nature that can be likened through environmental memory back to one’s earliest communion with ecstatic places in youth,
Oliver’s spare diction, enjambed free verse in regular stanzas, modulating rhythm and syntax, and climactic endings (Ellmann et al. 652) lead the reader by the hand back “into nature’s energy, cycles, and flux – [as] human animals fused with a nonhuman world”
(Ellmann, et al. 652). It is through her poetry that Oliver is able to “[take] on [the] expressive magic” (Abram 96) of the natural world, her work translating in a way that almost reimagines the life of “[o]ur first writing” (Abram 96) – that of a print left in the snow or mimicked on the wall of a cave (Abram 96); in either case, both poetry and petroglyphs have the potential of “placing oneself in distant contact with the Other” and possibly even “invok[ing] its influence” (Abram 96). It is, indeed, this prospect of accessing the influence of the natural world that gives Oliver the desire in “The Summer
Day” to pause in her “one wild and precious life” (l. 19) to “pay attention” (l. 12), to “be idle” (l. 14), and finally, to ask “what else should I have done?” (l. 16). The answer is, as
Oliver summarizes in “The Moths,” “[i]f you notice anything,/it leads you to notice/more/and more” (“The Moths” ll. 7-10); leads you back to the sensing body, to the breath; back to the language of the land; back to the music and choreography and dance of the imagination; back to “the child.”
73
Alphabets By Seamus Heaney
I. A shadow his father makes with joined hands And thumbs and fingers nibbles on the wall Like a rabbit’s head. He understands He will understand more when he goes to school.
There he draws smoke with chalk the whole first week, Then draws the forked stick that they call a Y. This is writing. A swan’s neck and swan’s back Make the 2 he can see now as well as say.
Two rafters and a cross-tie on the slate Are the letter some call ah, some call ay. There are charts, there are headlines, there is a right Way to hold the pen and a wrong way.
First it is ‘copying out’, and then ‘English’, Marked correct with a little leaning hoe. Smells of inkwells rise in the classroom hush. A globe in the window tilts like a coloured O.
II. Declensions sang on air like a hosanna As, column after stratified column, Book One of Elementa Latina, Marbled and minatory, rose up in him.
For he was fostered next in a stricter school Named for the patron saint of the oak wood Where classes switched to the pealing of a bell And he left the Latin forum for the shade
Of new calligraphy that felt like home. The letters of this alphabet were trees. The capitals were orchards in full bloom, The lines of script like briars coiled in ditches.
Here in her snooded garment and bare feet, All ringleted in assonance and woodnotes, The poet’s dream stole over him like sunlight And passed into the tenebrous thickets.
He learns this other writing. He is the scribe Who drove a team of quills on his white field. Round his cell door the blackbirds dart and dab. Then self-denial, fasting, the pure cold.
By rules that hardened the farther they reached north He bends to his desk and begins again. Christ’s sickle has been in the undergrowth. The script grows bare and Merovingian.
74
III. The globe has spun. He stands in a wooden O. He alludes to Shakespeare. He alludes to Graves. Time has bulldozed the school and school window. Balers drop bales like printouts where stooked sheaves
Made lambdas on the stubble once at harvest And the delta face of each potato pit Was patted straight and moulded against frost. All gone, with the omega that kept
Watch above each door, the good-luck horseshoe. Yet shape-note language, absolute on air As Constantine’s sky-lettered IN HOC SIGNO Can still command him; or the necromancer
Who would hang from the domed ceiling of his house A figure of the world with colours in it So that the figure of the universe And ‘not just single things’ would meet his sight
When he walked abroad. As from his small window The astronaut sees all that he has sprung from, The risen, aqueous, singular, lucent O Like a magnified and buoyant ovum -
Or like my own wide pre-reflective stare All agog at the plasterer on his ladder Skimming our gable and writing our name there With his trowel point, letter by strange letter.
75
Conclusion
The work of Oliver can be viewed as having the definitive form and function of a
“public text,” for her poems have come to represent a shared space by her readers.
Though Oliver does not claim to write for any particular audience, many specific publics have gravitated towards her work and incorporated her poetry as a voice for their own agendas. These interpretations and uses of her work can be viewed as extensions of the poems themselves, as such communities as the LGBT, feminist, environmental, ecocritical, spiritual, religious, therapeutic, and educational have all given Oliver’s poetry a new life in their many incarnations and readings of her work. For example, the United
States Library of Congress has used her poems on their website “Poetry 180: a poem a day for American high schools”30; “Panhala” (which hosts a large collection of Oliver’s work) is a Yahoo group designed “to share poems and prose that make the day a little brighter” (“Panhala”)31 via a daily email that “customers” can subscribe to; “Poetry
Chaikhana: Sacred Poetry from Around the World”32 is a website archiving inspirational poetry, including a large selection of Oliver’s; and “Gratefulness.org” (also known as “A
Network for Grateful Living” or “ANG*L”), a collective of followers dedicated to the practice of gratitude and the consequential fostering of “personal transformation, cross- cultural understanding, interfaith dialogue, intergenerational respect, nonviolent conflict resolution, and ecological sustainability,” has included Oliver’s poems in an online syllabus on gratitude that includes the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, W. B. Yeats, Okri,
Naomi Shihab Nye, and Margaret Atwood.
30 Visit
Countless blogs, forums, lists, archives, and websites, from Berkeley33 to
BrainyQuotes34 to Bryant McGill35, are host to Oliver’s work, each with its own digital
“editions” of her poems that include accompanying formatting, background, picture, and music choices to enhance a perceived or “intended” message and its affect or theme.
Interestingly, there is no evidence of an asserted copyright of Oliver’s work by her publishers, which suggests that her poems are more than just communal grounds for her publics: they are an offering. Thinking back to the notecard marking a page in Oliver’s poetry book on loan from the library, I am reminded of another such offering: a thank you – a fish that was caught during a certain time of year at a certain place along the river, prepared in a certain time-honoured tradition and presented as a certain kind of gift.
What is certain, whether it be a poem or a gift, is that its real offering is in the patience, the thought, the reverence, the passion, the care, the connection, and the love put into it in the first place.
Although the ways in which Oliver’s readerships alter, manipulate, mark, and ultimately claim her work – her “offerings” – for their own purposes can be viewed as compromising the voice, control, and integrity of her art, others would argue that this accessibility is one of her work’s greatest appeals. And Oliver would likely agree with this: “I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer,” she has commented. “I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together” (Ohioana
Authors). For Oliver, it is this passing over of poetic license to her work that allows it to be fully received by the world; as one reader put it on the “Dear Mary” blog, it is this
33 “a compendium of poetry”:
“never let [her] down” (Michael). In many ways then a poem – as an offering – is not finished until a reader has read it, just as a gift is not given until the receiver has accepted it.
I have endeavoured to explore throughout this thesis the ways in which Oliver’s audiences have accepted such gifts. While Oliver has made it clear that, for her,
“[w]riting poems […] is a way of offering praise to the world […]. They’re not trying to explain anything […]. They just sit there on the page, and breathe” (Oliver, Long Life xiv), her poetry has oftentimes meant much more than this to her readers. As one follower wrote upon hearing of Oliver’s sudden illness, “[i]f by some ordinary magic our words can return all this soul-filling wonder, joy, satisfaction of mind and spirit to you and that reflection of your gifts can somehow heal you or help you as your gifts have healed and helped us, then we will only have paid back a small part of what we have received” (Keville). As yet another reader contributed, “your poetry has been my constant companion, the proverbial soundtrack behind my meandering journey. By turns, your poetry has been my comfort and my inspiration. It has encouraged me to risk greatly, wonder deeply, and age gracefully. The debt that I owe you for each of these gifts is inestimable” (Perry). For many, as with reader Cora Murphy, Oliver’s “most amazing gift has been how [she has] helped [others] to see, feel and marvel in the glory and abundance of nature” (“My Work Is Loving the World”). Whether Oliver’s readers find an entry point through her poetry back to nature, to language, to the senses – to “the child” – they are posed with the challenge, as Oliver writes, of responding to “how the world, moist and bountiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That’s 78 the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. ‘Here you are, alive.
Would you like to make a comment?’” (Oliver, Long Life xiv). It is sometimes by making this comment, in response to her poetry, that Oliver’s readers come to find their own voices.
I would like to return to Lane here, and his admission that, upon returning from a rehabilitation centre after forty-five years of alcoholism and drug abuse, he stepped into his garden for what felt like the first time while the chickadees seemed to sing “Welcome back” (Lane 5) and “Where have you been?” (Lane 5). “Once dead, I am come alive again” (Lane 5) he confesses – which, as many of Oliver’s readers testify, is not such a different experience from a first encounter with her work – particularly for those consumed by and consuming the numbing clutter of haste and waste in North American culture. For these readers, Oliver’s poetry is a detox, a healer: one that can be written out and taped to the dresser mirror, tacked to the corkboard at the office, folded into squares and carried in a pocket, or left resting on the nightstand. No matter where Oliver’s poetry may be – whether in public or private space – it is often accompanied by a reader who has found something – that something oftentimes being themselves.
In an article for the Poetry Foundation, journalist Alice Gregory attributes this accessible quality of Oliver’s work (that in turn allows readers to access themselves) to an ability to write poems that are “spellbound but not shushed, contemplative but not cowed” (“Nature-esque”). It is through this quality that Oliver “observes conscious life”
(Gregory) as opposed to providing mere “snapshots of nature” (Gregory). Rather,
“[n]ature, [Oliver] seems to be saying, is a place for people” (Gregory). Once again, as
Oliver herself writes, we all have a “place/in the family of things” (“Wild Geese” ll. 14- 79
18). This, Oliver would surely agree, is no small miracle, but nature’s own offering for a life of attention to, of praise for, the everyday mysteries that move through one’s life – sometimes with ceremony, sometimes with the quiet presence of waiting just beneath the surface of things.
80
Works Cited
Primary Sources: Poetry Collections
Oliver, Mary. House of Light. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1990. (HL). Print.
---. New and Selected Poems. Vol. 1. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992. (N&S. 1). Print.
---. New and Selected Poems. Vol. 2. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2005. (N&S. 2).
Print.
---. No Voyage, and Other Poems. Expanded edition. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin,
1965. Print.
---. Our World. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2007. Print.
---. Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin,
1999. Print.
Poems Cited
Oliver, Mary. “A Certain Sharpness in the Morning Air,” N&S. 1. 41-42. Print.
---. “Beside the Waterfall,” N&S. 2, 149-150. Print.
---. “Beyond the Snow Belt,” N&S. 1. 245. Print.
---. “Crossing the Swamp,” N&S. 1. 166-167. Print.
---. “Entering the Kingdom,” N&S. 1. 190. Print.
---. “Everything,” N&S. 2, 4. Print.
---. “Forty Years,” N&S. 2, 128-129. Print.
---. “Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches,” N&S. 2, 141. Print.
---. “I Found a Dead Fox,” N&S. 2, 162-163. Print.
---. “I Looked Up,” N&S. 2, 174. Print. 81
---. “Just Lying on the Grass at Blackwater,” N&S. 2, 64. Print.
---. “Lead,” N&S. 2, 54. Print.
---. “Little Owl Who Lives in the Orchard,” N&S. 1. 85-86. Print.
---. “Long Afternoon at the Edge of Little Sister Pond,” N&S. 2, 108. Print.
---. “Mindful,” N&S. 2, 90-91. Print.
---. “Mysteries, Four of the Simple Ones,” N&S. 2, 9. Print.
---. “Nature,” N&S. 1. 90. Print.
---. “Of What Surrounds Me,” N&S. 2, 32. Print.
---. “Over the Hill She Came,” N&S. 2, 38-39. Print.
---. “Rain,” N&S. 1. 3. Print.
---. “Skunk Cabbage,” N&S. 1. 160. Print.
---. “Snow Geese,” N&S. 2, 82-83. Print.
---. “Stars,” N&S. 2, 126. Print.
---. “Terns,” N&S. 2, 34-35. Print.
---. “The Gift,” HL. 36. Print.
---. “The Moths,” N&S. 1. 132-133. Print.
---. “The Rabbit,” N&S. 1. 221. Print.
---. “The Summer Day,” N&S. 1. 94. Print.
---. “The Sun,” N&S. 1. 51. Print.
---. “The Sea Mouse,” N&S. 2, 167-168. Print.
---. “This World,” N&S. 2, 81. Print.
---. “Toad,” N&S. 2, 164. Print.
---. “White Heron Rises Over Blackwater,” N&S. 2, 13. Print. 82
---. “Wild Geese,” N&S. 1. 110. Print.
---. “Vultures,” N&S. 1. 155-156. Print.
---. “Yes! No!,” N&S. 2, 151. Print.
Primary Sources: Essays, Handbooks, and Interviews
Oliver, Mary. Long Life: Essays and Other Writings. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press,
2004. Print.
---. “Maria Shriver Interviews the Famously Private Poet Mary Oliver.” The Exclusive O
Interview. Oprah.com. 9 March 2011. Web. 4 June 2011.
Oliver/print/1>. ---. “Mary Oliver with Coleman Barks; Wednesday, August 4, 2001 [audio/video].” Lannan Readings & Conversations. Lannan Foundation. 1 August 2001. Web. June 4, 2011. ---. Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Print. Secondary Sources a compendium of poetry. Berkeley: University of California. 14 March 1998. Web. 5 May 2013. About Mary Oliver: Poems by Mary Oliver. Bryant McGill. 12 April 2012. Web. 6 May 2013. Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than- Human World. New York, NY: Vintage Books/Random House, 1997. Print. 83 Ackerman, Diane. A Natural History of the Senses. New York, NY: Vintage Books/Random House, 1995. Print. After Ellen. Logo. 2002-2013. Web. 5 May 2013. Alliance for Wild Ethics. “David Abram.” Alliance Members. Alliance for Wild Ethics. Web. 18 June 2012. Austin, Linda M. “Children of Childhood: Nostalgia and the Romantic Legacy.” Studies in Romanticism. 42 (2003). 75-98. Web. 9 June 2010. nostalgia-and.html>. Bett, Henry. Nursery Rhymes and Tales - Their Origin and History. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1968. Print. Booth, David. “Language Delights and Word Play: The Foundation for Literacy Learning.” Voices on Word Matters: Learning about Phonics and Spelling in the Literacy Classroom. Ed. Irene C. Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell. Westport, CT: Heinemann, 1999. Print. Burton-Christie, Douglas. “Nature, Spirit, and Imagination in the Poetry of Mary Oliver.” Cross Currents. 46.1 (1996). 77-87. Print. Bringhurst, Robert. “The Tree of Meaning.” Ascent. 37 (2008). 13-16. Print. Brooks Barbour, Julie and Julie L. Moore (Eds.). Dear Mary: A Blog of Tributes and Testimonials for Mary Oliver’s Work. Blogspot. 14 February 2012. Web. 5 May 2013. Browning, Dominique. “Sense of Oneness with the Natural World.” Dear Mary: A Blog of Tributes and Testimonials for Mary Oliver’s Work. Ed. Julie Brooks Barbour 84 and Julie L. Moore. Blogspot. 14 February 2012. Web. 9 August 2012. CamYoga. Cambridge Yoga Centre. 2013. Web. 5 May 2013. Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1962. Print. Centre for Environmental and Sustainability Education. Florida Gulf Coast University. 2013. Web. 5 May 2013. Chawla, Louise. “Ecstatic Places.” Children’s Environments Quarterly. 7.4 (1990). 18-23. Print. ---. Growing Up in an Urbanizing World. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2001. Print. ---. “The Ecology of Environmental Memory.” Children’s Environments Quarterly. 3.4 (1986). 34-42. Print. ---. “The Place of Poetry.” Children's Environments Quarterly. 2.2 (1985). 7-13. Print. Cook, Greg. “Mary Oliver Saved My Life: Dispatch from the National Association of Poetry Therapy’s annual conference.” Poetry Foundation: Articles. Poetry Foundation. 22 August 2006. Web. 27 November 2011. Poetry Chaikhana: Sacred Poetry from Around the World. 2012. Web. 5 May 2013. Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham, NC, USA: Duke University Press, 2003. Print. 85 Daily Montessori – Montessori Education. “Daily Montessori.” Maria Montessori Quotes. Daily Montessori – Montessori Education. 2011. Web. 26 June 2011. Davis, Todd. “The Earth as God’s Body: Incarnation as Communion in the Poetry of Mary Oliver.” Christianity and Literature. 58.4 (Summer 2009). 605-624. Print. Dempsey, John. “You Do Not Have To Be Good (But It Helps) – A Look At Mary Oliver.” Plagiarist Articles. Plagiarist Poetry. 21 April 2002. Web. 12 February 2013. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Print. Dobyns, Stephen. “Praise and Awards.” Mary Oliver: Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Winning Poet. Beacon. Web. 7 July 2012. Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Text.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Ed. Richard Ellmann, Robert O’Clair, and Jahan Ramazani. 3rd ed. Vol. 1. New York, New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2003. 941-947. Print. Ellmann, Richard, Robert O’Clair and Jahan Ramazani (eds.). “Mary Oliver.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry: Volume 2, Contemporary Poetry. 3rd ed. New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2003. 652. Print. 86 Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature. American Transcendentalism Web. Virginia Commonwealth University. Web. 9 August 2010. Encyclopædia Britannica. “oral tradition.” Encyclopædia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. 2011. Web. November 23, 2011. Ga Voice, The. LGBT News. 2013. Web. 5 May 2013. Garner, Dwight. “Inside the List.” Sunday Book Review. New York Times. 18 February 2007. Web. 11 August 2010. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2004. Print. Gianoulis, Tina. “Oliver, Mary.” Literature. glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture. 2005. Web. 4 December 2011. Graham, Vicki. “Into the Body of Another: Mary Oliver and the Poetics of Becoming Other.” Papers on Language and Literature. 30.4 (1994). 352-373. Print. Gregory, Alice. “Mary Oliver and the Nature-esque: Rambles with America’s most popular poet.” Poetry Foundation: Articles. Poetry Foundation. 2011. Web. 12 August 2012. Griffore, Robert J. and Lillian A. Phenice. “Young Children and the Natural World.” Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood. Symposium Journals Ltd. 4.2 (2003). 167-171. Print. Hammond, Fred L. “The Theology of Mary Oliver.” A Unitarian Universalist Minister in the South. Serenity Home Word Press. 14 September 2008. Web. 9 August 2010. Harris, Mark W. “Unitarian Universalist Origins: Our Historic Faith.” History: UU Origins. Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations. 9 January 1998. Web. 29 November 2011. Heaney, Seamus. “Alphabets.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry: Volume 2, Contemporary Poetry. Ed. Jahan Ramazani, et al. 3rd ed. New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2003. 741-743. Print. ---. “Feeling into Words.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry: Volume 2, Contemporary Poetry. Ed. Jahan Ramazani, et al. 3rd ed. New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2003. 1096-1109. Print. Heer, Jeet. “Divine Inspiration: How Catholicism made Marshall McLuhan one of the twentieth century’s freest and finest thinkers.” The Walrus: Media. The Walrus Foundation. July/August 2011. Web. 25 July 2011. Holloway, Sarah L. and Gill Valentine. Children’s Geographies: Playing, Living, Learning. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2000. Print. 88 Hough, Andrew. “Student ‘addiction’ to technology ‘similar to drug cravings’, study finds.” Technology News. The Telegraph. 8 April 2011. Web. 12 August 2011. technology-similar-to-drug-cravings-study-finds.html>. Johnson, Mark. “Keep Looking: Mary Oliver’s Emersonian Project.” The Massachusetts Review. 46.1 (2005). 78-98. Print. Keville, Annie. “Beautifully Simple Sense of Things.” Dear Mary: A Blog of Tributes and Testimonials for Mary Oliver’s Work. Ed. Julie Brooks Barbour and Julie L. Moore. Blogspot. 24 February 2012. Web. 12 August 2012. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1980. Print. Lane, Patrick. There is a Season: A Memoir. Toronto, Ontario: McClelland and Stewart Ltd., 2004. Print. Lesbian Question, The. WordPress. 2007-2013. Web. 5 May 2013. Louv, Richard. The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2011. Print. Mann, Thomas W. God of Dirt: Mary Oliver and the Other Book of God. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004. Print. Marcum, Marla. “On (not) Being Good.” Journal of Faith and Science Exchange. Boston University Digital Common. 6 (2010). Web. 11 June 2012. Mary Oliver Quotes. BrainyQuote. 2001-2013. Web. 5 May 2013. Mazza, Nicholas. Poetry Therapy: Theory and Practice. New York, New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2003. Print. McCullough, David. “Commencement speech: ‘You are not special’.” News/Insight. The Toronto Star. 16 June 2012. Web. 18 July 2012. e_not_special.html>. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Mentor, New York: 1964; reissued by MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1994. Print. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London, England: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962. Print. Michael, Ann E. “The Poems Never Let Me Down.” Dear Mary: A Blog of Tributes and Testimonials for Mary Oliver’s Work. Ed. Julie Brooks Barbour and Julie L. Moore. Blogspot. 19 February 2012. Web. 8 August 2012. Montessori, Maria. The Montessori Method. New York, NY: Cosimo, 2006. Print. Murphy, Cora. “My Work Is Loving the World.” Dear Mary: A Blog of Tributes and Testimonials for Mary Oliver’s Work. Ed. Julie Brooks Barbour and Julie L. Moore. Blogspot. 14 February 2012. Web. 9 August 2012. National Association for Poetry Therapy. “Beginnings.” History. The National Association for Poetry Therapy. 2005. Web. 27 November 2011. ---. Journal of Poetry Therapy. Online and print journal. Ed. Charles Rossiter. Taylor & Francis Online. 1987-2013. Web. 5 May 2013. Nichols, Ashton. “William Wordsworth (1770-1850).” A Romantic Natural History. Dickinson College. January 2007. Web. 28 June 2010. Oasis Ministries for Spiritual Development. CTI Networks, Inc. 2010-2013. Web. 5 May 2013. Okri, Ben. A Way of Being Free. London, England: Phoenix House, 1997. Print. Ohioana Authors. “Highlights of a Life.” Mary Oliver. Ohioana Authors. 2012. Web. 11 August 2012. Palmer, Parker J. “The Grace of Great Things: Reclaiming the Sacred in Knowing, Teaching, and Learning.” The Heart of Learning: Spirituality in Education. Ed. Steven Glazer. New York, NY: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1999. 15-32. Print. Panhala. Yahoo! Groups. 2002-2013. Web. 5 May 2013. Poetry 180: a poem a day for American high schools. United States Library of Congress. 6 September 2007. Web. 5 May 2013. Poetry Chaikhana: Sacred Poetry from Around the World. Poetry Chaikhana. 2013. Web. 5 May 2013. Poetry Foundation. “Mary Oliver.” Biography. Poetry Foundation. 2010. Web. 11 August 2010. Perry, Kristin. “Risk Greatly, Wonder Deeply.” Dear Mary: A Blog of Tributes and Testimonials for Mary Oliver’s Work. Ed. Julie Brooks Barbour and Julie L. Moore. Blogspot. 16 February 2012. Web. 12 August 2012. Pollan, Michael. The Botany of Desire. New York, NY: Random House, 2001. Print. Preston, Rohan B. “Oliver Shares Her Search For Meaning.” News: Featured Articles. The Chicago Tribune. 23 September 1993. Web. 6 August 2010. modern-poetry-association-new-and-selected-poems>. Random House. “Our World.” Random House for High School Teachers. Random House. 2007. Web. 26 June 2011. 8809&view=print>. Ratiner, Steven. “Poet Mary Oliver: A Solitary Walk.” The Christian Monitor. The Christian Monitor. 9 December 1992. Web. 16 August 2010. Rich, Adrienne. “Legislators of the world: In our dark times we need poetry more than ever, argues Adrienne Rich.” Culture: Books. The Guardian. 18 November 2006. Web. 19 July 2012. >. 92 Ricou, Laurie. Everyday Magic: Child Languages in Canadian Literature. Vancouver, British Columbia: The University of British Columbia Press, 1987. Print. Rosen, Kim. “Q & A: Saved by a Poem: The Transformative Power of Words.” Kim Rosen. Kim Rosen. 2010. Web. 9 August 2010. Rose Hill Montessori School. “Cosmic Education.” Cosmic Education: Rose Hill Montessori School. Verna Montessori School. Web. 9 August 2010. Ross, Gina. Beyond the Trauma Vortex: The Media’s Role in Healing Fear, Terror, and Violence. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 2003. Print. Rossington, Michael. The Reception of P. B. Shelley in Europe. Ed. Susanne Schmid. London, England: Continuum, 2008. Print. Saint Vincent College. “Textspeak Signals 500-Year Language Change, SVC Professor, Philologist Observes.” News Archive. Saint Vincent College. 9 January 2012. Web. 2 August 2012. Schwartz, Nomi. “Venerable Beacon Press Shines on Social Issues.” Bookselling This Week. American Booksellers Association. 19 December 2005. Web. 29 November 2011. social-issues>. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “A Defence of Poetry.” English Essays: Sidney to Macaulay; Harvard Classics. Bartleby. 2011. Web. 15 November 2011. Simpson, John (Ed.). Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford English Dictionary. 2013. Web. 5 May 2013. Spidel, Lianne. “Stopping My Heart In Its Tracks.” Dear Mary: A Blog of Tributes and Testimonials for Mary Oliver’s Work. Ed. Julie Brooks Barbour and Julie L. Moore. Blogspot. 26 February 2012. Web. 8 August 2012. Stephens, Susie. “The Grotesque in Children’s Literature.” Grotesque: The World Wide Website. Dr. David Lavery Books and Journals. Web. 22 July 2011. ml>. Thomas, Dylan. “Poetic Manifesto.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry: Volume 2, Contemporary Poetry. Ed. Jahan Ramazani, et al. 3rd ed. New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2003. 1061-1066. Print. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. Ed. Richard Lenat. The Thoreau Reader. Thoreau Society. 1999-2009. Web. 5 May 2013. TAVA Full Circle. TAVA Full Circle. 2008-2013. Web. 5 May 2013. Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations. “Our Unitarian Universalist Principles.” Principles. Unitarian Universalist Association of Congragations. 1996. Web. 29 November 2011. ---. “WorshipWeb.” Worship. Unitarian Universalist Association of Congragations. 1996. Web. 5 May 2013. United States Fish and Wildlife Service. “Remembering Rachel.” Resources. United States Fish and Wildlife Service. 1-7. Web. 7 July 2012. Vaughan, Steve and Zoe. “The big question: is text speak destroying the English language?.” The Big Question. MSN News. 21 February 2012. Web. 17 February 2013. speak-destroying-the-english-language>. Warner, Michael. “Publics and Counterpublics.” Public Culture. 14.1 (2002). 49-90. Print. WellesleyChannelTV. “You Are Not Special Commencement Speech from Wellesley High School.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube. 7 June 2012. Web. 8 June 2012. Wordsworth, William. “Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour. July 13, 1798.” Complete Poetical Works. Bartleby. 2012. Web. 8 July 2012. ---. The Prelude of 1805, in Thirteen Books. DjVu Editions/Global Language Resources, Inc.: Project Gutenberg. 2001. Web. 7 July 2012. E1805/Download.pdf>. Yeats, William Butler. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry: Volume 1, Modern Poetry. Ed. Jahan 95 Ramazani, et al. 3rd ed. New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2003. 94-95. Print. Zen Centre of Los Angeles. Zen Centre of Los Angeles. 2013. Web. 5 May 2013.