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The Return to “The Child” 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 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lfxYhtf8o4>. 2 over-accommodated throughout their entire high school education, have never truly experienced failure nor earned success. Instead, McCullough proposes that students – whether they deserve it or not – have been convinced that they are “special” with grades, accolades, titles and awards that do not make them “special” at all, but that make them, consequently, the same as everyone else. “The fulfilling life, the distinctive life, the relevant life,” McCullough cautions, “is an achievement, not something that will fall into your lap because you’re a nice person or mommy ordered it from the caterer” (“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.
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