Mary Oliver

It's been a long time since I posted here. But the death of Mary Oliver, and the many posts on FB and elsewhere mourning her passing, have me thinking. I get that many people appreciate her work because it is "accessible," and because it employs plain diction, and that it focuses on the natural world. I suppose those qualifiers could apply to my poems also.

But what I never have been able to get past in many of Oliver's poems is the feeling that I'm being preached to. Here are a couple of sentences from the NYT obit: "Her poems, which are built of unadorned language and accessible imagery, have a pedagogical, almost homiletic quality. It was this, combined with their relative brevity, that seemed to endear her work to a broad public, including clerics, who quoted it in their sermons; poetry therapists, who found its uplifting sensibility well suited to their work." 

"Tell me," she asks in "The Summer Day," "what it is you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?" My answer is, I'm not sure, or, None of your business. "And have you finally figured out what beauty is for? / And have you changed your life?" ("The Swan") I'm not interested in what beauty is "for," and NO. Or am I not supposed to have answers for the questions that Oliver's poems consistently present to me? 

The speaker in her poems seems so often to speak from a dais, with perhaps an open Bible or some other Solomonic text in front of her. I don't go to poems for answers to enigmas, but rather to explore them. The questions that such poems ask seem to embody the one answer possible. If one is driven to rapture by the poem, then perhaps it is easier to let that simple answer wash over one. But that, again, is what happens when the preacher reaches his peroration, and the sinner walks down the aisle with tears streaming down his face.

There are some lovely poems in books such as "American Primitive" and elsewhere. But I stopped reading Oliver a long time ago. I'm more interested in the questions than the answers.