Why Mary Oliver Changed My Mind About Poetry (+3 Poems You’ll Love)
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Despite being a self-proclaimed poetry fanatic, I’m sad to say it hasn’t always been so. I spent years eye-rolling my way through poetic literary assignments in school so I could get back to what really mattered… boys (and books, of course.)
I grew up preferring a rich, long, complicated story to the works of Edgar Allan Poe or Shakespeare, or even Emily Dickinson. At the time, their words struck me as frilly, long-winded, and sometimes weird (I’m looking at you, Poe) and didn’t resonate with me a bit. This caused me to ignore anything to do with poetry for years to come.
But all that changed when I read Mary Oliver.
I first heard of Mary Oliver when her poems began making their way around my social media circles in 2018. She’s most famous for her poem “Wild Geese” — its profundity has deeply touched so many that some even credit it with saving their lives:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
But “Wild Geese” is just the tip of the iceberg. Oliver’s way with words piqued my interest so much that I decided to purchase a book of her collected poems called Devotions — and I couldn’t put it down!
Her writing style drew me in and kept me turning page after page for more of her frank, matter-of-fact tone and surprising gems of insight. Her words, trimmed down to the essentials, caused the whole world to suddenly shrink into an insect or a petal or that squirrel you hardly noticed wandering through the woods.
I felt as if she were showing me creativity didn’t have to be complicated, that genius is found in simplicity. She showed me you need not travel the world and have all kinds of wild experiences to have something meaningful to say about life.
With every line, she opened my eyes to the joy, comfort, and sorrow that surrounds us every day in our own backyards. When I read her my world got still; when I read her my world made a little more sense; when I read her I could feel the poet inside of me leap to life.
Want to see what I’m talking about? Here are 3 short poems (from the Devotions collection) that will take your breath away, leave you pondering its words for weeks, and just maybe inspire you to pick up a pen yourself:
01 | Sometimes (poem 4)
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
02 | At the Edge of the Ocean
I have heard this music before, saith the body.
03 | Passing the Unworked Field
Queen Anne’s Lace
is hardly
prized but
all the same it isn’t
idle look
how it
stands straight on its
thin stems how it
scrubs its white faces
with the
rags of the sun how it
makes all the
loveliness
it can.
If you love these poems as much as I do and you’re feeling inspired, but wondering how to get started, try these two writing exercises to get the creative juices flowing:
Tell a story in 10 words or less
Write a haiku (5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables)
