Tag Archives: Poet Mary Oliver

April 18, 2023 Spotlight on OWLS AND OTHER FANTASIES by Mary Oliver and Context for My Poem, “Yesterday”

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A benefit of a leisurely book-sorting project is the opportunity to revist books again. Yesterday, I dipped into Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays (Beacon Press, Boston; 2003) by poet Mary Oliver (1935-2017). The collection brings together poems on birds from the first forty years of her publishing career, along with two essays, also on birds. Not surprisingly, it opens with her “Wild Geese,” and also not surprisingly, it will remain, along with other of her books, on my culled and dusted shelves, to be revisited soon.

Context for My Poem, “Yesterday”:

I took this still life, a little bronze replica of an Etruscan owl, that Tim and I bought decades ago on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, against a piece of Labrodorite (also known as Spectrolite) that I gave Tim for one of our wedding anniversaries. (I think the lines, lights, and shadows of this form of feldspar look like forest branches.) When I took the photograph, I was thinking of how photographers speak of “captures,” and of how poets seize upon–or are seized by–images and ideas. It seemed to me that humans in their creative modes really do resemble raptors, at least during some of the process of creating.

Then, yesterday, reading Oliver’s essay, I learned that the Great Horned Owl, a fearsome raptor, has as their prefered food, brains. Not sure that my poem of the day addresses that odd natural fact adequately, but I wanted to begin to think about this.

Until tomorrow, LESLIE

Mourning Mary Oliver: September 10, 1935 to January 17, 2019

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Mary Oliver’s works as a poet and a writer have left indelible impressions on me. When I learned that she had died today, I felt a stab of grief, followed by a feeling of joy at all she, this person whom I never met, had given to me through her work. I know that many, many people feel the same way.

Tonight, I want to share two sharp memories of moments when her work intertwined with my life, enriching and deepening it. The first is when I read to my students her justly famous poem, “Wild Geese,” at the end of one of my yoga classes. Here is a link to the complete poem. It is a poem about accepting life in a body–your own body, just as it is–and ends with an up-rush of sheer ecstasy for being alive, right now, in this minute. If you have a moment,  read it again (or for the first time.) That day back in the autumn of 2001, after reading it, I could hear geese on the wing not far away, sailing over the Cannon River.

The other memory is of a trip to Bayfield, WI with family. We were still new to homeschooling. I had brought Mary Oliver’s Selected Poems with me. Julia and Tim and I read a number of them aloud in the quiet and natural beauty of the Bayfield Pennisula, near the Apostle Islands, each of us responding in our own ways. That is a place where we have often seen bears near the side of the the road, crossing from one part of the forest to the other, and so I was especially taken, that day, with her poem, “Spring.”  The evocation of a newly awakened bear still thrills me each time I read this poem, or even when I just imperfectly remember it.

There are many beautifully written obituaries for her online, including this one from
The New York Times. I am grateful that she was who she was, and also that she broke her privacy to share, through her work, her clear and passionate observations of the natural world and the human pysche with all of us.

Leslie

Heartfelt thanks to my sister, Karla Schultz, for these amazing photographs of wild geese near Horicon Marsh in Wisconsin–and for taking the time to find them in her vast archives on short notice so I could share them here.