Poetic Uber-ing

On New Year’s Day, I listened to an ON BEING podcast of a rare interview of Mary Oliver by Krista Tippett which took place on October 5, 2015 in Florida where Oliver now lives.  Mary Oliver is certainly a poet I return to frequently, partly I think because of her attachment to the natural world which I share.

Oliver talks briefly but in generalities about her home which was difficult at best and  relates that when she was a child, she often left school to simply walk in the woods, to listen deeply. She calls it "listening convivially."  This intrigues me, but I find myself doing this listening more often when I have my camera tucked in my hand, even in the coldest weather. Recently I needed a mental boost, and I found myself at the Chicago Botanic Garden; it was a cold day, and in the ninety minutes or so that I was there, maybe I passed three other people, all of whom seemed equally happy to be inhabiting this space of winter Midwest browns and silhouettes alone.  I often use nature imagery in my poetry,, but it’s generally generated for me by “seeing convivially.” 

Oliver states that she “. . . did find the entire world in looking for something. But I got saved by poetry. And I got saved by the beauty of the world.” I can identify with that in every part of my being. In 2004 several years before I retired from teaching and found myself pursuing poetry more passionately and with much more attention to craft, I wrote these lines:  Some days / I am even/ saved by / beauty. Every minute part of nature, and particularly the botanical part of nature, draws me in.  One photograph, just one, that pleases me to the point of elation is enough to change the tenor of the entire day for me.  I commented to a friend just this week that when I go to the Chicago Botanic Garden to I can feel even my breathing change, the tightness in my chest and shoulders loosen within minutes--I am being saved.

That idea of the single serendipitous photographic moment dovetails with another part of the conversation that Oliver and Tippett had which is about poems that just come to us.  So rare. Poems that we write where we never need to change a single word.  Oliver says, and I agree, "But they do happen. It does — I have very rarely, maybe four or five times in my life, I’ve written a poem that I never changed. And I don’t know where it came from. But it does happen. But it happens among hundreds of poems that you’ve struggled over.”  The words for me come later or else I draw upon a visual image I've recorded with the camera, and I can feel equally exhilarated when something works on the page. It's rare when there's unedited magic, but when it happens, it's glorious!

Yesterday I read Oliver’s book, Felicity. A quick reading, and the "Humility" poem jumped out.  I like the idea of thinking of myself as transportation, as a vehicle. An Uber driver for poems, for poetry.

And one more playful poem in this collection that fits with my love of trees . . . and humans.  ​

---