Who's Mary Oliver?
Welcome to the English Republic of Letters to the many new readers who have joined us recently. It’s great to have you here, and I hope you’ll stick around and, if you feel able, join in the conversation in the comments.
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The origin of this newsletter’s title comes from a place of intellectual curiosity and exchange, taking inspiration from the original Republic of Letters. Generosity and openness are keys to intellectual and artistic exchange, I believe. So in the spirit of openness, I will make a terrible confession.
Before I came to Substack, I hadn’t read a single line by Mary Oliver.
Worse, although I’m sure her name would have cropped up somewhere in the course of my life of reading, if you’d asked me before September who she was, I wouldn’t have been able to give you an answer.
It’s not as if I don’t read American poetry. The list of American poets I've enjoyed is a long one, including Hart Crane, Lucille Clifton, Louise Glück, Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, John Ashbery, and Frank O’Hara, among many others. But Oliver is not there.
When I joined Substack in September last year, her name immediately started cropping up everywhere. At first—and this is the most shameful part of my confession—I actually thought she might be a self-help/mindfulness guru who’d used poems to get her message across. Of course, when I looked her up, I was put in my place.
“Mary Oliver... was perhaps the most popular American poet of the past few decades,” I read in the Guardian.
I happened to mention my ignorance of Oliver’s work recently to the brilliant writer and editor,
and she was, as a devotee of the poet, both surprised and fascinated. She thought this might interest many of you, so I decided to share my ignorance with you.I asked myself, How had this oversight occurred? Was there something so “American” about her (and I am very conscious that most people on Substack are American) that no one had bothered to fill in us Brits (or the rest of the world) about her? Or was it, well, just me?
A late and very dear former colleague in Mexico used to like to say “nadie es profeta en su tierra” (“no prophet is accepted in his own country”). As I was never sent to Sunday school as a kid, I thought this was one of those beautiful and colourful Latin American idioms which I enjoyed so much. It took me a while to work out that this comes from the Bible (I used the King James version above). Anyway, some writers aren’t accepted in their own country, either. Examples include Jorge Luis Borges, who at first only found favour in Europe, not in his native Argentina. Others, such as Haruki Murakami in Japan, enjoy a massive international readership while receiving a more mixed, even polarised, reception at home.
Other writers seem destined to be widely loved or respected in their own country but little known elsewhere, such as Lu Xun, revered in China yet read little elsewhere, or Philip Larkin, who was the unofficial poet laureate of Britain's hospitals, office blocks, station hotels and “raw estates” in small towns, but who never gained huge recognition outside Britain (which wouldn’t have bothered him at all).
It’s possible that Mary Oliver comes into this category, in which case it would be fascinating to know why that would be.
But if this is just a case of my own ignorance and the rest of the world knows her and loves her too, I still want to understand how I came to miss her.
As regular readers know, I’m not in the habit of giving you any work to do. You’re busy enough as it is. But as I’m really curious to understand this more and to put my mistake right by getting to know Oliver’s work, I’m making an exception.
So, a question for all of you is: which book by Mary Oliver would you recommend for me to start with?
And for those of you who are not from the US, do you know her work? If so, where did you find out about her?
Finally, are there any other writers who you are surprised to see (or not to see) mentioned on Substack? Or do you remember a time when you discovered a beloved author (to others) you knew nothing about?
Thank you for reading, and I look forward to your comments and insights, as always.
Yes, she's been a big favourite of mine for a long time. I very often read her work to participants in my poetry workshops. Yes, as someone else says, she's quite well-known outside poetry circles, in the way that, say, Rumi is.
I love her New and Selected; I would agree with Lev who says In Blackwater Woods is a great poem; another is Dogfish.
I love that her work is so rooted in the natural world but spans other dimensions too.
I suspect that some potential readers think that she is or would be too 'New Age'; she is emotionally engaged, and some people who like more detached academic work might not enjoy hers. Personally, I think she's done us all a big favour by being and writing as she is (was) and has.
Thank you for writing about Mary. "I actually thought she might be a self-help/mindfulness guru who’d used poems to get her message across"—agh, this hurt to read! But I know where it comes from. A few of her poems have become popular in mindfulness and yoga type circles, and a lot of people have not bothered to learn much about her beyond that, but her topics are so much broader and deeper. She herself was a chain-smoking, wind-weathered, very private, gnarled little tree of a woman who devoted her life to her partner Molly and was close friends with John Waters. A queer poet who was very rarely identified as such. She survived terrible childhood abuse, which she also wrote about. She was my writing mentor in college and one of the best, most bullshit-free people I have ever known. I hope you'll look at her earlier work especially. Thanks for writing about her 💜