Monthly Archives: January 2019

Mary Oliver: My Mentor & Teacher

Mary Oliver, circa 1992
photo by Marv

The two summers I spent in Mary Oliver’s poetry writing workshop changed my life. A practicing psychotherapist for twenty-five years, lines of poetry had arrived in the middle of the night. At lunch with a friend one day, as I mused about the mystical quality of how lines arrive each morning, she asked how the revision process was going. “Revision,” I laughed, “I’m clueless.”  Poetry had seemed like a gift from the muse, not to be tampered with.

Tampering with grit and specificity is what Mary Oliver was all about. That first morning in July 1990, blond, lean, dressed in a yellow shirt, Mary was soft-spoken bordering on shy yet directive and clear about why we were there and what was to come. She said, “I teach what works for me.” We were there to learn language, technique, and process.

Session 1— a few highlights

  • “Sound selection is unconscious. The sense of the poem is carried by sound,” she began.
  • “You work with the equipment you get inside you.”
  • “The daylight part of the mind edits.”
  • “Any word is a help or a hindrance.”
  • “There is no such thing as a neutral sound.”
  • “Without this type of artistry, the use of sound, you don’t have a poem.”
  • “When art is right, the more bearable it is.”

I can attest to the truth of Mary’s words. I come from a line of music makers. My children are music makers as am I. Under Mary’s tutelage, I sung words to myself, tapped out rhythms, played with line breaks, varied stanzas, wrote multiple drafts of poems and rarely published. The creativity, the hope of artistry, the effort to shape the words and use the tools Mary gave me powered my effort and brought balance to my life.

After I retired from my practice, I shifted into the longer form of personal essay and memoir. The musicality of words, what I had learned about enjambment, the concept of the turning of the line, the difference between a slim poem such as Mary wrote or a long line, such as Whitman, whom she blessed for speaking to her, followed me.

In my Solstice MFA critical thesis, titled, Poetic Language and Musicality in Essays of E.B. White and Ted Kooser’s Local Wonders, I expanded on Mary’s specificity. I explored symbolism as well as elements of rhythm as depicted by beat, and melody as demonstrated by sound and physiological harmony in relationship to the particulars of imagery which evoke sight, sounds, tastes, smell and touch.

On the sad occasion of Mary’s death, I recall our private feedback meeting at Bennington in 1991. She affirmed my passion and work ethic as she offered, “Send me a few poems from time to time. I’ll run alongside you, to help lift your kite into the air.”

I am grateful for Mary’s generosity, respect and poetic commentary, which enabled me to express and trust the “equipment” I have inside. Like so many who mourn her today, I turn to her vast work of artistry, her ability to create “bearable art” and rejoice for her legacy.

On Slow Waking

 

Faye, circa 1950’s
photo by Marv

For the past week, I’ve been ensconced at Pine Manor’s Winter MFA Solstice residency in Chestnut Hill. I was one of the first alumni to graduate in January, 2009. Thanks to their generous policy of encouraging alumni to audit classes and attend alumni events, I return twice a year for inspiration, learning and collegiality.

Every year, I focus on a particular aspect of craft and writing. In years past, as a memoir and personal essay writer, I’ve selected classes in creative nonfiction. This past year, perhaps because of the swirling events of Trump’s presidency, I have returned to writing poetry. The form, succinct and compressed, forces me to hone in, shape words in a rhythmic form, and highlight the essence of my subject.

I write free verse, using narrative, craft particulars and associations to shape my words. As of late, I have struggled to find the “right” words to fit my subject and fill the page. I’ve begun to wonder: does the possibility of so much free form limit my imagination?

I am grateful to report that midweek, I attended a class taught by Dzvinia Orlowsky on the Villanelle and Pantoum forms. We read and dissected Dylan Thomas’s Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, Sylvia Plath’s Mad Girl’s Love Song, Theodore Roethke’s The Waking and two more. Villanelle is a form that uses repetition of lines to highlight the poet’s themes and intention.

As an Octogenarian with far more years behind me than ahead, the experience of probing the contrast between Thomas’s “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” and Roethke’s “I learn by going where I have to go”  tapped into my own personal dilemma about creative focus and time.

In aging, one can rail and narrow one’s options as Thomas so aptly reveals or in contrast, one can follow one’s instincts or intuition and expand as one lives as Roethke unveils. It was remarkable join my classroom peers, all decades younger, in exploring and articulating the options.

On his recent 91stbirthday, my brother joked, “I’ve never been this old.” There is such truth is that simple statement and with it, the question of how one proceeds facing the “sunset years.” For myself, I am grateful to have returned to poem making in order to try to harness the light, caste the mauves, blues and lavenders of topics that compel me to write.

At the same time, I am grateful to experience validation of the path I am on, the belief that experience is the best teacher— a mantra I followed in all my therapeutic work with others. My choice of poetry classes was intuitive. It now seems significant that Roethke wrote the poem In Waking in 1953, a turning point in my life. I was a junior in college, far from home, emotionally adrift from my family and learning life long lessons I continue to embrace.

In Roethke’s words—“I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I learn by going where I have to go.” I am grateful.