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Mary Oliver reads from her poetry collection "A Thousand Mornings" and other works.
Summary
Mary Oliver presents an intimate poetry reading at the 92nd Street Y on October 15, 2012, featuring work from her new collection "A Thousand Mornings," published by Penguin, alongside beloved earlier poems. Despite battling a severe cold, she shares pieces ranging from meditative nature observations to deeply personal works about loss, survival, and spiritual seeking. The reading includes her most famous poems like "Wild Geese" and "The Summer Day," as well as newer work about her dog Percy, written in homage to Christopher Smart's "For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry." Oliver reveals personal history throughout, including her experiences of childhood trauma, a broken arm that led to writing shorter poems, and her recent move to Connecticut after years living on the harbor in Provincetown. She also shares the story of how she came to write narrow poems while working at a printing company, where financial constraints led her to use four-inch-wide paper trims.
Key Takeaways
Full Transcript
Mary Oliver: I'm going to read mostly from this evening's books, poems from the new book "A Thousand Mornings," which is for my new publisher, Penguin. Hurrah. And I also now have an agent, Charlotte Sheedy. Ah, so I'm a happy camper.
I also have a very, very bad cold. Can everybody hear me? Good. And I think that I'll be pretty good. They gave me water. I've never apologized, but if I cough and break a poem, I'll start over and so forth. But things could be worse. I remember reading once with Grace Paley in Indiana, and when she got on stage she said, well, we'll have to see how it goes. I just ate supper and I ate the toothpick. No toothpick could get Grace Paley down, for sure.
I'm going to start off with poems from the new book after a very short poem that I have been reading lately to start the reading, and I still continue it. It's called "Percy," our new dog, named for the beloved poet.
Percy
He ate a book which, unfortunately, we had left unguarded. Fortunately, it was the Bhagavad Gita, of which many copies are available. Every day now, as Percy grows into the beauty of his life, we touch his wild, curly head and say, oh wisest of little dogs.
It's that second ripple I like.
The first poem in "A Thousand Mornings" is what I call my misery poem. I'm not miserable. I won't say I've never been miserable, but this is once in a while. I'm miserable. Who isn't?
I Go Down to the Shore
I go down to the shore in the mornings, and depending on the hour, the waves are rolling in or moving out. And I say, oh, I am miserable. What shall I do? And the sea says in its lovely voice, excuse me, I have work to do.
The Way of the World
Something more serious. This is a prose poem.
The chickens ate all the crickets. The foxes ate all the chickens. This morning, a friend hauled his boat to shore and gave me the most wondrous fish. In its silver scales, it seemed dressed for a wedding. The gills, repulsing just above where shoulders would be if it had shoulders. The eyes were still looking around. I don't know what they were thinking. The chickens ate all the crickets. The foxes ate all the chickens. I ate the fish.
The Mockingbird
All summer, the mockingbird in his pearl gray coat and his white-wing—out-windowed wings—flies from the hedge to the top of the pine and begins to sing. But it's neither lilting nor lovely, for he is the thief of other sounds: whistles and train brakes and dried hinges, plus all the songs of other birds in his neighborhood. Mimicking and elaborating, he sings with humor and bravado, so I have to wait a long time for the softer voice of his own life to come through.
He begins by giving up all his usual flutter and settling down on the pine's forelock, then looking around as though to make sure he's alone. Then he slaps each wing against his breast, where his heart is, and copying nothing, begins easing into it as though it was not half so easy as rollicking. As though his subject now was his true self, which, of course, was as dark and secret as anyone else's, and it was too hard—perhaps you understand—to speak or to sing it to anything or anyone but the sky.
I need a hot toddy, you know. It always happens. You get a terrible cold and you tell people, for whatever reason, and they say, oh yes, it's going around. That's the sympathy you get.
Hum
All right, a serious poem, still from the new book, called "Hum."
One
Summer afternoon, I heard a looming, mysterious hum high in the air. Then came something like a small planet flying past, something not at all interested in me but on its own way somewhere, all anointed with excitement. Bees swarming, not to be held back. Nothing could hold them back.
Two
Gannets diving. Black snake wrapped in a tree, our eyes meeting. The grass singing as it sipped up the summer rain. The owl in the darkness, that good darkness under the stars. The child that was myself that kept running away to the also-running creek, to coltsfoot and trilliums, to the effortless prattle of the birds.
Three
Said the mother: you are going to grow up, and in order for that to happen, I am going to have to grow old, and then I will die, and the blame will be yours.
Of the father: he wanted a body, so he took mine.
Some wounds never vanish, yet little by little I learned to love my life, though sometimes I had to run hard, especially from melancholy, not to be held back.
Five
I think there ought to be a little music here. Mmm, mmm.
Six
The resurrection of the mornings. The mystery of the night. The hummingbird's wings. The excitement of thunder. The rainbow in the waterfall. Wild mustard, that rough blaze of the fields. The mockingbird replaying the songs of his neighbors. The bluebird with his—that's his—with its unambitious warble, simple yet sufficient. The shining fish. The beak of the crow. The new colt who came to me and leaned against the fence that I might put my hands upon his warm body, and no fear. Also, the words of poets a hundred or hundreds of years dead, their words that would not be held back.
Seven
Oh, the house of denial has thick walls and very small windows, and whoever lives there, little by little, will turn to snow. In those years, I did everything I could do, and I did it in the dark—I mean without understanding. I ran away. I ran away again. Then again, I ran away. They were awfully little, those bees, and maybe frightened, yet unstoppably they flew on somewhere to live their life.
Come, thank you very much. That was a hard one.
And one other poem that seems certainly connected with that one I want to read, still from the new book.
Hurricane
It didn't behave like anything you had ever imagined. The wind tore at the trees. The rain fell for days, slant and hard, the back of the hand to everything. I watched the trees bow and their leaves fall and crawl back into the earth as though that was that.
This was one hurricane I lived through. The other one was of a different sort and lasted longer. Then I felt my own leaves giving up and falling, the back of the hand to everything.
But listen now to what happened to the actual trees. By the end of that summer, they pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs. It was the wrong season, yes, but they couldn't stop. They looked like telephone poles and didn't care. And after the leaves came blossoms.
For some things, there are no wrong seasons, which is what I dream of for me.
I have a couple of very short poems from this book too, so I'll read them. And I'll tell you that a couple of years ago, a few years ago, I broke my arm and my wrist as well, so I couldn't write, I couldn't type. So I wrote real short poems.
After I Fell Down the Stairs at the Golden Temple
For a while, I could not remember some word I was in need of, and I believed, and said, where are you, beloved friend, and what page are you on?
Three Things to Remember
As long as you're dancing, you can break the rules. Sometimes breaking the rules is just extending the rules. Sometimes there are no rules.
All right, I'm going to stop from the book now and read a couple of old poems, because if I don't, I get slapped.
Wild Geese
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.
The Summer Day
Who made the world? Who made the swan and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean, the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down, who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
So now you know I've come to "The Journey," because these seem to be the poems people want to hear.
The Journey
One day you finally knew what you had to do and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice. Though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles—mend my life, each voice cried.
But you didn't stop. You knew what you had to do. Though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible, it was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones.
But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do, determined to save the only life you could save.
Tecumseh
This is a poem I just like to read.
Tecumseh was the chief of the Shawnee who tried to gather the tribes sufficiently to keep his land, their land.
I went down not long ago to the Mad River, under the willows. I knelt and drank from that crumpled flow. Call it what madness you will—there's a sickness worse than the risk of death, and that's forgetting what we should never forget.
Tecumseh lived here. The wounds of the past are ignored but hang on like the litter that snags among the yellow branches—newspapers and plastic bags—after the rains. Where are the Shawnee now? Do you know? Or would you have to write to Washington? And even then, whatever they said, would you believe it?
Sometimes I would like to paint my body red and go out into the glittering snow to die. His name meant Shooting Star. From Mad River country north to the border, he gathered the tribes and armed them one more time. He vowed to keep Ohio, and it took him over twenty years to fail.
After the last and final fighting, it was over, except his body could not be found. It was never found. And you can do whatever you want with that. Say his people came in the black leaves of the night and hauled him to a secret grave, or that he turned into a little boy again and leaped into a birch canoe and went rowing home down the rivers.
Anyway, this much I'm sure of: if we ever meet him, we'll know it. He will still be so angry.
When I Am Among the Trees
I don't know what book it is, but it doesn't really matter.
When I am among the trees, especially the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks, and the pines, they give off such hints of gladness I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself, in which I have goodness and discernment and never hurry through the world but walk slowly and bow often.
Around me, the trees stir in their leaves and call out, stay awhile. The light flows from their branches. And they call again: it's simple, they say, and you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.
I'm Traveling Through
Just a miniature. I can't add, and much less write numbers down correctly.
I'm traveling through beautiful places every day. I'm still looking for God, and I'm still finding him everywhere: in the dust, in the flowerbeds, certainly in the oceans, in the islands that lay in the distance, continents of ice, countries of sand, each with its own set of creatures.
And God, by whatever name—how perfect—to be aboard a ship with maybe a hundred years still in my pocket. But it's late for all of us, and in truth, the only ship there is is the ship we are all on, burning the world as we go.
I am the lucky occupant of a very small living quarters right on the harbor in Provincetown. In the summer—now—my knees feel the cold, so I migrated.
Tides
This is called "Tides," which are, of course, right in front of me all the time.
Every day the sea—blue, gray, green, lavender—pulls away, leaving the harbor's dark, cobbled undercoat, slick and rutted and worm-riddled. The gulls walk there among old whale bones, the white spines of fish. Then, as the hours tick over, far out the faint sheer line turns, rustling over the slack, the outer bars, over the green flats, over the clam beds, slippery logs, barnacle-studded stones, dragging the shining sheets forward, deepening, pushing, wreathing together—wave and seaweed, their piled curvatures spilling over themselves—lapping blue, green, lavender, never resting, not ever, but fashioning shore, continent, everything.
And here you may find me on almost any morning, walking along the shore, so light-footed, so casual.
Blue Iris
Now that I'm free to be myself, who am I? Can't fly, can't run, and see how slowly I walk.
Well, I think I can read books. What's that you're doing, the green-headed fly shouts as it buzzes past. I close the book.
Well, I can write down words like these, softly. What's that you're doing, whispers the wind, pausing in a heap just outside the window. Give me a little time, I say back to its staring, silvery face.
It doesn't happen all of a sudden, you know. Doesn't it, says the wind, and breaks open, releasing distillation of blue iris. And my heart panics not to be, as I long to be, the empty, waiting, pure, speechless receptacle.
Mindfulness
Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light.
It was what I was born for, to look, to listen, to lose myself inside this soft world, to instruct myself over and over in joy and acclamation.
Nor am I talking about the exceptional, the fearful, the dreadful, the very extravagant—but of the ordinary, the common, the very drab, the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar, I say to myself, how can you help but grow wise with such teachings as these, the untrimmable light of the world, the ocean's shine, the prayers that are made out of grass?
Meadowlark
Meadowlark, when you sing it's as if you lay your yellow breast upon mine and say, hello, hello. And are we not of one family in our delight of life? You sing, I listen. Both are necessary if the world is to continue going around, night-heavy, then light-laden.
Though not everyone knows this, or at least not yet, or perhaps has forgotten it in the torn fields, in the terrible debris of progress. You have to run away from the microphone.
The man who has many answers is often found in the theaters of information, where he offers, graciously, his deep findings. While the man who has only questions to comfort himself makes music.
Morning at Blackwater
For years, every morning, I drank from Blackwater Pond. It was flavored with oak leaves and, also, no doubt, the feet of ducks.
And always it assuaged me from the dry bowl of the very far past. What I want to say is that the past is the past, and the present is what your life is, and you are capable of choosing what that will be, darling citizen.
So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing, and put your lips to the world. And live your life.
I wrote two more poems about Percy. I wrote this book, and there's a note in the book in the back that you'll see. I said the poem is obviously derivative of Christopher Smart's poem "For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry." It's an imitation in style, and there are, I think, seven lines that are actually his, except for a change of tense and using Percy instead of Jeoffry. And I'll just put my hand up when you'll know that that's Smart's line, not mine.
For I Will Consider My Dog Percy
For I will consider my dog Percy. For he was made small but brave of heart. For if he met another dog, he would kiss her in kindness. For when he slept, he snored only a little. For he could be silly and noble in the same moment.
For when he spoke, he remembered the trumpet, and when he scratched, he struck the floor like a drum. For he ate only the finest food and drank only the purest of water, yet would nibble at dead fish also. For he came to me impaired and therefore certain of short life, yet thoroughly rejoiced in each day. For he took his medicines without argument.
For he played easily with the neighborhood's bullmastiff. For when he came upon mud, he splashed through it. For he was an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon. For he listened to poems as well as love talk. For when he sniffed, it was as if he were being pleased by every part of the world.
For when he sickened, he rallied as many times as he could. For he was a mixture of gravity and waggery. For we humans can seek self-destruction in ways he never dreamed of. For he took actions both cunning and reckless, yet refused always to offer himself to be admonished.
For his sadness, though without words, was understandable. For there was nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest. For there was nothing brisker than his life when in motion. For he was of the tribe of wolf. For when I went away, he would watch for me at the window.
For he loved me. For he suffered before I found him and never forgot it. For he loved Annie. For in wit, when he lay down to enter sleep, he did not argue about whether or not God made him. For he could fling himself upside down and laugh a true laugh.
For he loved his friend Ricky. For he would dig holes in the sand and then let Ricky lie in them. For often I see his shape in the clouds, and this is a continual blessing.
This one is also about Percy.
Percy Came Back
The first time Percy came back, he was not sailing on a cloud. He was loping along the sand as though he had come a great way.
Percy, I cried out, and reached to him—those white curls—but he was unreachable. As music is present, yet you can't touch it.
Yes, it's all different, he said. You're going to be very surprised. But I wasn't thinking of that. I only wanted to hold him.
Listen, he said, I missed that too. And now you'll be telling stories of my coming back, and they won't be false, but they won't be true, but they'll be real.
And then, as he used to, he said, let's go. And we walked down the beach together.
Life Story
This is from the new book, one of the poems toward the end.
When I lived under the black oaks, I felt I was made of leaves. When I lived by Little Sister Pond, I dreamed I was the feather of the blue heron left on the shore. I was the pond lily, my root delicate as an artery, my face like a star, my happiness brimming.
Later, I was the footsteps that followed the sea. I knew the tides. I knew the ingredients of the wrack. I knew the eider, the red-throated loon with his uplifted beak and his smart eye. I felt I was the tip of the wave, the pearl of water on the eider's glassy back.
No, there's no escaping, nor would I want to escape this outgo, this foot-loosening, this solution to gravity and a single shape. Now I am here. Later I will be there. I will be that small cloud staring down at the water, the one that stalls, that lifts its white legs, that looks like a lamb.
Those of you who know my poems pretty much have probably seen a lot of poems that run very thinly down the page. They're fast, they don't have much punctuation, but mostly they're narrow. And somebody wrote me from some university asking me how I came to write those poems and why didn't I do it so much anymore.
I didn't tell him, but I'm going to tell you. When you want to be a poet and you want to write, I didn't have a lot of money. The cupboard was bare. So I got a job in a printing company. I certainly had not the money to buy that lovely eight-and-a-half-by-eleven paper, a ream of it. But the printing company needed all kinds of sizes, and they had trims, and they said, oh sure, take these trims—four inches wide and eleven inches long. So I made poems to fit the paper.
White Heron Rises Over Blackwater
This is one such poem written in this way.
I wonder what it is that I will accomplish today, if anything can be called that marvelous word. It won't be my kind of work, which is only putting words on a page, the pencil haltingly calling up the light of the world, yet nothing appearing on paper half as bright as the mockingbird's verbal hilarity in the still-unleafed shrub in the churchyard, or the white heron rising over the swamp, over the darkness, his yellow eyes and broad wings wearing the light of the world, in the light of the world.
Ah yes, I see him. He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.
Little Dog's Rhapsody in the Night
And I'm going to conclude, of course, with one more little Percy poem.
He puts his cheek against mine and makes small, expressive sounds. And when I'm awake, or awake enough, he turns upside down, his four paws in the air, and his eyes dark and fervent.
Tell me you love me, he says. Tell me again.
Could there be a sweeter arrangement? Over and over he gets to ask it. I get to tell.
Thank you.