Mary Oliver is one of the most beloved and reviled poets in the English language. While legions of readers find her work uniquely legible and inspirational, fellow poets tend to dismiss it as shallow and sentimental. Maggie Millner, a poet herself, examines this reputational dichotomy and finds revelation in Oliver’s relationship with shame:
Oliver’s detractors, pro- and anti-lyric alike, show all the classic symptoms of this sort of shame: a discomfort with her work’s digestibility, earnestness, and apparent disinterest in other people—and a fear about what the popularity of such work might say about them. Her commercial success alone seems to imply her complicity in American capitalism; could a true devotee of observation and stillness—someone aspiring to be the “tiniest nail in the house of the universe”—really have churned out such a large and lucrative corpus? And why did she seem not to know about modernism?
It was easy to detect shame in the contempt of Oliver’s critics, but it hadn’t occurred to me to diagnose it in the author herself: such a distinctly social emotion seemed unlikely to have inspired so many poems about the nonhuman world. Yet as I revisited her work, what struck me again and again was the tinge of social difference that suffuses her best poetry. Oliver’s own childhood was intensely lonely, marred by abuse and neglect that she referred to in interviews but treated only obliquely in her poems. It was this early trauma, she said, that first sent her both out of doors and into books. “Oh, I wanted // to be easy / in the peopled kingdoms, / to take my place there, / but there was none // that I could find / shaped like me,” she writes in a poem I love called “Trilliums.” Her more boring poems might pretend to a state of prelapsarian innocence, but the most vivid ones unfold in the fallen world inhabited by this highly self-conscious speaker, who is dogged by feelings of shame and unbelonging. As Oliver writes in “The Moths”: “I was always running around, looking / at this and that. // If I stopped / the pain / was unbearable.” What my favorite Oliver poems seem to dramatize, I realized gradually, is not a successful defection from human society but a deeply moving failure to leave it.
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Good Riddance To ‘The Best American Poetry’
“If ‘The Best American Poetry’ captures ‘the zeitgeist of the current attitudes in American poetry,’ we should be asking: Why are those attitudes so f****d up?”
Maximalisma
“A professor endeavors to separate treasure from trash—before her children have to do it for her.”
In Defense of Despair
“The feeling is most commonly framed as an end point, a level of despondency that cannot be overcome. But it doesn’t have to be.”
