Mary Oliver - Weebly
Name_______________________ Mr. Moran
Mary Oliver
B. 1935
Date____________ English 9
"To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work," writes Mary Oliver in a prose poem entitled "Yes! No!" In ten published books of poetry, Oliver conveys a sense of the grace and serenity that can be earned if we actively work at noticing and honoring our connection to the natural world. Her poetry has been noticed and honored as she has become what critic Stephen Dobyns called "one of our very best poets." She won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for American Primitive 91983) and the 1992 National Book Award for poetry for New and Selected Poems (1992).
Born in Cleveland and educated at Ohio State University and Vassar, Oliver has lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts, for more than thirty years. She explains in Sierra magazine (November/December 1991) that one of the reasons she continues to live there is that "things are by now so familiar that I have no choice but to look deeper, and deeper, into the ordinary." Her process in making a poem is to start with intense observation of "the particulars of the world," accomplished on long walks with her dog on the Cape Cod dunes, and then to let her mind "swing out slowly to great, exciting thoughts."
In Sierra she goes on to explain, "Before we move from recklessness into responsibility, from selfishness to a decent happiness, we must want to save our world. And in order to save the world, we must learn to love it--and in order to love it we must become familiar with it again. That is where my work begins, and why I keep walking, and looking." The following poem, from American Primitive, shows that for Oliver, learning to love the world starts with learning to trust and love one's own body, its appetites and its wildness. Because mortality is a frequent theme of hers, the poem can also be read as an injunction to love life fiercely in its particulars while we are alive.
Name_______________________ Mr. Moran
The Honey Tree
And so at last I climbed the honey tree, ate chunks of pure light, ate the bodies of bees that could not get out of my way, ate the dark hair of the leaves, the rippling bark, the heartwood. Such frenzy! But joy does that, I'm told, in the beginning. Later, maybe, I'll come here only sometimes and with a middling hunger. But now I climb like a snake, I clamber like a bear to the nuzzling place, to the light salvaged by the thighs of bees and racked up in the body of the tree. Oh, anyone can see how I love myself at last! how I love the world! climbing by day or night in the wind, in the leaves, kneeling at the secret rip, the cords of my body stretching and singing in the heaven of appetite.
Date____________ English 9
................
................
In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.
To fulfill the demand for quickly locating and searching documents.
It is intelligent file search solution for home and business.