Volume 4, No. 19: (Re)Reading Mary Oliver

on seeing familiar wor(l)ds anew

Greetings, book and treat people! I finally got a wetsuit and I have been to my beloved lake three times so far since May 1st. The water is cold, cold, cold, and utterly glorious. I could certainly plunge in without a wetsuit, but with one, I can stay in the water for so much longer, swim far out into the middle of the lake. I’ll be swimming into November this year. Or maybe December!

Regarding my big announcement last week: thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who has subscribed or pledged to subscribe if/when I switch over to Ghost. I don’t know how to explain how much your support means to me.

Something one reader said when they became a paying subscriber really resonated with me, and I want to share it with you. They said that, when they learned paying $5/month would not only mean that they would be able to keep reading the newsletter, but that people who couldn’t afford $5/month would also be able to continue reading it, it changed how they thought about that $5/month.

Capitalism wants me to give you certain kinds of incentives so that you’ll pay me for my work. Essentially, capitalism wants me to create and uphold access barriers. It wants me to reward whoever can pay. It’s a basic business model, right? Shell out some cash, receive a coffee, a book, a paywalled article. I get it. I need to pay my mortgage and my electric bill. I need to buy olive oil and dog food. I am not going to overthrow capitalism with this newsletter. I’m asking you to pay for it precisely because we live in capitalism. I’m simply hoping that if you’re one of the people who can afford it, if you will not notice $5 leaving your bank account every month, you’ll look at those five dollars the way I do—as something that does a little bit of good in the world.

Another reader, a friend of mine who runs a CSA farm, mentioned to me that the “pay if you can, and don’t pay if you can’t” model is how many farms (including hers) are able to offer subsidized CSA shares. Farmers ask those who can pay more to pay more, and that allows people who can’t pay more to pay less (or nothing at all). Sliding scale payment models aren’t perfect, but until we dismantle capitalism, they’re what we have. In that spirit, there’s now an option for you to pay any amount above $50/year for Books & Bakes. For $120/year ($10/month), I’ll send you a handwritten thank you note and a personalized book rec!

Lastly, I forgot to mention last week that there is one perk that all paying subscribers get: a downloadable, customizable template of my reading spreadsheet! I’m a data nerd so you know it’s good. There’s a whole page of charts, tabs for various reading challenges, a Read the World tracker, author catalogues, and more.

I’m not anywhere close to reaching my goal yet, but I’m hoping you’ll help me get there. Thank you, as always, for reading, and for being here. Let’s talk about Mary Oliver!

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The Book

Mary Oliver is a foundational poet for me. I have loved her work since I was a teenager. There is so much of it, though, and I have not read nearly all of it! So I decided I would read one Mary Oliver book every month this year. This project has blossomed into a full-blown Year of Mary, and it is rewiring my brain.

So far I have read five of her books, as well as Wild & Precious, a book of and about her that includes many of her poems. It’s one of my favorite books of the year so far, by the way, and I have many thousands of words to share about it, but in the meantime, my friend Rosamond wrote a beautiful review.

Reading Mary Oliver in the midst of poetry school, in the midst of my own coming-into-being-a-poet, has been revelatory and transcendent. I am seeing her in ways I have never seen her before. Her work is showing me things about myself and the world I did not know were there before. It’s a dizzying and sometimes disorienting experience of wonder. Here’s my first official Year of Mary review, with many, many more to come.

At Blackwater Pond by Mary Oliver (Poetry, 2006)

This is a short audiobook (one hour) in which Mary Oliver reads 40 of her favorite poems. The selections span her career from Dream Work (1986) through New and Selected Poems: Volume 2 (2005). I listened to it while walking in the springtime woods around my house, absorbing the poems, watching the world, learning how to look.

Mary’s reading voice is deliberate and musical. I don’t usually like this kind of poetry narration, but it did not bother me here. I loved listening to her read. She’s soft and focused, but never in a haughty, formal way. It feels more like she’s giving each one of her poems the serious attention they deserve.

She reads some of her most famous poems, as well as some of my most beloved ones. I’d read almost all of them before—some of them many, many times. As I was listening, I was thinking about something Ross Gay said about Mary in Wild & Precious: “She’s mainly talking about death.” I felt this so acutely listening to these poems that she selected, one about death and then another about death, and then another. In poem after poem, she looks at it, wonders about it, grieves it, looks at it some more. In poem after poem, she reminds herself that she and everything on this earth will die, so pay attention. If you spend more than three minutes with her poetry, you will see that death is everywhere, and you will also see that her obsession with death is an obsession with life, which, of course, makes me think of Martyr!.

One of the poems in this collection is ‘When Death Comes’, a poem that I and many other people love. It ends like this: “I don’t want to end up having simply visited this world.” This is a poem I’ve read dozens of times, but as I listened to her read it, my understanding of it changed. I used to think that the last line, about not wanting to die only having visited the world, was simple: an expression of wanting to be fully present, to look closely, to be, as she says earlier in the poem, “a bride married to amazement.”

But what are any of us but visitors to this world? We’re born, we live, we die. No one gets to stay. What does it mean to not want to be a visitor in a place where, by definition, you cannot remain forever? I used to think Mary Oliver was a poet of the natural world, only. A poet of the ponds and the herons, the roses and the fields. I’m not saying she isn’t. But when she says she doesn’t want to have lived in this world only as a visitor, I think she’s saying more than “I want to have paid good attention all my life.” I think she’s expressing a desire to be a part of the world’s making and remaking. To not only look at the world, but to be of the world. If you are not a visitor, than you are at home. And being at home, I think, means allowing yourself to both change and be changed by the world.

I listened to this book right after finishing one of Mary Oliver’s nonfiction craft books, A Poetry Handbook (it’s wonderful and quite prickly, I loved it). In that book, she talks about how it would often take her 40 or 50 drafts to finish a poem. So I was walking around in the woods, looking at the unfurling beech leaves and the violets, listening to her read, thinking about her walking around in her woods, jotting down notes. I was imagining her scribbling ideas in her notebook, things like: “saw a beautiful owl, thought about death,” or “the shape of these shells is WILD,” or “goldenrod is so wise,” or “another dead snake in the road,” and then taking those scraps home and turning them into poems.

I know I’m just imagining what her writing life was like, but who cares. It was such a joy to think about her craft while listening to these poems. It was a joy to think about how an ordinary moment might have sparked into something that became a poem. I think this is part of why her work speaks so deeply to so many of us. You can see those sparks in the finished poems. When she names a poem ‘Goldenrod’ or when she begins one with “This morning…” or “On a walk,” she’s makes her process visible. You can see the moment that made the poem. You can see her being at home—not being a visitor in this world.

The Beyond

Cooking

In a shocking twist, I have baked two delicious treats in the last two weeks, both thanks to Yossy Arefi! I made the chocolate chip cookies from her latest book Snacking Bakes and they are wonderful. I also made this delicious carrot cake with the last of my winter carrots. The lemon glaze gives it a springy vibe.

Recent Audiobooks

I finally listened to A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib and it was just as brilliant as everyone said it would be. Kai Cheng Thom’s 2019 essay collection I Hope We Choose Love just came out as an audiobook, narrated by the always-fantastic Nicky Endres! So I reread it on audio. It’s a must-read. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

During the first wave of violent arrests and police brutality against students protesting genocide, I listened to Abolitionist Intimacies by EL Jones, partly because I was too angry to focus on anything else. It’s a collection of essays, poetry, snippets, conversations, and meditations about incarceration and abolition in Canada. I highly recommend it.

I’m currently listening to Creep by Myriam Gurba, which is very good. Next up is Dear Wendy by Ann Zhao, which fulfills the asexual protagonist prompt for Queer Your Year.

Further Reading

What’s your favorite Mary Oliver poem? You might know by now that I don’t do favorites, but here are a few that I’ve been into recently:

• What I Have Learned So Far

• Of The Empire

• Humpbacks

The Bookshelf

Around the Internet

It’s been a long time since I did a link roundup like this, so here are some highlights from the last few months. I reviewed Bad Habit for BookPage. I love this book so much. Please read it! On Book Riot, I wrote about what it’s been like reflecting on every book I read, and about how reading picture books has helped me embrace seasonal reading. I also made some fun lists: genre-blending nonfiction and books that twist genre into unrecognizable shapes. On AudioFile, I wrote about exuberant audiobooks (any excuse to write about Martyr!) and some of my favorite recent nonfiction.

A Taste of the Commonplace

In honor of Mary Oliver, I searched my commonplace book for quotes tagged with ‘death’ and found this stunning poem by Carl Phillips. This is especially fitting because I’ve been reading a lot of Carl Phillips for poetry school. It’s from his 2019 collection Wild is the Wind.

Gold Leaf

To lift, without ever asking what animal exactly it once belonged to,
the socketed helmet that what’s left of the skull equals
up to your face, to hold it there, mask-like, to look through it until
looking through it means looking back, back through the skull,
into the self that is partly the animal you’ve always wanted to be,
that—depending—fear has prevented or rescued you from becoming,
to know utterly what you’ll never be, to understand in doing so
what you are, and to say no to it, not to who you are, to say no to despair.

And Beauty

First, some things I’ve been reading and thinking about and doing and dreaming:

• Ruby Hamad wrote a brilliant critique of and response to Zadie’s Smith’s recent New Yorker essay criticizing students protesting genocide.

• These letters written back and forth between George Abraham and Sarah Aziza in ‘Palestine Is Everywhere, and It Is Making Us More Free’ are gorgeous and illuminating.

• Margaret Killjoy on May Day.

• Gaza Solidarity Sticker Packs from Justseeds.

• Protests can be serve many purposes and be many things at once.

• This book just came out and I can’t wait to read it! This book is out in August and I can’t even explain to you how excited I am! This book is out in September and I can’t wait to read it! This book came out yesterday and two trusted bookish friends told me in separate, non-coordinated DMs that I must read it immediately. To quote: “it’s so earnest and gorgeous and queer - all the Laura vibes!!” and “the author is earnest in some really Laura ways.” What a joy to be bookishly known. It’s at the top of the audio queue.

As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: I read a picture book about dandelions this week. Mary Oliver wrote poems about the most banal beauties because she knew, of course, that they were not banal. Have you ever looked at a dandelion? They are sort of unreasonably beautiful.

One more time, if you’ve made it all the way down here: here is where you can subscribe to keep Books & Bakes going, and here is where you can pledge your support, to do the same. Catch you next week, bookish friends!