How the Poet Mary Oliver was “Saved by the Beauty of the World”
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Filmmaker Sasha Waters wasn’t shy when asked at the National Book Festival about the legacy of her latest documentary subject, the poet Mary Oliver: “I think we’re going to think of her as the (Walt) Whitman of the 20th century.”
That’s an almost impossible standard, as Whitman became synonymous with the American spirit in the late 19th century with poems such as “I Hear America Singing,” “Song of Myself,” “O Captain! My Captain!” and “I Sing the Body Electric.” He has since become an iconic American personality of the age, along with the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain and Frederick Douglass.
But Oliver, who adored Whitman’s work, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for her rapturous odes to nature and our connection to it. She was adored about as much as any poet since Whitman when she died, at 83, in 2019.
She was the nation’s bestselling poet in her late career, quotes from her most famous poems still circulate widely on social media and you can find her work in any bookstore. One of her poems, “Morning at Great Pond,” is featured in the Library’s new exhibit, “The Declaration’s Promise,” showcased alongside that of Whitman and a handful of others as representations of the nation’s highest artistic achievements.
And Waters’ new documentary, “Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World,” is airing on PBS stations across the country as part of its American Masters series. It draws heavily on the Library’s Mary Oliver Papers, a vast collection of some 40,000 items, including her books of poetry, essays and correspondence, plus more than 100 notebooks from her solitary walks in nature.
The documentary also demonstrates how her work is supposed to be heard, with readings by fans such as television host Stephen Colbert, actor Steve Buscemi and actress Helena Bonham Carter.
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?” she asked at the end of one of her most famous poems, “The Summer Day,” an ode to the joy of just being alive. It comes as close as anything to encapsulating her world view.
She wrote about ponds and sunsets and wild geese and white flowers and dogfish and goldfinches in the field of thistles and hungry bears in the autumn. She wrote in such a way as to make her sense of awe and wonder infectious.
“Joy is not made to be a crumb,” she wrote in “Don’t Hesitate.”
This, from a shy and quiet child.
She was born into what she described as a dysfunctional household during the Depression in a suburb of Cleveland. It was not a place anyone thought of as a paradise of nature. Still, she was drawn to the forests and the ponds and streams, wandering into the nearby woods as a child to escape her unhappy home life. There, she built little huts made of leaves and sticks.
She was interested in poetry early (school, not so much) and while still a teen wrote to the sister of the late poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, asking if she could visit Millay’s house in Austerlitz, New York. Her admiration was such that the sister eventually hired Oliver to help organize the poet’s papers, a project that took years. While in Austerlitz, Oliver met Molly Malone Cook, a staff photographer at The Village Voice, later a gallery and bookstore owner, and always the love of her life.
“Molly was a very strong character, so Molly gave her the belief that she was a great, great talent and was going to succeed in everything,” said John Waters, the avant-garde filmmaker and a longtime friend of the couple (he’s no relation to Sasha Waters), in the documentary.
The pair often struggled to make ends meet — Cook acted as Oliver’s agent, while Oliver taught at a couple of universities — before Oliver’s work began to achieve wide popularity in the 1970s and 1980s. The couple was a fixture in tiny Provincetown, Massachusetts (a summer resort on Cape Cod), for decades.
For a person who never sought out the spotlight and was protective of her privacy, her popularity was a surprising turn and was surprisingly welcomed.
“She was very shy, then blew up to be extremely famous, particularly for a poet, and really sort of enjoyed it,” Sasha Waters said at the festival, in an onstage conversation with book critic Ron Charles.
Oliver wasn’t all that shy and retiring anymore, John Waters, one of the liveliest voices in the documentary, playfully noted. She smoked cigarettes one after another, did not suffer fools gladly and was extremely dedicated to her students. “A Poetry Handbook,” a guide she wrote in the early 1990s, become a staple of the craft.
After Molly died in 2005, Oliver went through a difficult time, including a stint attending Alcoholics Anonymous. Later, on camera, she told journalist Maria Shriver that she had endured sexual abuse as a child and it had made her want to be “invisible” for so much of her life.
It was that sort of unadorned honesty, and bravery, that made her work so relatable to so many for so long.
“She really spoke to people,” John Waters said.
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