Every hotel room and cottage rental on Sanibel and Captiva Islands had been reserved by Floridians eager to drive from various parts of the state this week for the Eighth Annual Rachel Carson Lecture, sponsored by the Center for Environmental and Sustainability Education at Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers.
The word quickly went beyond the university community, to poetry lovers all over Florida, that Mary Oliver was coming to Sanibel to read poetry and speak at St. Michael and All Angels Church on Friday evening, February 17, 2012.
Sanibel Public Library and Sanibel Island Bookshop put up elaborate displays of Oliver's twenty books of verse, including American Primitive, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1983, and New and Selected Poems which received a National Book Award in 1992.
On Friday, February 10, the news spread again: that the poet had received a medical diagnosis requiring immediate and aggressive treatment, with doctor's orders for no travel or public appearances.
Her Master Class with FGCU students, scheduled for Thursday afternoon, was also cancelled. Oliver has taught poetry at many colleges and universities, including Case Western, Sweet Briar, and Bennington.
She wrote two books about writing poetry (A Poetry Handbook and Rules for the Dance), hoping to avoid any more talking about it, but speaking invitations still come from all over the world, through the Stephen Barclay Agency, which also books authors A. S. Byatt and Terry Tempest Williams.
Alison Hawthorne Deming, poet and member of the Center's Advisory Board, said in an earlier press release that Oliver's broad following "speaks to the power of poetry to make our lives resonate with the more-than-human world that embraces us."
Mary Oliver Is Our Talismanic Poet
Deming continued. "She is our poet of pond and woods, bears and marsh hawks, body and spirit. Her poems transform the argument between amazement and skepticism into the beauty of song."
The argument "between amazement and skepticism," as Deming put it, is never more eloquently transformed than in Mary Oliver's poetry about God. She is constantly finding signs of a higher being in the natural world, from a whale bone to her dog's silky ears:
Faith . . . the engine of my head, my breast bone, my toes.
She continues in a recent poem, "More Evidence," to speak, as Deming does, of poetry as "Music - what so many sentences aspire to be."
In the same poem, she write of feeling as if she could never measure up to her hero:
Emerson.
"How the elegance of his language can make me weep over my own inadequacy."
In younger years, she was reticent about religion, but starting with Thirst, published in 2006, she began to address God directly in her poems, and in "More Evidence" (2010) she said, outright, "Okay, I confess to wanting to make a literature of praise."
Yet even as she publishes poems like "Coming to God: First Days," in which she "kneels in peace, done with all unnecessary things," Mary Oliver is the first to acknowledge, "I don't know who God is, exactly" (Evidence, p. 51).
The unanswerable question is Oliver's forte. She nudges her readers to embrace the mystery of life and the hereafter. Her faith is as strong as her love for her partner of more than forty years, Molly Malone Cook, who died in 2005 after a long illness. Oliver was advised to put her in a nursing home. She would not do that, she told Maria Shriver in a 2011 interview for O Magazine.
I said "Absolutely not." I took her home.
Oliver acknowledged how difficult it was to be a caregiver when she had been accustomed to roaming the woods and beach, each day, composing poems as she went. "I used to go out at night with a flashlight and sit on a little bench right outside the house to scribble poems, because I was too busy taking care of her during the day to walk in the woods."
Although she certainly felt a deep loneliness of grief after Cook's death, Mary Oliver pushed herself onward, as she pushes her readers who feel a similar despair: "Of the two possibilities, take your choice, and live. Refuse all cooperation wth the heart's death."
"Let laughter come to you now and again, that sturdy friend," she writes in Swan (p. 53) and in Thrist, (p. 37) she writes more about an elusive subject:
Praying
" . . . the doorway into thanks, a silence in which another voice may speak."
She also writes of falling in love again, of having her heart broken, "The Uses of Sorrow," and of living in a house she has named "Gratitude," filled with memories of Molly, how she "lay in the sun . . . and friends came, and the dogs played . . . and I put around the room flowers . . . daisies, butter-in-eggs, and everlasting - until like our lives they trembled and shivered everywhere." (Thirst, p. 21)
According to the Concept Statement published by the Center for Environmental and Sustainability Education, Mary Oliver was chosen for the 2012 Rachel Carson Lecture because "her poetry urges readers to reconsider the role of nature in our everyday lives. Her poems rekindle what Rachel Carson calls the 'sense of wonder' for the natural world."
The Center's Director, Peter Blaze Corcoran, noted that the group's annual fundraiser, also filled to capacity for Saturday evening, would proceed as planned, including the opportunity to walk on a Sanibel beach at sunset.
"We hope that you will join us in sending prayers, healing thoughts, and well wishes to Mary Oliver . . . We encourage you to spend time reading her poetry aloud."
SOURCES
"Difficult News Regarding Mary Oliver," Press Release, Center for Environmental and Sustainability Education, February 10, 2012.
from "More Evidence," Swan: Poems and Prose Poems, p. 50.
"Maria Shriver interviews Mary Oliver," Beacon Broadside, March 15, 2011.
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