This week’s letter is written by Krista. Dear friends, I’ll never forget the text I received from our producer on my way to interview Mary Oliver in 2015, airing again this week. “She wants to smoke as you talk. Are you ok with that?” Was there really any way I would say no? I had met Mary once before, briefly, at an event where she read from her poetry. With some trepidation and due reverence, I approached her and asked if she would ever possibly consider a radio conversation with me. She smiled and said, in a tone that invited no negotiation, “I don’t give interviews any more. Except to my six-year-old neighbor.” I don’t always take no for an answer, but I did lose hope that this would happen. Then years later, out of the blue, a mutual colleague brought it into being. Life had moved forward, as it does. It was now composed of ingredients, as it always is, that neither she nor I would have been able to imagine. Her beloved life partner had died. She was living in Florida, no longer the Cape Cod that leapt off the page of so many of her poems across decades. I sat with her in Florida, but it’s in that Cape landscape of dune and salt that I will forever see Mary Oliver in my mind’s eye, traipsing while holding her ever-open notebook in one hand. Now, in my mind’s eye, she’s sometimes holding a cigarette in the other hand, too. As we spoke, she inhaled deeply between words that dropped like jewels. She was wearing a New England Patriots sweatshirt. She was frank about doing this kind of thing — an interview — with a large heap of unease. You’ll hear her exclaim at the end, like a child who’s been approved to go outside and play, “I’m free! I’m free!” Before we got to that point, though, she was present and open in ways that took my breath away: with her surprising memory of how “Wild Geese,” a poem that has saved lives, was born through an exercise in honing form; her matter-of-fact telling of the cancer she’d struggled with very privately; her reaction to a child reading her exquisite poem “The Summer Day.” This was a human who had been deeply wounded in childhood. Her wounds and scars threaded between the lines of her poetry. Sitting across from her, they were palpable, as was the way she had survived. She met and transfigured it all through her fierce, chosen way of walking through the world: looking up and around, passionately seeing, “listening convivially.” She let her wounds and her scars power a defiant joy in living beings and precise, living words. She treated her life as a kind of prayer. “I was saved by the beauty of the world,” she said to me. And the beauty of the world was honored in the devotion of her attention. Nothing less than the beauty of the world has become more present, more redemptive, for more of us in the encounter with her poetry. I believe that this had something to do, too, with how she resisted any appearance of ethereal saintliness, any proximity of a pedestal to stand on, which we are wont to hand someone of such talent. The smoking, the New England Patriots sweatshirt — they are a reason, or manifestations of a reason, this woman could write about flowers and the sea, about her beloved dogs, about God, and never veer for a second into sentimentality or any superficial idealizing. Her beautiful, precise words evoked both what we’re up against and what we’re given to delight in nevertheless, in this world that vibrates always and explodes sometimes with the force of its aliveness. We’re in yet another moment in the life of the world where we might unsee the beauty or imagine it overshadowed, defeated, or simply less powerful than what would steal it from us, blot it out. What a gift to re-summon Mary Oliver’s presence for this time. I hope you feel that, too. |
