Response 6: Blue Iris

Before reading this collection, I never really "got" Mary Oliver.  I mean, what was all the hubbub about?  To me she seemed outdated, stuck in the past, her writing too simplistic and somewhat romantic, pretty words with no depth, save spiritual thought.  I always wondered what I was supposed to be looking for, and after reading the first couple poems in this book, I still didn't get it, was worried that there was something wrong with me or something wrong with the world for seeing something in her that wasn't relevant today, with our complicated poetry, or at least complicated ideas behind it.  But when I got to Black Oaks, it started to sink in.  It started to pelt me like heavy rain.

Blue Iris has, in a way, opened my eyes to a new way of writing poetry.  Oliver strikes me as a very complicated persona attempting to mask itself with uncomplicated words--slow, methodical sentences revealing little more than the obvious, taking us action by action and thought by thought, never over-saturating the message, sometimes burying it under the dirt and making me dig for it, making me wonder if it's even in there.  I find her incredibly subtle.  Her writing, to me, is simple and accessible, the way Billy Collins is simple and accessible--though I always found Collins entertaining, whereas Oliver had a tendency to bore me.  What was she getting at, exactly?  What was new or fresh about any of this?  Maybe I was trying too hard.

I'll start with Black Oaks.  Granted, the tone in this poem was a little more conversational than usual, but the formula was the same--simple, paced descriptions--except here, I started to see something more than simplicity, nice little words and images like "thick bodies ruckled with lichen" and "shining green hair."  Okay, so that's something, but where's the value in this?  You love trees, Mary Oliver.  Black oaks.  You don't want to leave them.  Alright.  Why is this important?

To tell the truth, I don't want to let go of the wrists

of idleness, I don't want to sell my life for money,

I don't even want to come in out of the rain.

Whoa.  To tell the truth, indeed.  To tell the truth, I had to read those last three lines about fifteen times before the weighty chill of honesty shook loose from my bones.  She's still subtle, but at the same time, she's not hiding anything here.  For the first time, I'm noticing she's actually saying something.

And there you have it--I'm seduced by Mary Oliver.  It might not pan out as a lengthy affair, but it's still worth noting. I have started to notice things in her subtlety.  Great words like "blank blaze," "dumb dazzle," "glittering pandemonium."  I've become quite enamored with "The Oak Tree at the Entrance to Blackwater Pond"--its message of loss, of death, finality; the line "the storm / laid one lean yellow wand against it, smoking it open / to its rosy heart."  Spectacular.

And yet, there are moments when I'm still underwhelmed.  Poems that don't grab at me, don't seem to say anything they're not saying.  But the ones that do grab me have made me look closer, have made me err on the side of "maybe I'm missing something" as opposed to "maybe she's missing something."  I appreciate her approach to writing about nature--her way of personifying flowers, making them characters; her way of weaving in memories, of breaking down her own actions into meaningful lines, of listing every characteristic or interpretation of a thing, a moment, and calculating the sum.

"Freshen the Flowers, She Said" is perhaps for me the summation of Oliver's style or approach to nature, to writing--the simplicity and subtle conclusion, the way she prepares these flowers, carefully, methodically, simply, as though she is preparing a poem.  Though she may be a very slow writer, for all I know, the following is the feeling I get while reading, the way I imagine her describing her process of writing a poem, and what comes out of it:

It took, to do this,

perhaps fifteen minutes.

Fifteen minutes of music

with nothing playing.

I know Oliver didn't write about these, but they're my favorite, so here goes:

Pansies

Forget that they're small, soft, forgettable.
The fact that their name has become
a derogatory term for weakness
perplexes me.

I have never associated weakness
with an army;
with stolid black eyes
bent to the glare of sunlight;
traveling alone
without water--
flesh bruised purple and yellow,
knuckled through concrete.