“Mary Oliver: Poet of the Natural World” Gives a Picture of the Famed Poet

The following is a guest post by Barbara Bair, historian in the Library’s Manuscript Division, to coincide with the second annual Mary Oliver Memorial Reading on Thursday, May 29th, featuring bestselling poet and writer Aimee Nezhukumatathil with emerging poets Ariana Benson and Robin Walter. Tickets are still available!

More than five years since her passing, Mary Oliver (1935-2019) remains one of the bestselling poets of our time. Her poetry and essays of the natural world are alive in libraries and bookstores, social media, poetry readings and classrooms across the country. Her work lives as well in the minds of countless poetry fans as they walk along the seashore, pause beside a pond, look up into the sky or move along their neighborhood sidewalks or in urban backyards.

The Library’s “Mary Oliver: Poet of the Natural World” display, in the Great Hall of the Thomas Jefferson Building until May 30th, charts Oliver’s close affinity with nature beginning in childhood, and her understanding of nature as an abiding source of solace and inspiration as an adult. All the objects on view are from the Mary Oliver Papers collection in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress.

Mary Oliver frequently described poetry as a form of prayer, and she believed that the reading and sharing of poetry was a matter of devotion. The display shows her living a devoted life in her commitment to those close to her, in the discipline she gave to her poetry and writing and in her keen observation of the vibrant natural world she witnessed all around her. The display spans natural habitats from semi-rural Ohio, where Oliver was born, to the sands and marshlands of Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she lived for most of her adulthood.

As a child and teenager, Oliver grew up playing beside a lively stream and feeding birds from her hands. She carried Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” in her day pack and disappeared into the woods to read poetry, and she engaged in what would be her lifelong love of bird-watching. The exhibit includes one of her bird-sighting notebooks and a checklist of birds she saw in her lifetime, a snapshot of a swan, stray feathers she collected along her walks and cover art designed for her collection “Owls and Other Fantasies” (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003)—a book that featured illustrations of feathers on its pages.

Viewers of the exhibit see Oliver mature from sun-dazzled youth into a professor and the Pulitzer-Prize winning poet of “American Primitive” (Boston: Little, Brown, 1983), and finally as a resident—with her partner, the photographer and literary agent Molly Malone Cook—of the artistic community of Provincetown, where life included joyous boating on the water and quiet sojourns to nearby Blackwater Pond.

A typed draft manuscript version of Oliver’s poem “Morning at Blackwater” is featured in the display. In it, Oliver heralds the magic hour of dawn, when “the usual half-miracles begin.” Light from the rising sun transforms the body and the sky, and birds and insects and the rustling leaves of the trees respond to the new day in chorus. It is another morning, another transformation, another poem, eliciting affirmation, making happiness enter “the air as fragrance,” infusing all with “the sweet odor of prayer.” (“Morning at Blackwater,” draft, Mary Oliver Papers, Manuscript Division, Box 34).

The kind of prayer and devotion Oliver found in nature and poetry were reinforced in other ways as well. When Molly Malone Cook grew ill and died of cancer, Oliver coped with loss and grief by immersing herself in the miraculous messages of renewal offered by natural elements. She also turned to psalms in the Episcopal “Book of Common Prayer” and love poems of the Persian poet Rumi, as compiled in an edition created by her friend and fellow naturalist poet Coleman Barks (“A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings,” 2006). She kept her copies of these devotional books on her writing desk near her typewriter, below a window.

These two books from her personal collection are on view in the display, along with Oliver’s personal correspondence with dancer and potter Paulus Berensohn about her joy in returning to Provincetown to live full time and her loss of Molly. There are also photographs of Oliver with Molly, with Berensohn, with her beloved dog Percy—subject of many poems and the positive source of his own seemingly supernatural influence—and of Oliver in the natural settings where she thrived, living her “wild and precious life.”