Response 6: Blue Iris

I'm not sure if I could identify a Mary Oliver poem just by looking at it, but there's a good chance I could. The subject matter, for one, is a good tip off, as well as the way she structures the poems on the page. The stanzas are mostly short, or the poem is a series of short paragraphs. The form of the poems, as well as the fact that they don't rhyme, helps to place the author somewhere in time. In other words, though the poet is a nature writer, I know I'm not reading Emily Dickinson.

The poetry here is highly descriptive in a visual and tactile sense. A short list of phrases that made me either feel or see what Oliver is describing:
"the mossy shadows, under the trees" p.5
"gnaw through the darkness, like wolves through bones" p.15
"that mud-hive, that gas-sponge, that reeking leaf-yard" p.22
"the green fists of the peonies" p.36
"white flowers that open all summer, sticky and untidy" p.50
on page 61, the description of a fallen log now filled with honey from bees.
on page 64, frozen goldenrods "waiting, in their glass suits, to fall."

Of course this kind of description is wonderful, and especially important to poetry, where every word needs to have the right weight, meaning, cadence, etc. Oliver has got the knack for this.

What really grabs me about her poems, though, is the way she employs nature as a way of looking at ourselves (and, of course, at nature). Hamlet says that the purpose of art is to hold, as it were, the mirror up to nature. Through her poetry, Oliver quite literally holds the mirror up to nature in two ways: nature as in Nature, the green stuff and the animals and ponds; and nature as in human nature, as in our own very human thoughts about the self and its relationship to the green world. Some of the more haunting (for me) examples of this come from "Some Questions You Might Ask." (page 9)

In "Some Questions" Oliver addresses a question I've long struggled with, and that is why we don't think of animals or trees or rocks as having souls. Darwin says that we don't like to think of animals as our equals because we have made them our slaves. The Japanese, however, attach great importance to prominent geographic features, saying that they have kami or god-nature. Mt. Fuji, impressive old trees, and waterfalls all have kami according to the Shinto system, but under the Buddhist system, animals are relegated to the level of being just below human-hood and above starving ghost-hood. The subject is fraught. Oliver deals with it by saying the moose's face is just as sad as Jesus's, and that she doesn't understand why she should have a soul if the anteater, who loves her children, does not.

Which brings me to the observation that poetry, or at least Oliver's poetry, is primarily about feelings. She does not, cannot, know if the anteater feels love, or if the moose feels sadness. But scientific consideration does not have a place in her poetry. She even says, in "The Oak Tree at the Entrance to Blackwater Pond," that she's tired of hearing about nitrogens returning to the soil after a tree dies and decays, because she loved the tree. As much as I love science, I have to say, fair enough. The following does not make for a good poem:

Nitrogen
is a component of
amino acids, proteins,
and nucleic acids and
is a crucial and
often limiting
plant nutrient

(taken from page 1197 of the Campbell-Reece 7th edition Biology text)

I have to wonder if this kind of nature writing is therefore selfish. If branding animals with human emotions is alright. I try not to do it in my own writing, but it happens... and I never feel as if I'm anthropomorphizing with an agenda other than to strengthen the piece. In poetry, an animal with a sad-like-Jesus face can be the entire piece.

It's the absences I'm really fascinated by, the negative space. Oliver captures some of this in her final poem, "Roses, Late Summer." She says that roses do not ask how long they have to roses, nor do they ask other "foolish question(s)." (p. 73) What the roses don't do becomes the crux of this piece, by hinting at what kinds of foolish questions we ask.