Was mary oliver gay

‘You must not ever deliver anyone else the responsibility for your life’

Mary Oliver, U S poet, Pulitzer prize winner and inspiring human being, died on 17th January aged 83. One of her most famous poems, “Wild Geese” begins:

‘You do not acquire to be good.

You act not have to stroll on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.’

You do not have to be excellent – Every time I read that sentence, my shoulders drop in relief. For over 12 years now, my intention has been to become more ‘real,’ rather than ‘good’ and for the last 5 years the poems of Mary Oliver possess kept me company. Fancy many others, I’ve been brought up to be ‘good’ and not to attend to my needs or pay attention to what I want in life. As a product, I would not seek directly for what I wanted and often didn’t even know what I wanted. Instead my tendency was towards the ‘passive aggressive’ approach: ‘I won’t tell you what I need but I’ll build it clear how let down I am that you didn’t work it out through ESP and perform it anyway.’

But I’m changing!

Mary Oliver’s poem, ‘The Journey’ is that call to listen to yourself. It begins:

‘One da

As a teenager, Oliver had corresponded with Norma Millay, the sister of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, who maintained Steeplechase, Edna’s estate in Austerlitz, Recent York. The morning after high university graduation, Oliver left home for Steeplechase, where she helped organize Edna’s papers and where she would live on and off for the next half-dozen years. She attended Ohio State University and Vassar College but did not graduate, eventually moving to Greenwich Village. However, she remained a frequent visitor at Steeplechase.

On one of those visits in the belated 1950s, Oliver met Village Voice photographer Mary Malone Boil, who was at Steeplechase to hold pictures. It was love at first sight. Oliver moved to Provincetown in 1964 to dwell with Cook, who operated the first photography gallery on the East Coast, and their affair lasted for over forty years, until Cook’s death in 2005. In an appreciation written about her and the bookstore that she ran, movie director and Provincetown denizen John Waters described Cook as “beautiful and grumpy and smart” in his book Shock Value: A Tasteful Publication about Bad Taste (1981). Cook’s presence informed some of Oliver’s poems, but it was n

Published in:September-October 2023 issue.

MARY OLIVER (1935–2019) was famously private and accustomed to her ways of active as a poet, writing often about how she walked with pad and pen at dawn every day through the woods and along the shoreline of Provincetown, and later in Hobe Sound, Florida. Years ago, when I was an editor at Country Living magazine, a glossy Hearst title, I wanted to have her contribute a personal essay. Working through her publisher, I was told that Oliver was wary of a magazine so commercial and that she didn’t use the fax (yes, I’m dating myself) and wouldn’t respond to email. Eventually, I was told that she would write a piece, but insisted on hand-delivering the finished essay to me at New York’s 92nd Street Y, where she was scheduled to make an appearance.

Prior to the reading, amid a crowd of Birkenstock-clad, gray-haired fans with PBS tote bags, young lesbians sporting multi-colored hair, and other fans of all ages and persuasions, she graciously handed me a sealed envelope. She shook my hand and said with genuine modesty: “I hope that what I wrote is good enough.”

As a longtime reader of hers, I felt as if Sappho herself had waded from

Much has been written about poet Mary Oliverin the week since her death last Thursday.

Describedas "far and away, [America's] best-selling poet," Mary Oliver has been compared to Emily Dickinson, with whom she shared an affinity for solitude and inner monologues. Also, like Dickinson's poetry, Oliver's combines dark introspection with joyous release.

The poetry of Mary Oliver is also recognizable and celebrated for its clear and poignant observances of the natural earth. Indeed, according to the 1983 Chronology of American Literature, one of Oliver's collection of poems, American Primitive, "presents a new gentle of Romanticismthat refuses to acknowledge boundaries between nature and the observing self."

Oliver's creativity was stirred by essence, and, as an avid walker, she often pursued inspiration on foot. Her poems are filled with imagery from her daily walks near her residence in New England: shore birds, rain snakes, the phases of the celestial, and humpback whales. In Long Life, a collection of essays, she says, "[I] go off to my woods, my ponds, my sun-filled harbor, no more than a blue comma on the map of the world but, to me, the emblem of everything."

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