You Do Not Have To Be Good (But It Helps) - A Look At Mary Oliver

dmittedly, I'm predisposed to disliking "nature poems." Maybe it's because many are facile, easy to write, and make the kinds of observations only an idiot needs spelled out in poetry. It's not that a good nature poem can't be written - it's just that so many poets have written poor ones.

So I'm in a bit of a quandary when it comes to writing about a poet who's made a career out of writing bad nature poems. Mary Oliver is technically proficient, and from reading her prose works about poetry (her A Poetry Handbook is probably one of the best introductory volumes about poetry ever written) I believe that she knows a lotabout poetry. So why are her poems so god-awful?

That Mary Oliver is a grossly overrated poet isn't really the issue. She's very easy to digest, and, since her poems take no risks, there's little to offend in them. The following is emblematic of what's wrong with Mary Oliver's poetry:

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.  Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes,  over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.  Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,  the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --  over and over announcing your place  in the family of things. 

Gee.

This isn't the usual creative-writing-program-produced pap—no, this is highly-crafted, meticulously-designed, carefully-thought-out archetypal creative-writing pap. It takes a well-educated poet to write a poem this bad.

I was actually a bit hopeful by the first line. But then as I continued my enthusiasm waned, much like the steam driving this poem. It's like a balloon with a slow leak, hissing along until the last lines push the air completely out, leaving a wrinkly piece of plastic on the floor, to later get caught in the gears of the vaccuum cleaner and cost $143 (U.S.) to repair, resulting not only in dirty carpets for the duration of the cleaner's time in the shop, but also a small bald spot on the top of your head from where you scratched it trying to figure out how a balloon wound up in your living room...

Okay, maybe I got carried away with my own metaphor there. "Meanwhile the world goes on." Really? It does? I mean, come on! The world does not call to me like wild geese. I'm not really sure what to "latch onto" in this poem, because the images (such as they are) are so vague and "first-level" - here's a tip: just because you use the words "mountains" and "rivers" in your poem does not mean that they're going to be in there. Those are just words. You have to dosomething with them if you want to make poetry.

Mediocrity Abounds!

The problem with "Wild Geese" is not that it's vague, which it is, but that it's completely spineless - what's the message, ultimately, of this poem? "You have a place in this world and like the geese, are free because of your imagination!"

Assuming for a second that this is true, who needs to be told this? A useful tool for revision is to take a statement from a poem, and then state its opposite - if the opposite is ridiculous (i.e., doesn't need to be said), you don't need to make the original statement. This poem is like an advertising slogan, telling you that the company's product is great. Of course it is. What else would they say?

The danger creeping into contemporary poetry (it's been happening for years, but is growing) is the flattening of the image, the death of risk. Using nouns in a poem inserts an object into the poem, but for that object to become an image it must be acted on by the poet. Something needs to happen to the object. Here's another little gem:

I was standing at the edge of the field-- I was hurrying  through my own soul, opening its dark doors-- I was leaning out; I was listening. 

Like a sugar pill, this poem seems to be doing something, but isn't, really. I'll let her vagueness go for a minute and stop to shudder on the phrase "hurrying / through my own soul, / opening its dark doors--"

This is the kind of adolescent angst that would be barely forgivable if a teenage girl wrote it. Coming from Oliver, who should know better, this is shameful. Angst-ridden posturing doesn't ever make a poet sound "cool" or "deep," especially since referring to your "soul" as "dark" is hardly original, and usually the work of the shallow and simple-minded.