"Attention is the beginning of devotion". Upstream: Selected Essays (2016) by Mary Oliver
Essays, nonfiction
All good writers are intentional with their words, whether in poetry or prose, but Mary Oliver’s words, while holding an appearance of simplicity, feel especially polished. While her collection of essays, Upstream, is mostly prose, the rhythm is still musical; and right at the beginning, after a deceptively simple couple of paragraphs, you encounter a line break, and then: “I walk, all day, across the heaven-verging field.” The heaven-verging field. Isn’t that extraordinary? Heaven-verging. In a wonderful interview for On Being with Krista Tippett1, Mary Oliver talked about that “I”:
«And always, I wanted the “I.” Many of the poems are: I did this, I did this, I saw this. I wanted the “I” to be the possible reader, rather than about myself. It was about an experience that happened to be mine, but could well have been anybody else’s. And that was my feeling about the “I.” I have been criticized by one editor, who felt that the “I” would be felt as ego, and I thought, No, well, I’m going to risk it and see. And I think it worked. It enjoined the reader into the experience of the poem. I became the kind of person who did the walking and the scribbling, but shared it if they wanted it. Yes.»
That is something I feel acutely while reading Oliver. She is the I, she is pulling from her life experience to write these beautiful, powerful words, but in the sharing the Oliver-I becomes a possible me-I, anyone-I.
In Upstream, Oliver’s life-experience and her literature-experience are one and the same; life and literature are interconnected, reading and thinking and writing and walking and watching and breathing, all one. She writes in Section One, chapter three “Staying Alive” that she learned “that the world’s otherness is an antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness—the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books—can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.” (14-15) Fields or books, both holding the beauty and the mystery of the world. Oliver talks about her relationship with nature—especially animals, water and the woods—as well as literaure. Section Three is devoted to essays on Emerson, Poe, Whitman and Wordsworth. They are insightful, deeply personal, thought-provoking; they also show the deep influence these poets had on Oliver’s own poetics. I especially recommend them if you enjoy the Transcendentalists. Later on, in Section Four, the chapter “Building a house” mentions, of course, Thoreau, with small callbacks you’ll recognise from Walden if you’ve read it, like the listing of the employed tools, and the exact total cost of materials, and more generally the philosophical reflections related to the building of a house.
On the theme of life and poetry and how they relate to each other, I’ll quote again from the On Being interview—Upstream expands these concepts into essay form:
Kippett: […] there’s a place you talk about you were one of many thousands who’ve had insufficient childhoods, but that you spent a lot of your time walking around the woods in Ohio.
Oliver: Yes, I did, and I think it saved my life. To this day, I don’t care for the enclosure of buildings. It was a very bad childhood — for everybody, every member of the household, not just myself, I think — and I escaped it, barely, with years of trouble. But I did find the entire world, in looking for something. But I got saved by poetry, and I got saved by the beauty of the world.
and
«But I do think poetry has enticements of sound that are different from literature — literature certainly has it, too, or some literature, the best literature — and it’s easier for people to remember. People are more apt to remember a poem, and therefore feel they own it and can speak it to themselves as you might a prayer, than they can remember a chapter and quote it. And that’s very important, because then it belongs to you. You have it when you need it.»
Well, now Upstream belongs to me as well—as I hope it might belong to you. I hope you cherish this book, its beauty; I hope you take with you the very core of it, as I’ll try to do; and maybe some paragraphs will make you reflect on something new, or make you remember something you’d forgot, or just make you feel something—that’s the key.
One essay is about a bird Oliver and her partner rescued one day; this essay made me cry. A bit that resonated with me deeply is this:
“He was, of course, a piece of the sky. His eyes said so. This is not fact; this is the other part of knowing something, when there is no proof, but neither is there any way toward disbelief. Imagine lifting the lid from a jar and finding it filled not with darkness but with light. Bird was like that. Startling, elegant, alive.”
That is what Mary Oliver’s writing feels like—steeped in an inexplicable knowledge; filled with light; startling, elegant, alive.
The website has a transcript for the interview if you’d rather read it! But as there’s some beautiful readings of poems as well, I recommend listening. The episode is available on podcast apps—I used PocketCasts, because I love the trimming silence feature.