One day I'll love Mary Oliver

Wild Geese, and why I don't get poetry

“I was born to bathe in the morning sun.” – Orb, on the Movements of the Earth

I

I don’t really get poetry. It’s embarrassing, because I have a healthy reverence for literature and art. It’s even more embarrassing, because I know that one day I will love poetry. But as of today, I don’t really get poetry.

It wasn’t always the case that I didn’t get poetry. I once wrote 3000 words of rhyming couplets in a verse-off against my high school friend. I spent years on Tumblr writing emo poetry. Unfortunately, that blog is long since deleted, but I remember some of what I wrote, and I think I did get the medium. But I eventually gave up on any structural limitations or brevity, which is how I ended up as the person you read now.

But I think I can learn something about how I understand poetry by going back to the only poem from that period of life that has stuck with me – Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver.

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.

II

“Everything will be okay” is a sazen. It is a generally true statement! But it is impossible to reconstruct the deep feeling that everything will actually be okay from just hearing that statement. So we play elaborate games of peekaboo to make that sentiment feel new and surprising, even though we would dismiss it as trivial if it was stated plainly.

To be even clearer: when I’m in distress, saying “everything will be okay” does nothing for me. But saying “the world offers itself to my imagination, calls to me like the wild geese, over and over announcing my place in the family of things” makes me feel it. Mary Oliver has found the

This poem has been a hazy presence in and out of my life for ten years. It comes back into focus whenever I’m in distress. I ask myself whether I’ve found my place in the family of things, and comfort myself that I will one day find it, that maybe I’m already in it and it hasn’t clicked yet. As time goes by, an accumulation of my life’s big emotions become entangled with these 131 words.

When I think about it, it’s amazing that those 131 words have such staying power. By default, any other way to put that sentiment together eventually melts into semantic slurry. If my best friend texted me 131 words of comfort, it might really help me in the moment. But there is no chance I would remember that message word for word, or be able to reconstruct what it made me feel when I first read it. But I’ve been able to recite Wild Geese to myself for years.

I don’t get poetry. But I know that one part of what makes it special is that it configures a small number of words with the power to absorb all of your emotions and hold onto them.

III

One thing that Wild Geese impresses on me is that poetry can convey visceral sensations in a way that prose can’t. Stories have too many words, and each word does too much. Like light passing through a thousand fractured mirrors, the sensations created by words in a story become muddled.

Of course, stories can and do make readers feel emotions. But the process is totally different. The emotional core of a story is like a clock, constructed from a thousand pieces. The way each person relates to each other, the way each event proceeds after another, all are engineered to create a particular feeling. Meanwhile, the emotional core of a poem is like the bud of a flower. It stands alone, with only a few petals of decoration. This analogy should not be taken to mean that poems are somehow more “organic” and less “planned” than stories. Only that the end product has much fewer pieces to plan with, and much less attenuation of the raw imagery.

Moreover, some feelings are not amenable to being constructed in the way that prose does, and those feelings are the domain of poetry. I don’t believe a story could convey a sense of beauty in the way that Wild Geese does. If one exists, I haven’t read it. But beauty is not a property that can be constructed from many pieces. It exists in the minimal form. Every piece added to that minimal form diminishes the experience of beauty.

IV

If I understand poetry enough to describe Wild Geese with reverence, then why don’t I get it?

The problem is that I understand these features of poetry, but I don’t experience them. I run most of my experiences through a deconstructive filter, trying to understand each component of an experience. When I read stories and articles, I analyze how they choose a first sentence or an introduction. When I watch a movie, I try to spot the thesis statements or leading metaphors and use them to predict the plot. When I look at people, I imagine their bodies as a collection of polygons. (That one’s a joke… partly. I did that when I was learning to draw.) In short, I intellectualize every experience. And that is not conducive to mainlining a spiky and colorful packet of emotions from a poem.

I get stories because stories are amenable to deconstruction. Taking a watch apart only makes you marvel at it more. Of course I feel things from the stories I read – you’re going to see plenty of that on this blog! – but those are feelings that benefit from marveling at the gears of the watch. It is much harder for me to get poems when I feel that deconstructing them is tearing the flower apart.

But I have the situational awareness of a wild animal. I know that my deconstructive tendencies are built for this phase of life, in which I gain a richer understanding of myself and the world around me. I know that a time will come when I do want to experience the raw sensation of a poem or an artwork that previously I was on guard against. I forage for understanding now to enrich that future me.

One day I will love Mary Oliver, and it will be as if I always did.