Blue Horses: Poems

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The painting was the inspiration behind the title of a bestselling volume of poetry, Blue Horses (2014), by the American poet Mary Oliver. Any previous exposure I've had to Oliver's poems has been via the internet and I've loved them all, though the first one I came across online remains my favorite of hers: Further exploring the analogy between music and color, Marc envisioned the equivalent of music without tonality in painting — a sensibility where “a so-called dissonance is simply a consonance apart,” producing a harmonic effect in the overall composition, in color as in sound. The Tower of Blue Horses, 1913. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.) Animals with their virginal sense of life awakened all that was good in me. The Little Monkey, 1912. (Available as a print.) The Large Blue Horses, 1911. (Available as a print.) I don't think I realized that Mary Oliver had come out with another volume of poetry, but she's one of my favorites, and when I saw it at the public library I snagged it right away.

is the piece of God that is inside each of us.'This is stunning and I think a key theme in Oliver's poetry. She believes wholeheartedly in the good and the beautiful, in beauty for beauty's sake, despite the cruelty and the malice we are also capable of. And this comes from a little piece of the divine in us, of something outside ourselves that is good. Being Christian myself, I do like this idea, but I can also imagine that for non-religious readers that perhaps doesn't strike entirely true. Exactly. She rises above chatter in powerful gems like the last lines of “To Be Human Is To Sing Your Own Song:” Wankheit, Klaus and Steffen, Uwe. Briefe aus dem Feld. (Munich: Piper, 1986), 64; Partsch, Susanna. Franz Marc 1880-1916. (Cologne: Taschen, 1991), 38-39; Piper, Reinhard "Franz Marc: On the animal in art" in Das Tier in der Kunst. (Munich: Piper, 1922) included in Partsch, op.cit. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2020-12-10 01:25:18 Boxid IA40001504 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier From there we go into Franz Marc's tragic end, come too soon. There is such an ineffable sadness to Oliver's unwillingness to share this news with the horses, as if they exist in a different realm where such tragedy could not occur, would be outlandish. It shows us Oliver's belief that nature itself isn't violent in the way that humans are. While death occurs there, nothing as ' impossible' as Marc's young death would be feasible. Yet despite his early death Marc clearly brought some joy to the world, some beauty, something for which Oliver is grateful.This is one of Marc's earliest major works depicting animals and is one of the most important of his series of portraits of horses. It is often thought that Marc considered animals to be more pure and more beautiful than humans and, therefore, his paintings represent a pantheistic understanding of the divine or of spirituality. [6] She begins by separating what her parents did from what she did, and it is wonderfully vague about when she decided to put words to this, and how angry she was at being expected to do things their way. Adults come to grips with binding/unbinding, and artists, with words or other tools, are a large part of the sorting out. Oliver’s tone here works perfectly, validating what anyone trying to grow up has to struggle with. Yes, she says. It stays with you. And paying attention to the sparrow–as opposed to just one’s inner angst– helps keep anger from being destructive as it breaks away from being hobbled by any obstacle. The whole poem is strong and rewarding.

What I Can Do,” comes next and it is a gripe about how confusing she finds operating a television, a clothes washer and cell phones. The last line announces that she can strike a match and light a fire, the kind of statement better suited to the late Philip Whalen, a Buddhist priest. In “I Don’t Want To Be Demure or Respectable,” she declares : The speaker in the poem has limitations, but she rejoices in those limitations and is willing to find the strange comedy that comes with loss and aging. Most refreshing, however, is that the poem avoids making any “wise” declarations. Because it is grounded in the personal rather than the didactic, it works as an approachable observation of being elderly. The title poem, about a painting called “Blue Horses” by Franz Marc, is equally strong and rewarding and is the kind of piece –I say this with pleasure- I can imagine turning up in a glossy magazine, the reproduction and the words it inspired side by side. Marc was a contemporary and friend of Kandinksy, and killed himself during World War I, having seen and experienced more than he could cope with facing again. Most of his paintings take natural subjects and play with them, and Blue Horses has an uncanny, towering perspective. The poem is also, literally, an imaginative leap.In our final "part" of the poem, Oliver is now surrounded by all four horses and while they can't speak their message, Oliver can perhaps intuit it. Their beauty, otherworldly as it is, is their whole purpose and that is enough. They are meant to give the viewer beauty, a moment of rest and perhaps a moment of connection. For those who want more, who want the horses to mean something more clear or more defined, Oliver asks what you could possible expect. In a world where young people die too soon with a bullet in the head, in which this occurs not just once but countless of times, what could there horses possibly do except be beautiful and themselves? Blue Horses or Die grossen blauen Pferde ( The Large Blue Horses) is a 1911 painting by German painter and printmaker Franz Marc (1880–1916).

Lccn 2014009724 Ocr tesseract 4.1.1 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.5653 Ocr_module_version 0.0.7 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA19887 Openlibrary_edition Twenty years after Marc’s death on the battlefields of the First World War, when the forces of terror that had fomented it festered into the Second, the Nazis declared his art “degenerate.” Many of his paintings went missing after WWII, last seen in a 1937 Nazi exhibition of “degenerate” art, alongside several of Klee’s paintings. Marc’s art is believed to have been seized by Nazi leaders for their personal theft-collections. An international search for his painting The Tower of Blue Horses has been underway for decades. In 2012, another of his missing paintings of horses was discovered in the Munich home of the son of one of Hitler’s art dealers, along with more than a thousand other artworks the Nazis denounced as “degenerate” in their deadly ideology but welcomed into their private living rooms as works of transcendent beauty and poetic power. The Dreaming Horses, 1913. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.) Continuing an artistic renaissance that began with A Thousand Mornings (2012), Mary Oliver’s latest poetry collection, Blue Horses, finds her exploring a new home and rediscovering love. Oliver has long been America’s bestselling poet, and these latest conversational poems show why you can find her work on shelves across the United States. If there is a statement of purpose for Blue Horses, it arrives early in the book with “I Don’t Want to be Demure or Respectable,” in which the poet writes: Among the paintings he produced in those two ecstatically prolific years just before he was drafted was The Fate of the Animals— an arresting depiction of the interplay of beauty and brutality, terror and tenderness, in the chaos of life. An inscription appeared under the canvas in Marc’s hand: “And all being is flaming agony.” Compare this to Read, Herbert. A Concise History of Modern Painting. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974 ed.) at 193, describing Marc's associate and fellow Blue Reiter member Kandinsky's work of this time as "Lines fluctuate and represent not only movement, but purpose and growth. Colours are associative not only in the sense that they express human emotion (joy or sadness, etc.) but also in that they signify emotive aspects of our external environment-yellow is earthy, blue is heavenly; yellow is brash and importunate, and upsets people, blue is pure and infinite, suggestive of infinite peace."Every piece of paper has “tooth,” the texture of the sheet. Linen and cotton in the wet mix of pulp affect tooth, as will any additive. For years, fiber artists and printers have been redefining paper, and poets have been redefining what they hope readers want. Oliver has known this for a very long time, which is why it is a little surprising that “What We Want” is not the first poem in Blue Horses. Instead she begins with the pompously titled “After Reading Lucretius, I Go To The Pond, ” with an almost painfully trite image of a heron’s white plumes as a crown. Her past work makes me want much better. Like so much of her work, it is an uncommonly direct yet beguiling love letter to vitality itself, poured from the soul of someone utterly besotted with this world which we too are invited to embrace. Some critics cast Oliver as demure or preachy, and perhaps there was evidence for those claims in her earlier works. However, with A Thousand Mornings, she stepped away from that position into generous spiritual and personal musings, a trend she continues with this most recent book. We go to poetry for countless reasons, which helps explain why Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry, Helen Vendler’s Soul Says, Dana Gioia’s Can Poetry Matter?, and Seamus Heaney’s The Redress of Poetry are still necessary. No one should go to Mary Oliver’s poems to be challenged, and that’s all right. There’s nothing criminal about being soothed by an often tenderly crafted Oliver composition. She won a Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive, her fourth volume of poetry, and Blue Horses is her twelfth. Here Oliver says what every “decider” needs to face, deep within her or his heart, We should prefer to die rather than to explain to any living creature exactly what war is. So we have a poem that is both richly imaginative and as political as the best antiwar cri de Coeur.

Blue is the male principle, stern and spiritual. Yellow the female principle, gentle, cheerful and sensual. Red is matter, brutal and heavy and always the colour which must be fought and vanquished by the other two! Mary Oliver, born in 1935, never ceases to amaze me. Many of her poems reflect on nature, but she is always having new experiences and learning more about herself. Some of these poems give an insight to a new home, and a new love, even now so late in life. I would recommend her outlook to anyone needing a bit of a boost, anyone who feels lonely, or anyone who has had to forge their own path. Blue Horses’ has thirty-eight poems. They are on topics which are close to Mary Oliver’s heart – nature, plants, trees, flowers, animals, insects, seasons. There are also poems on love, art, yoga, spirituality and other everyday topics. Each poem is different – each has a different number of lines, some are short some are long, there is no consistency in terms of form and structure – but all of them are beautiful. If one is new to Mary Oliver, one would expect that at some point she would unfurl all the poetic pyrotechnics and dazzle the reader – something that might intimidate the non-specialist reader of poetry – but one would be wrong. Mary Oliver doesn’t bother with metre and rhyme and rhythm and alliteration and the iamb and the dactyl and the trochee. She just writes one beautiful poem after another in free verse which is accessible to the general reader and touches our hearts with beautiful images and thoughts and in the process makes it look so deceptively simple, like the best poets do. In “What We Want,” she provides a presumptuous manifesto in a few lines, and anyone familiar with her earlier poems will see what she almost always aims for, and succeeds in achieving : La Cava, Gabi. Review Article: The Expressionist Animal Painter Franz Marc (April 2004)". Archived from the original on 16 October 2012 . Retrieved 22 June 2012.Mary Oliver had been writing poetry more than 40 years before I ever read “The Journey” and “Wild Geese,” and she became one of my favorite poets. Her work drops me down into a meditative realm, and I feel the homey and raw aspects of this natural world that are feeding my body and senses at all times. When I heard that Mary Oliver’s new poetry collection ‘Blue Horses’ has come out, I couldn’t wait to get it and read it. I read it in one breath. Here is what I think. The 39 poems in Blue Horses are much like prayers, I think. They don’t strive to answer questions, but turn things over like seasons in the hand. Some favorites (this week) are “Blueberries,” “Such Silence,” “Watering the Stones,” “Drifting,” “On Not Watering The Lawn,” “Do Stones Feel?,” “What Gorgeous Thing,” and “The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac.” I love how the first two lines are almost like a frame-narrative, a gateway into the poem where you have to accept that as the viewer you can step into a painting and engage with it, relate to it, learn from it. Without that belief, the rest of the poem feels less accessible. The horses are the ones to approach Oliver and I think it's key that she says she is 'commingling' with them. She becomes one with the horses, in a sense blends her awareness with theirs. The horses are not "straight-forward" horses, but rather almost like messengers, clearly grand and knowledgeable, but with a fondness and acceptance of our poet. Oliver also uses her this book to survey a wide spectrum of spirituality and art, including eastern sensual poetry (“Rumi”), the writings of Lucretius (“After Reading Lucretius, I Go to the Pond”), zodiac signs (which she uses as a jumping-off point to explore her battle with cancer in “The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac”), and Hinduism (“To Shiva,” another sharply observed poem about mortality). “First Yoga Lesson” is the best poem of this ilk because it shows the poet confronting her spiritual interests and aging body with humor: