Upstream: Selected Essays

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Nature was her first language and she managed to translate it into words on paper that make me step outside and look up at the trees in awe. Her appreciation of the world and its quiet miracles never fails to stun me.

MARY OLIVER - DocDroid SELECT TITLES ALSO BY MARY OLIVER - DocDroid

The world sheds, in the energetic way of an open and communal place, its many greetings, as a world should. What quarrel can there be with that? But that the self can interrupt the self — and does — is a darker and more curious matter. Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves.” ― Mary Oliver, Upstream Poetry, May, 1987, p. 113; September, 1991, p. 342; July, 1993, David Barber, review of New and Selected Poems, p. 233; August, 1995, Richard Tillinghast, review of White Pine, p. 289; August, 1999, Christian Wiman, review of Rules for the Dance, p. 286. So begins Upstream, a collection of essays in which revered poet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness, as a young child and as an adult, to lose herself within the beauty and mysteries of both the natural world and the world of literature. Emphasizing the significance of her childhood friend Walt Whitman, through whose work she first understood that a poem is a temple, a place to enter, and in which to feel, and who encouraged her to vanish into the world of her writing, Oliver meditates on the forces that allowed her to create a life for herself out of work and love. As she writes, I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple. I never met any of my friends, of course, in a usual way—they were strangers, and lived only in their writings. But if they were only shadow-companions, stillthey were constant, and powerful, and amazing. That is, they said amazing things, and for me it changed the world.I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.” — Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver Quotes (Author of A Thousand Mornings) - Goodreads Mary Oliver Quotes (Author of A Thousand Mornings) - Goodreads

Of this there can be no question — creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity. A person trudging through the wilderness of creation who does not know this — who does not swallow this — is lost. He who does not crave that roofless place eternity should stay at home. Such a person is perfectly worthy, and useful, and even beautiful, but is not an artist. Such a person had better live with timely ambitions and finished work formed for the sparkle of the moment only. Such a person had better go off and fly an airplane. In the Poe essay, there's a brief riff on love and death, two human preoccupations (well, full-time occupation once you're dead and your loving capabilities have left you): Oliver continued her celebration of the natural world in her next collections, including Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (1999), Why I Wake Early (2004), New and Selected Poems, Volume 2 (2004 ), and Swan: Poems and Prose Poems (2010). Critics have compared Oliver to other great American lyric poets and celebrators of nature, including Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Walt Whitman. “Oliver’s poetry,” wrote Poetry magazine contributor Richard Tillinghast in a review of White Pine (1994) “floats above and around the schools and controversies of contemporary American poetry. Her familiarity with the natural world has an uncomplicated, nineteenth-century feeling.”Upstream is an essay collection divided into five sections. It covers Oliver's devotion to nature, words, and home (Provincetown). It also includes thoughtful essays about authors Emerson, Poe, Whitman, and Wordsworth. With poetry it’s okay to not understand the meaning of the poem or its language. It’s okay to play with the sound and rhythm and images and symbolism be the goal of the art. Essays, however, are about something—an idea, an argument, an analysis and should contain more than a vague notion or hint about the overarching subject. Among them was the poet Mary Oliver (September 10, 1935–January 17, 2019), who recounts the redemptive refuge of reading and writing in her essay “Staying Alive,” found in Upstream: Selected Essays ( public library) — the radiant collection of reflections that gave us Oliver on the artist’s task and the central commitment of the creative life. Mary Oliver I have a weird relationship with Mary Oliver. I own, and have read, several of her books. Most of them are poetry, but a couple of them are essay collections (as Upstream is). I generally like most of her books, and it excites me to see someone making some kind of a living off selling poetry. Though, where Ms. Oliver lives (a beaver hut?) is yet to be determined by me. Oliver's latest book is a collection of essays called Upstream. Most of these pieces have been published elsewhere, but reshuffled here they form a kind of sporadic spiritual autobiography.