A Prose Piece by Peter Lattu

Mary Oliver’s Poetry

I love Mary Oliver’s poetry. Her poems are deceptively simple and straightforward yet they often reveal profound truth about the human experience.

I have wondered how Mary Oliver writes. From her description of natural settings, like Blackwater woods and pond, she clearly takes early morning walks with her dogs. She sees deer, fox, herons, turtles, gannets, watersnakes, mushrooms, wild geese, egrets… and she writes about what she sees.

I imagined that Mary Oliver comes back from her early morning walks to settle down to write for a couple of hours. In her book A Poetry Handbook she confirms that she does just that: “One can rise early in the morning and have time to write (or, even, to take a walk and then write) before the world’s work schedule begins.”

Writing early is not all there is to her creative process. Her walks are crucial to her creative process, to her hearing her “inner ‘poetic’ voice”. In A Poetry Handbook, she describes her imaginative process at work on her walks:

For myself, walking works… I walk slowly and not to get anywhere in particular, but because the motion somehow helps the poem to begin. I end up, usually, standing still, writing something down in the small notebook I always have with me.

Walks work to make her poems. Her poems display that creative process at work through her descriptions of nature all around her.

Through A Poetry Handbook I have gained more insight into Mary Oliver and her imaginative processes. That book has deepened my appreciation of her life and work.

{Piece by Peter Lattu, December 31, 2007}