From The Archives: The Surprising Sound of Mary Oliver's Voice

The long continuum and many registers of a voice + the time Mary Oliver heard herself in another voice across time, a voice in which I also heard myself, proving how we all might actually be one

Nov 24, 2023

If ever there has been a patron saint of paying attention, it’s Mary Oliver. She spent her own life practicing the art of attention by walking in the woods (and, later, on the beach) every morning. She also smoked cigarettes until the day she died. There’s something about that paradox that grabs me and won’t let go, just as Mary’s surprisingly gruff and irreverent persona grabbed me back in 2010 when I had the incredible honor of being with her for a live, in-person reading. I had never heard her read before and was stunned by the alive, roughened texture of her voice (again, the cigarettes) and the humor in almost every line. Humor I certainly had not heard before, when reading her poetry inside my own head.

I’m grateful for the chance to have met Mary Oliver in person and to have heard this chasm between the way I her her work in my head and the way she sounded when reading it out loud herself. The gap underscores the importance of, whenever possible, hearing my students read their own work out loud to me. This is a practice I’ve recently brought into my classroom at Stillwater Prison, where I am teaching a flash fiction and nonfiction class to sixteen incarcerated men. Hearing them read their words out loud has been the highlight of my spring so far. The first assignment we tackled was the “I Remember” assignment I teach at almost every in-person retreat as well as periodically in the Writing in the Dark workshop, and the absolute crystalline way in which these writers executed my call for concrete, specific, exterior imagery (with an absence of interiority) rocked my world. Every single reading last week brought tears, laughter, or both. Astounding.

Back to Mary Oliver, I’ve been thinking lately about the impact of her work on so very many lives, and how this must be at least partly related to the quality of attention she spent a lifetime honing. I have often shared Oliver’s poetry with my students, including when I taught middle school, where her poems left a more lasting impression among some than I could have predicted—as revealed to me by Aly, who was in my sixth-grade class back in 2005-’06. I taught Aly and her peers the poem “The Summer Day,” which they memorized and learned to recite by heart.

Which leads me to this rare interview conducted by Aly’s mom, Krista Tippet (On Being) several years ago. When the interview aired, Aly was in college, and I had not been in steady contact with her since she graduated from my class in 2008. But Aly wanted to bring the interview to my attention, and boy did she. I have saved Aly’s email all these years, and always will. Here is what she said (among other things):

"... [D]o you remember when you taught us all ‘The Summer Day?’ There is a clip around 22 minutes in of me reciting the poem as it was taught to me by you, and though I remember being very nervous during the recording, I listen to it now and am overwhelmed with the physical memory of how deeply I felt this poem in the mornings in your classroom as we all spoke it out loud together, learning how to feel it piece by piece.
I am constantly thinking of you, always being reminded of things I ought to thank you for, but one of them is surely the gift you gave me of being able to recite the same thing as my classmates in honor of the beauty of the world—the truths that do not compromise. At an age so prone to loneliness and overwhelm where internal change is learned, there couldn’t have been a better time for me to learn such a gift— and now I am only a little bit older and much much more comfortable and taking wonderful poetry classes in college and THANKING you for bringing my attention to such a powerful outlet.
Again, I have many things to thank you for, but perhaps the best thanks I can give now comes in the form of Mary Oliver’s reaction to the reading. She sounds very pleased! When she listens, perhaps she hears a poem becoming something else again with a new voice. When I listen, I see your hands in the air as you guide us through the words, and I am comforted again by familiar words in a way that I had forgotten— or rather, absorbed and made subconscious and part of me.
Clearly I have not yet attained Mary Oliver’s beautiful ability to attain exact simplicity in writing! But I hope that this finds you in good health and great happiness, and I will continue writing you over the years until perhaps one day I will be sending you one-word emails that are precise and passionate and appropriately minimalist— and surely I will be thanking you in them still.

As you can imagine, having this image of my former self reflected back to me by Aly, from her current perspective on her own former self, was deeply revelatory and moving. I can’t help but feel thankful to Mary Oliver for facilitating such a communion!

Communion was perhaps the result of attention for Mary Oliver, who dove headlong into life’s most profound questions as she stared unflinchingly at grasshoppers, dead foxes, wild geese, and—repeatedly—the sun.

In his essay, “In Her Own Way: Remembering Mary Oliver in Minnesota,” Thomas Smith writes about a workshop he attended with Mary Oliver in Duluth many years ago:

She was in her early 50s then, privately coming to terms with difficult personal issues Dream Work hinted at but stopped short of making explicit. Her style was unfussily neat, outdoorsy. I thought there was something of the fox in her countenance, a shy yet cunning elusiveness well-practiced in avoiding traps—not furtive or evasive exactly, but delicately wary and cautious, not willing to come close enough to be what one could call ‘personal.’ She had dignity, gravitas, and did not wear her sense of humor close to the surface.

It's fascinating to me that by the time I met Mary Oliver in person a couple of decades after Smith did, she seemed to wear her humor on her sleeve (at least in comparison to what I expected based on the seeming reverence of her poems). Hearing Mary Oliver read her work in her own voice changed and deepened my relationship to her words and images, and that feels directly connected to the issues of attention and listening, two practices I talk, write, and teach about routinely because they feel so integral to doing language.

Hearing her read in her own voice also underscores the way in which writing must maintain some awareness of voice, the speaking quality of the voice, and its music. There is a reason for the idiom “talk things out,” because speaking things out loud activates a region of the brain that is more open to possibility and problem solving than we engage through silent thinking. Isn’t that interesting?

To me, this signals that when we read our own work out loud to ourselves as part of a revision process (a practice that I highly recommend), we’re not just opening the door to making the work better. We’re opening the door to discovering—to accessing—unrealized dimensions of ourselves.

Some of you might recall we did a strange but very fruitful exercise on this last April during the Creativity Challenge. It’s an exercise that bears repeating as much as it bears beginning, or beginning anew. Just like so many other good but challenging things in life.