It's 'our duty as writers'

 

“I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.” – Mary Oliver

 

Born in Maple Heights, Ohio on this date in 1935, Oliver said people want poetry and that’s why she started writing it, becoming one of the best ever in the genre.  “They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work,” she said.

Oliver won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for her poetic stylings, and The New York Times described her as "far and away, [America's] best-selling poet.”

 

She began writing poetry at age 14, and at 17 visited the home of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay in upstate New York where she and the poet's sister Norma became friends.   Oliver "more or less lived there for the next six or seven years, running around the 800 acres like a child, helping Norma, or at least being company to her," and assisting with organizing St. Vincent Millay's papers – another writing obsession.

 

Oliver's poetry often turned to nature for its inspiration, describing the sense of wonder it instilled in her.  She wrote 33 books of poetry and 4 nonfiction books, the first No Voyage, and Other Poems published in 1963 and the last Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver in 2017.  She died in 2019.

 

"When it's over," she said, "I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement.  I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms."