Mary Oliver (1935 to 2019) was an American poet, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, whose plain-spoken poems give close, loving attention to herons, grasshoppers, geese, ponds and woods. Her poetry teaches that paying real attention to the living world is itself a kind of devotion, and that the world keeps offering us a place within it. Therapeutic Shamanism, which teaches that everything is alive and that learning shamanism is learning to attend again to perceptions we stopped valuing, finds much in her poems that it recognises.
Who was Mary Oliver? #
One of the most widely read American poets of her time. She was born on 10 September 1935 and grew up in Maple Heights, Ohio, near Cleveland; she attended Ohio State University and Vassar College without taking a degree, and for a while worked as secretary to the sister of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.1 Her first collection, No Voyage and Other Poems, came out in 1963. American Primitive won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984, and New and Selected Poems the National Book Award in 1992.2 She lived and wrote for some five decades on Cape Cod, and spent her last years in Florida, where she died on 17 January 2019, at the age of eighty-three.3
She published more than twenty volumes of poetry, as well as prose and two short handbooks on writing poems. She was known for walking the woods and shore with a notebook, and is said to have hidden pencils among the trees so she would never be caught without one.4
What does her poetry say about attention? #
That attention comes first, and that it is a form of reverence. She put it simply in her essay “Upstream”, and repeated it in conversation: “attention is the beginning of devotion”.5 Her poems do what that sentence says. They stay with one being long enough to see it properly: a grasshopper eating from her hand, the way its jaws move, how it washes its face; a heron lifting into the sky; wild geese passing overhead. The noticing is not decoration. It is the point of the poem, and often the poem’s way of praying.
Two of her best-known poems show this. In “The Summer Day” she sets the large questions of who made the world beside a single insect looked at closely, says she is unsure what prayer really is, but sure of how to give her attention to a summer’s day, and ends by asking the reader what they mean to do with the one life they have. The title of the podcast This Wild and Precious Life echoes that closing question. In “Wild Geese” she tells the reader that there is no need to be good, or to do penance, only to let the body follow what it loves; and that however lonely we are, the world keeps calling, like the geese, and keeps announcing our place among all that lives.
Why do critics disagree about her? #
Because the plainness that drew so many readers struck some critics as thin. Her critical reception was mixed throughout her career. Reviewers called her poems simplistic or merely earnest, noted that her landscapes are scrubbed of cars, planes and technology, and the poetry critic David Orr once dismissed her as a writer of whom one could only say that no animals seemed to have been harmed in the making of her poems.6 On the other side, she held that poetry “mustn’t be fancy” and must be clear to be understood; the writer Alice Gregory called her work “deceptively elementary”, warning that crude attention misses its quieter connections; and The New Yorker answered her critics directly, arguing that they had not taken her old-fashioned subjects, nature, beauty and God, seriously.7
What does Therapeutic Shamanism teach about attention to the living world? #
That everything is alive, and that the skill to perceive it has been neglected, not lost. In animism the rocks, rivers, mountains and wind are alive and conscious, and this is experienced, not only believed; humans are one of the Animal People, cousins of the Plant People and the Stone People, with no hierarchy among them and everything part of one big family of beings.8 See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
The empathic, interconnected perceptions of the right brain go on in us all the time. What changed with the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer was not that they stopped, but that we shifted our attention towards the left brain and came to value its perceptions more. So learning shamanism is about learning to value, and to pay attention to, something that is already going on in us, and always has been.9 Few things stir as much awe in us as the Stone PeopleStone People. All physical matter: mountains, sea, rivers, clouds, sun and stars: the oldest and widest of the Peoples. As some animist cultures put it, ‘we are just the Stone People, dancing for a while’. Read the full answer, and there is a lot of research on the good effects of awe. See What is awe, and why is it good for us?
Where do her poems and Therapeutic Shamanism meet, and where do they part? #
They meet in the way of attending. Oliver’s poems model the patient, unhurried looking that lets another being be a being, not a thing, and her picture of the world calling us back to our place in it sits close to the animist sense of one family of beings. Her refusal of penance, and her trust in the body, sit close to the Therapeutic Shamanism critique of hierarchical, body-denying spirituality. See What is spiritual bypassing and how can psychotherapy help prevent it?
They part in method. Her attention is the waking attention of a walker with a notebook. Therapeutic Shamanism adds relationship with the other-than-human Peoples through the shamanic journey, in the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer as well as here. Nothing in her work says whether she thought of herself as an animist; what can be said is that many of her poems read in an animist spirit. See How do humans communicate and build relationships with the other-than-human Peoples?
