Inspirational Interview with Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver is famous as a poet and famous for her sense of privacy, so this interview with Maria Shriver is a coup for O.com. I couldn't just post a link, I have to excerpt some of my favourite parts.

Maria Shriver: Mary, you've told me that for you, poetry is and always was a calling. How do you know when something is a calling?

Mary Oliver: When you can't help but go there. We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy. I spent a great deal of time in my younger years just writing and reading, walking around the woods in Ohio, where I grew up. I often say if you could lay out all the writing I did in those years, it would go to the moon and back. It was bad, it was derivative. But when you love what you're doing, honestly, you can get better…

Maria Shriver: Do you think it's possible to contain the spiritual world and also be of the "real world" in 2011?

Mary Oliver: I definitely believe that. And I think if you skimp on one or the other, you're not getting the whole show. You have to be in the world to understand what the spiritual is about, and you have to be spiritual in order to truly be able to accept what the world is about.

Maria Shriver: When you talk of the spiritual, though, you're not talking about organized religion.

Mary Oliver: I'm not, though I do think ceremony is beautiful and powerful. But I've also met some people in organized religion who aren't so hot. I've written before that God has "so many names." To me, it's all right if you look at a tree, as the Hindus do, and say the tree has a spirit. It's a mystery, and mysteries don't compromise themselves—we're never gonna know. I think about the spiritual a great deal. I like to think of myself as a praise poet…

Maria Shriver: So you never wanted your poetry to be a place where you worked out your own struggles. And yet "The Journey," my all-time favorite poem, seems to deal with darker themes.

Mary Oliver: Well, looking back, I'm shocked to see that I wrote that. Because I was always very private about my life, and yet the poems in Dream Work [1986] are not so private as I thought. I'm glad I wrote them, and I'm doing a little more of that now—using personal material. I want to be braver and more honest about my life. When you're sexually abused, there's a lot of damage—that's the first time I've ever said that out loud…

Maria Shriver: One line of yours I often quote is, "What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" What do you think you have done with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver: I used up a lot of pencils.

Maria Shriver: [Laughs.]

Mary Oliver: What I have done is learn to love and learn to be loved. That didn't come easy. And I learned to consider my life an amazing gift. Those are the things…

Maria Shriver: You had a 40-year relationship with Molly. How did her death change your life?

Mary Oliver: I was very, very lonely.

Maria Shriver: You've written in your work that you rarely spent any time apart. How did you avoid being crushed by losing her?

Mary Oliver: I had decided I would do one of two things when she died. I would buy a little cabin in the woods, and go inside with all my books and shut the door. Or I would unlock all the doors…

Maria Shriver: We live in a society where people think they're too old at 55 or 60 to do anything else. And you're 75! I find it fascinating that you've become happier, you're braver, you're more excited, you're healed from the early trauma of sexual abuse.

Mary Oliver: I'm also something else I never was—I'm funny!

Those are just the highlights–do read the whole thing. It's such a wonderful interview. I want to reread it all again.

h/t Cassandra Pages

Filed under: Literary Tagged: Mary Oliver interview