Oliver, Mary
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Mary Oliver | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | September 10, 1935 Maple Heights, Ohio, U.S. |
| Died | January 17, 2019 (aged 83) Hobe Sound, Florida, U.S. |
| Occupation | Poet |
| Education | Vassar College Ohio State University |
| Notable awards | National Book Award (1992) Pulitzer Prize (1984) |
| Partner | Molly Malone Cook |
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Mary Oliver (born September 10, 1935, Maple Heights, Ohio, U.S.—died January 17, 2019, Hobe Sound, Florida) was an American poet whose work reflects a deep communion with the natural world as well as a belief that poetry “mustn’t be fancy.” Oliver, who had a devoted following, was known for her use of plain language and accessible imagery. In 1984 she won a Pulitzer Prize for the collection American Primitive (1983).
Oliver stated that she grew up in a “very dysfunctional family” and had a “difficult childhood.” She later attended the Ohio State University and Vassar College but did not earn a degree. She worked for a time as a secretary for the sister of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Millay’s influence is apparent in Oliver’s first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems (1963). These lyrical nature poems are set in a variety of locales, especially the Ohio of Oliver’s youth. Her childhood plays a more central role in The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems (1972), in which she attempted to re-create the past through memory and myth. The Night Traveler (1978) explores the themes of birth, decay, and death through the conceit of a journey into the underworld of classical mythology. In these poems Oliver’s fluent imagery weaves together the worlds of humans, animals, and plants.
Oliver’s volume American Primitive (1983), which won a Pulitzer Prize, glorifies the natural world, reflecting the American fascination with the ideal of the pastoral life as it was first expressed by Henry David Thoreau. In House of Light (1990) Oliver explored the rewards of solitude in nature. New and Selected Poems (1992), which won a National Book Award; White Pine (1994); Blue Pastures (1995); West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems (1997); Why I Wake Early (2004); and A Thousand Mornings (2012) are later collections.
Oliver also wrote about the writing of poetry in two slender but rich volumes, A Poetry Handbook (1995) and Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse (1998). Winter Hours (1999) includes poetry, prose poems, and essays on other poets. In Long Life: Essays and Other Writings (2004), Oliver explored the “connection between soul and landscape.”
In addition to her writing, Oliver also taught at a number of schools, notably Bennington College (1996–2001).
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Mary Jane Oliver (September 10, 1935 – January 17, 2019) was an American poet who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 and the National Book Award in 1992. She found inspiration for her work in nature and had a lifelong habit of solitary walks in the wild. Her poetry is characterized by wonderment at the natural environment, vivid imagery, and unadorned language. In 2007, she was declared the best-selling poet in the United States.
Early life
Mary Oliver was born to Edward William and Helen M. Oliver on September 10, 1935, in Maple Heights, Ohio, a semi-rural suburb of Cleveland.[1] Her father was a social studies teacher and athletics coach in the Cleveland public schools. As a child, she spent a great deal of time outside, going on walks or reading. In an interview with the Christian Science Monitor in 1992, Oliver said of growing up in Ohio:
In a 2011 interview with Maria Shriver, Oliver called her family dysfunctional, adding that though her childhood was very hard, writing helped her create her own world.[3] Oliver revealed in the interview that she had been sexually abused as a child and had experienced recurring nightmares.[3]
Oliver began writing poetry at the age of 14. She graduated from the local high school in Maple Heights. In the summer of 1951, at age 15, she attended the National Music Camp at Interlochen, Michigan, now known as Interlochen Arts Camp, where she was in the percussion section of the National High School Orchestra. At 17, she visited the home of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, in Austerlitz, New York,[1][4] where she formed a friendship with the late poet's sister Norma. Oliver and Norma spent the next six to seven years at the estate organizing Edna St. Vincent Millay's papers.
Oliver studied at Ohio State University and Vassar College in the mid-1950s but did not receive a degree at either college.[1]
Career
Oliver worked at ''Steepletop'', Edna St. Vincent Millay's estate, as secretary to the poet's sister.[5] Her first collection of poems, No Voyage, and Other Poems, was published in 1963, when she was 28.[6] During the early 1980s, Oliver taught at Case Western Reserve University. Her fifth collection of poetry, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984.[7][1][8] She was Poet In Residence at Bucknell University (1986) and Margaret Banister Writer in Residence at Sweet Briar College (1991), then moved to Bennington, Vermont, where she held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College until 2001.[6]
She won the Christopher Award and the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award for House of Light (1990), and New and Selected Poems (1992) won the National Book Award.[1][9] Oliver's work turns to nature for inspiration and describes the sense of wonder it instilled in her. "When it's over" she wrote, "I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms" ("When Death Comes" from New and Selected Poems). Her collections Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (1999), Why I Wake Early (2004), and New and Selected Poems, Volume 2 (2004) build the themes. The first and second parts of Leaf and the Cloud are featured in The Best American Poetry 1999 and 2000,[10] and her essays appear in Best American Essays 1996, 1998, and 2001.[6] Oliver was the editor of the 2009 edition of Best American Essays.
Poetic identity
Oliver's poetry is grounded in memories of Ohio and her adopted home of New England. Provincetown is the principal setting for her work after she moved there in the 1960s.[4] Influenced by both Whitman and Thoreau, she is known for her clear and poignant observations of the natural world. According to the 1983 Chronology of American Literature, her collection American Primitive "presents a new kind of Romanticism that refuses to acknowledge boundaries between nature and the observing self."[11] Nature stirred her creativity, and Oliver, an avid walker, often pursued inspiration on foot. Her poems are filled with imagery from her daily walks near her home:[6] shore birds, water snakes, the phases of the moon, and humpback whales. In Long Life, she writes, "[I] go off to my woods, my ponds, my sun-filled harbor, no more than a blue comma on the map of the world but, to me, the emblem of everything."[4] She once said: "When things are going well, you know, the walk does not get rapid or get anywhere: I finally just stop and write. That's a successful walk!" She said she once found herself walking in the woods with no pen and later hid pencils in the trees so she would never be stuck like that again.[4] Oliver often carried a 3-by-5-inch hand-sewn notebook for recording impressions and phrases.[4] Maxine Kumin called her "a patroller of wetlands in the same way that Thoreau was an inspector of snowstorms."[12] Oliver said her favorite poets were Walt Whitman, Rumi, Hafez, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats.[3]
Oliver was also compared to Emily Dickinson, with whom she shared an affinity for solitude and inner monologues. Her poetry combines dark introspection with joyous release. Though criticized for writing poetry that assumes a close relationship between women and nature, she found that the self is only strengthened through immersion in the natural environment.[13] Oliver is also known for her straightforward language and accessible themes.[10] The Harvard Review describes her work as an antidote to "inattention and the baroque conventions of our social and professional lives. She is a poet of wisdom and generosity whose vision allows us to look intimately at a world not of our making."[10]
In 2007, The New York Times called Oliver "far and away, this country's best-selling poet."[14]
Personal life
On a visit to the town of Austerlitz, New York in the late 1950s, Oliver met photographer Molly Malone Cook, who became her partner for over 40 years.[4] In Our World, a book of Cook's photos and journal excerpts Oliver compiled after Cook's death, Oliver writes, "I took one look [at Cook] and fell, hook and tumble." Cook was Oliver's literary agent. They made their home largely in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where they lived until Cook's death in 2005, and where Oliver continued to live[10] until moving to Florida.[15] Of Provincetown, she said: "I too fell in love with the town, that marvelous convergence of land and water; Mediterranean light; fishermen who made their living by hard and difficult work from frighteningly small boats; and, both residents and sometime visitors, the many artists and writers.[...] M. and I decided to stay."[4]
Oliver valued her privacy and gave very few interviews, saying she preferred for her writing to speak for itself.[6]
Death
In 2012, Oliver was diagnosed with lung cancer, but was treated and given a "clean bill of health."[16] Oliver died of lymphoma on January 17, 2019, at the age of 83.[17][18][19]
Critical reception
In the Women's Review of Books, Maxine Kumin called Oliver an "indefatigable guide to the natural world, particularly to its lesser-known aspects."[12] Reviewing Dream Work for The Nation, critic Alicia Ostriker numbered Oliver among America's finest poets: "visionary as Emerson [... she is] among the few American poets who can describe and transmit ecstasy, while retaining a practical awareness of the world as one of predators and prey."[1] New York Times reviewer Bruce Bennetin wrote that American Primitive "insists on the primacy of the physical"[1] and Holly Prado of Los Angeles Times Book Review wrote that it "touches a vitality in the familiar that invests it with a fresh intensity."[1]
Vicki Graham suggests Oliver oversimplifies the affiliation of gender and nature: "Oliver's celebration of dissolution into the natural world troubles some critics: her poems flirt dangerously with romantic assumptions about the close association of women with nature that many theorists claim put the woman writer at risk."[13] In her article "The Language of Nature in the Poetry of Mary Oliver", Diane S. Bond writes, "few feminists have wholeheartedly appreciated Oliver's work, and though some critics have read her poems as revolutionary reconstructions of the female subject, others remain skeptical that identification with nature can empower women."[20] In The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, Sue Russell wrote, "Oliver will never be a balladeer of contemporary lesbian life in the vein of Marilyn Hacker, or an important political thinker like Adrienne Rich; but the fact that she chooses not to write from a similar political or narrative stance makes her all the more valuable to our collective culture."[21]
Selected awards and honors
- 1969/70 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.[6]
- 1980 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship[6]
- 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for American Primitive[8]
- 1991 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for House of Light[22]
- 1992 National Book Award for Poetry for New and Selected Poems[9]
- 1998 Lannan Literary Award for poetry[6]
- 1998 Honorary Doctorate from The Art Institute of Boston[6]
- 2003 Honorary membership into Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard University.[23]
- 2007 Honorary Doctorate Dartmouth College[6]
- 2008 Honorary Doctorate Tufts University[6]
- 2012 Honorary Doctorate from Marquette University[24]
- 2012 Goodreads Choice Award for Best Poetry for A Thousand Mornings[25]
Works
Poetry collections
- 1963 No Voyage, and Other Poems Dent (New York, NY), expanded edition, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1965.
- 1972 The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems Harcourt (New York, NY) ISBN 978-0-15-177750-1
- 1978 The Night Traveler Bits Press
- 1978 Sleeping in the Forest Ohio University (a 12-page chapbook, p. 49–60 in The Ohio Review—Vol. 19, No. 1 [Winter 1978])
- 1979 Twelve Moons Little, Brown (Boston, MA), ISBN 0316650013
- 1983 American Primitive Little, Brown (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-316-65004-5
- 1986 Dream Work Atlantic Monthly Press (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-87113-069-3
- 1987 Provincetown Appletree Alley, limited edition with woodcuts by Barnard Taylor
- 1990 House of Light Beacon Press (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-8070-6810-6
- 1992 New and Selected Poems [volume one] Beacon Press (Boston, MA), ISBN 978-0-8070-6818-2
- 1994 White Pine: Poems and Prose Poems Harcourt (San Diego, CA) ISBN 978-0-15-600120-5
- 1995 Blue Pastures Harcourt (New York, NY) ISBN 978-0-15-600215-8
- 1997 West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-395-85085-5
- 1999 Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-395-85087-9
- 2000 The Leaf and the Cloud Da Capo (Cambridge, Massachusetts), (prose poem) ISBN 978-0-306-81073-2
- 2002 What Do We Know Da Capo (Cambridge, Massachusetts) ISBN 978-0-306-81206-4
- 2003 Owls and Other Fantasies: poems and essays Beacon (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-8070-6868-7
- 2004 Why I Wake Early: New Poems Beacon (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-8070-6879-3
- 2004 Blue Iris: Poems and Essays Beacon (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-8070-6882-3
- 2004 Wild geese: selected poems, Bloodaxe, ISBN 978-1-85224-628-0
- 2005 New and Selected Poems, volume two Beacon (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-8070-6886-1
- 2005 At Blackwater Pond: Mary Oliver Reads Mary Oliver (audio cd)
- 2006 Thirst: Poems (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-8070-6896-0
- 2007 Our World with photographs by Molly Malone Cook, Beacon (Boston, MA)
- 2008 The Truro Bear and Other Adventures: Poems and Essays, Beacon Press, ISBN 978-0-8070-6884-7
- 2008 Red Bird Beacon (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-8070-6892-2
- 2009 Evidence Beacon (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-8070-6898-4
- 2010 Swan: Poems and Prose Poems (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-8070-6899-1
- 2012 A Thousand Mornings Penguin (New York, NY) ISBN 978-1-59420-477-7
- 2013 Dog Songs Penguin Press (New York, NY) ISBN 978-1-59420-478-4
- 2014 Blue Horses Penguin Press (New York, NY) ISBN 978-1-59420-479-1
- 2015 Felicity Penguin Press (New York, NY) ISBN 978-1-59420-676-4
- 2017 Devotions The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver Penguin Press (New York, NY) ISBN 978-0-399-56324-9
Non-fiction books and other collections
- 1994 A Poetry Handbook Harcourt (San Diego, CA) ISBN 978-0-15-672400-5
- 1998 Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-395-85086-2
- 2004 Long Life: Essays and Other Writings Da Capo (Cambridge, Massachusetts) ISBN 978-0-306-81412-9
- 2016 Upstream: Selected Essays Penguin (New York, NY) ISBN 978-1-594-20670-2
Works in translation
Catalan
- 2018 Ocell Roig (translated by Corina Oproae) Bilingual Edition. Godall Edicions.
See also
- Poppies, poem by Mary Oliver
- In Blackwater Woods, poem by Mary Oliver
- Lesbian Poetry
References
- "Poetry Foundation Oliver biography". Retrieved September 7, 2010.
- Ratiner, Steve (December 9, 1992). "Poet Mary Oliver: a Solitary Walk". Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved March 6, 2018.
- "Maria Shriver Interviews the Famously Private Poet Mary Oliver". Oprah.com. Retrieved November 30, 2018.
- Duenwald, Mary. (July 5, 2009.) "The Land and Words of Mary Oliver, the Bard of Provincetown". New York Times. Retrieved September 7, 2010.
- Stevenson, Mary Reif (1969). Contemporary Authors. USA: Fredrick G. Ruffner Jr. p. 395.
- Mary Oliver's bio at publisher Beacon Press (note that original link is dead; see version archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20090508075809/http://www.beacon.org/contributorinfo.cfm?ContribID=1299 ; retrieved October 19, 2015).
- "Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet Mary Oliver Dies at 83". The New York Times. Associated Press. January 17, 2019. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved January 17, 2019.
- ""Poetry: Past winners & finalists by category". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved April 8, 2012.
- "National Book Awards–1992". National Book Foundation. Retrieved April 8, 2012.
- "Oliver Biography". Academy of American Poets. Retrieved September 12, 2012.
- "The Chronology of American Literature". 2004.[permanent dead link]
- Kumin, Maxine. "Intimations of Mortality". Women's Review of Books 10: April 7, 1993, p. 16.
- Graham, p. 352
- Garner, Dwight. (February 18, 2007.) "Inside the List". New York Times. Retrieved September 7, 2010.
- Tippett, Krista (February 5, 2015). "Mary Oliver — Listening to the World". On Being. Archived from the original on November 11, 2016. Retrieved September 6, 2020.
- Helgeson, Mariah (February 16, 2015). "Mary Oliver's Cancer Poem". On Being. Retrieved January 20, 2019.
- Neary, Lynn (January 17, 2019). "Beloved Poet Mary Oliver Who Believed Poetry Mustn't Be Fancy Dies at 83". NPR. Retrieved January 20, 2019.
- Parini, Jay (February 15, 2019). "Mary Oliver obituary". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved February 18, 2019.
- "Mary Oliver". Poetry Foundation. May 7, 2019. Retrieved May 8, 2019.
- Bond, p. 1
- Russell, pp. 21–22.
- "Book awards: L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award". Library Thing. Retrieved July 18, 2016.
- "Phi Beta Kappa • Remembering Phi Beta Kappa member and poet Mary".
- Lawder, Melanie (November 14, 2012). "Poet Mary Oliver receives honorary degree". The Marquette Tribune. Archived from the original on March 5, 2013. Retrieved December 6, 2012.
- "Goodreads Choice Awards 2012". Goodreads. Retrieved July 18, 2016.
Sources
- Bond, Diane. "The Language of Nature in the Poetry of Mary Oliver." Womens Studies 21:1 (1992), p. 1.
- Graham, Vicki. "'Into the Body of Another': Mary Oliver and the Poetics of Becoming Other." Papers on Language and Literature, 30:4 (Fall 1994), pp. 352–353, pp. 366–368.
- McNew, Janet. "Mary Oliver and the Tradition of Romantic Nature Poetry". Contemporary Literature, 30:1 (Spring 1989).
- "Oliver, Mary." American Environmental Leaders: From Colonial Times to the Present, Anne Becher, and Joseph Richey, Grey House Publishing, 2nd edition, 2008. Credo Reference.
- Russell, Sue. "Mary Oliver: The Poet and the Persona." The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, 4:4 (Fall 1997), pp. 21–22.
- "1992." The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt, Houghton Mifflin, 1st edition, 2004. Credo Reference
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Mary Oliver, 83, Prize-Winning Poet of the Natural World, Is Dead
Mary Oliver, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose work, with its plain language and minute attention to the natural world, drew a wide following while dividing critics, died on Thursday at her home in Hobe Sound, Fla. She was 83.
Her literary executor, Bill Reichblum, confirmed the death. Ms. Oliver had been treated for lymphoma, which was first diagnosed in 2015.
A prolific writer with more than 20 volumes of verse to her credit, Ms. Oliver received a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for her collection “American Primitive,” published by Little, Brown & Company. She won a National Book Award in 1992 for “New and Selected Poems,” published by Beacon Press.
Ms. Oliver, whose work appeared often in The New Yorker and other magazines, was a phenomenon: a poet whose work sold strongly. Her books frequently appeared on the best-seller list of the Poetry Foundation, which uses data from Nielsen BookScan, a service that tracks book sales, putting her on a par with Billy Collins, the former poet laureate of the United States, as one of the best-selling poets in the country.
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Her poems, which are built of unadorned language and accessible imagery, have a pedagogical, almost homiletic quality. It was this, combined with their relative brevity, that seemed to endear her work to a broad public, including clerics, who quoted it in their sermons; poetry therapists, who found its uplifting sensibility well suited to their work; composers, like Ronald Perera and Augusta Read Thomas, who set it to music; and celebrities like Laura Bush and Maria Shriver.
All this, combined with the throngs that turned out for her public readings, conspired to give Ms. Oliver, fairly late in life, the aura of a reluctant, bookish rock star.
Throughout her work, Ms. Oliver was occupied with intimate observations of flora and fauna, as many of her titles — “Mushrooms,” “Egrets,” “The Swan,” “The Rabbit,” “The Waterfall” — attest. Read on one level, these poems are sensualist still lifes: Often set in and around the woods, marshes and tide pools of Provincetown, Mass., where she lived for more than 40 years, they offer impeccable descriptions of the land and its nonhuman tenants in a spare, formally conservative, conversational style.
In “Spring,” here in its entirety, she wrote:
I lift my face to the pale flowers
of the rain. They’re soft as linen,
clean as holy water. Meanwhile
my dog runs off, noses down packed leaves
into damp, mysterious tunnels.
He says the smells are rising now
stiff and lively; he says the beasts
are waking up now full of oil,
sleep sweat, tag-ends of dreams. The rain
rubs its shining hands all over me.
My dog returns and barks fiercely, he says
each secret body is the richest advisor ,
deep in the black earth such fuming
nuggets of joy!
For her abiding communion with nature, Ms. Oliver was often compared to Walt Whitman and Robert Frost. For her quiet, measured observations, and for her fiercely private personal mien (she gave many readings but few interviews, saying she wanted her work to speak for itself), she was likened to Emily Dickinson.
Ms. Oliver often described her vocation as the observation of life, and it is clear from her texts that she considered the vocation a quasi-religious one. Her poems — those about nature as well as those on other subjects — are suffused with a pulsating, almost mystical spirituality, as in the work of the American Transcendentalists or English poets like William Blake and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
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Readers were also drawn to Ms. Oliver’s poems by their quality of confiding intimacy; to read one is to accompany her on one of her many walks through the woods or by the shore. Poems often came to her on these walks, and she prepared for this eventuality by secreting pencils in the woods near her home .
Throughout Ms. Oliver’s career, critical reception of her work was mixed. Some reviewers were put off by the surface simplicity of her poems and, in later years, by her populist reach. Reviewing her first collection, “No Voyage,” in The New York Times Book Review in 1965, James Dickey wrote, “She is good, but predictably good,” adding:
“She never seems quite to be in her poems, as adroit as some of them are, but is always outside them, putting them together from the available literary elements.”
More recently, David Orr, the poetry columnist for The New York Times Book Review, was even more dismissive. In 2011, he referred to Ms. Oliver as a writer “about whose poetry one can only say that no animals appear to have been harmed in the making of it.” (That comment drew a retort from Ruth Franklin of The New Yorker, who wrote in an admiring article about Ms. Oliver in 2017, “The joke falls flat, considering how much of Oliver’s work revolves around the violence of the natural world.”)
Ms. Oliver’s champions argued that what lay beneath her work’s seemingly unruffled surface was a dark, brooding undertow, which together with the surface constituted a cleareyed exploration of the individual’s place in the cosmos.
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“Her corpus is deceptively elementary,” the writer Alice Gregory says in an essay on the website of the Poetry Foundation. “But you miss a lot by allowing the large language to overshadow the more muted connective tissue. Paying such crude attention will not grant you the fortifying effects Oliver has to offer.”
Mary Oliver was born on Sept. 10, 1935, in Cleveland to Edward and Helen (Vlasak) Oliver, and grew up in Maple Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. Her father was a teacher and her mother a secretary at an elementary school.
In one of her rare interviews, with Ms. Shriver in O: The Oprah Magazine in 2011, Ms. Oliver spoke of having been sexually abused as a child, though she did not elaborate.
“I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood,” she told Ms. Shriver. “So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.”
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Leaving home as a teenager — she would study briefly at Ohio State University and Vassar College but took no degree — Ms. Oliver spontaneously drove to Steepletop, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s former home in Austerlitz, N.Y., near the Massachusetts border. Ms. Oliver lived at Steepletop for the next half-dozen years, helping Millay’s sister Norma organize her papers.
In the late 1950s, on a return visit to Steepletop, Ms. Oliver met Molly Malone Cook , a photographer, who became her life partner and literary agent. Ms. Cook died in 2005. No immediate family members survive.
Ms. Oliver taught at Bennington College and elsewhere. Her other poetry collections include “The River Styx, Ohio” (1972), “House of Light” (1990), “The Leaf and the Cloud” (2000), “Evidence” (2009), “Blue Horses” (2014) and “Felicity” (2015).
Her prose books include two about the craft of poetry, “Rules for the Dance” (1998) and “A Poetry Handbook” (1994), and “Long Life: Essays and Other Writings” (2004).
Given its seeming contradiction — shallow and profound, uplifting and elegiac — Ms. Oliver’s verse is perhaps best read as poetic portmanteau, one that binds up both the primal joy and the primal melancholy of being alive.
For her, each had at its core a similar wild ecstasy. In one of her best-known poems, “When Death Comes,” she wrote:
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
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"Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift."
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Molly Malone Cook | |
|---|---|
 Photo: Barbara S. Cheresh | |
| Born | January 5, 1925 |
| Died | August 25, 2005 (aged 80) |
| Occupation | Photographer |
| Partner | Mary Oliver |
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Molly Malone Cook (January 5, 1925 – August 25, 2005) was an American photographer.[1] Despite being employed professionally as a photographer for only a short time,[1] Cook left behind an extensive collection of printed photographs and negatives, taken throughout her adult life.[2] Cook worked with and photographed dozens of iconic artists and famous faces such as Lorraine Hansberry, Norman Mailer, Eleanor Roosevelt and John Waters.
Career
Cook's interest in photography began while she was working for the US government in Europe. Upon returning to the United States she was employed as one of the first photographers for The Village Voice.[3] The Village Voice was an alternative weekly publication, which acted as a platform for creatives in New York City, beginning circulation in 1955 and ending in 2018.[citation needed] While creating content for the publication, Cook photographed poet Jean Cocteau, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, Eleanor Roosevelt, Robert Motherwell, writer Norman Mailer, and many other famous artists, writers and icons of the time period.[1]
After moving to Provincetown, Massachusetts, with her partner Mary Oliver in the 1960s, Cook opened the first photographic gallery on the east coast; the VII Photographers studio.[1] The studio represented many successful photographers such as Bernice Abbott, Eugene Atget, and Edward Steichen.[4] The studio notably sold prints by Ansel Adams for $35.[1] At that time, photography was considered an art form by relatively few people; although patrons were frequent, the studio could not be sustained financially, and Cook closed her doors only a few years after opening.[3]
Cook moved on to open the East End Bookshop, where she selectively stocked the shelves based on her personal judgment of quality of the literature.[3] In 1966 Cook hired the soon-to-be famous American filmmaker John Waters, with whom she would maintain a relationship for nearly the next 40 years.[citation needed] When her health began showing signs of decline in 1969, Cook closed the bookshop.[1]
In the 1970s, Cook worked as a literary agent for Oliver, among other writers, as well as an assistant to Norman Mailer.[3] During her time working as Oliver's agent, at any time that the couple received a telephone call for Oliver, Cook would pretend to be her, and many editors would play along.[5]
Personal life
Cook and Mary Oliver lived together in Provincetown, Massachusetts, after first meeting at the former home of poet Edna St Vincent Millay in the late 1950s.[3] Oliver dedicated many works to Cook, and while accepting the National Book Award in 1992 she publicly thanked Cook, saying "Molly Malone Cook, the best reader anyone could have. She is the light of my life".[3] After Cook's death in 2005, Oliver published Our World; a compilation of Cook's journal entries and photography, accompanied by memories, prose and poetry written by Oliver.[5]
Throughout her profession, Cook developed friendships with American artists such as playwright Lorraine Hansberry, writer Norman Mailer and director John Waters.[3] Waters is said to have brought magazines and newspapers to Cook's home every day towards the end of her illness.[3]
After being put up for adoption as an infant, Cook spent her adulthood interested in discovering her own ancestry.[1][4] Cook and Oliver visited Virginia several times with the intent of doing so. Among her discoveries, Cook found that she was related to Judith Jefferson, the aunt of Thomas Jefferson.[3] Cook was eventually able to meet her birth parents.[1]
References
- Roush, Jason (2008). "Epitaph to a Photographer". Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide. 15 (4): 50 – via Gale Database.
- Reynolds, Susan Salter (January 6, 2008). "A time for us". Los Angeles Times. ISSN 0458-3035. Retrieved November 20, 2018.
- Stone, Martha E. (January–February 2006). "Passages 2005". Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide. 13 (1): 10.
- "Molly Malone Cook". The Independent. September 7, 2005. Retrieved November 20, 2018.
- Kossman, Patricia A. (December 10, 2007). "Deck the shelves with books aplenty". America Magazine.
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Molly Malone Cook | The Independent | The Independent
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Molly Malone Cook
Photographer, gallerist and literary agent
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Molly Malone Cook was a great Bohemian American. An accomplished photographer in her own right, she set up the first photographic gallery on the East Coast, was sometime assistant to the writer Norman Mailer, and lived with Mary Oliver, perhaps America's best-loved living poet. Even in the last decade of her life she remained - perhaps more than ever - a fearless spirit of immaculate taste and fierce opinions, stocky of build, with a shock of white hair. "She could be acerbic, but underneath it, she was the warmest woman I've ever met," as her friend the publisher Helene Atwan observed.
Cook lived with Oliver in the Bohemian enclave of Provincetown, at the end of Cape Cod's outstretched arm; a place historically home to artists, writers and, latterly, tourists and gays. Its Commercial Street runs the gamut of American life: from sandy windswept beaches to the west, through a town centre thronged with transvestites and day-trippers with baby-buggies, to the East End, aestival home to Waspy families on vacation. It was here, in the quieter end of town, that Cook and Oliver made their year-round seaside home. The pair kept a boat, captained by Cook (with help from their young friend Josiah Mayo) like some salty sea-dog. After clam pasta, the pair would sail their friends out into the bay, lulled by the waves, keeping the conversation moving along with their dry double act.
Molly Malone Cook was born in San Francisco, and grew up idolising Frank Sinatra and Perry Como. She spent her early twenties travelling in Europe, where she worked for the US government in Heidelberg and began to be interested in photography. In New York, she worked as a photographer for the newly established Village Voice, but soon followed a well-worn path to Provincetown - then the summer home of writers such as Norman Mailer, and painters such as Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko. There she set up her ground-breaking photographic gallery. The VII Photographers' Studio represented the work of Edward Steichen, Berenice Abbott and Eugene Atget, among others, but it was an era when photography was yet to be rated as an art in itself. Indeed, when Cook asked Steichen to join her roster, he said, "Are you rich or crazy?" Her reply was typical of her laconic wit: "I'm not rich."
The gallery was well patronised, but it did not pay the rent. Cook diversified with her idiosyncratic East End Bookshop, purveying what she deemed "good literature"; a rep who tried to sell her Jacqueline Susann's The Valley of the Dolls was sent away with a flea in her ear. None the less, in 1966 Cook had the acumen to hire a six-foot-one, skinny speed-freak with long hair and a pencil moustache. It was the beginning of a 40-year friendship with John Waters, who was about to shock the movie world with such counter-cultural landmarks as Pink Flamingoes (1972) and Female Trouble (1974). In his book Shock Value (1981), Waters wrote,
I really wanted to work in the bookstore owned by Molly Malone Cook, a wonderfully gruff woman who allowed her help to be rude to obnoxious tourist customers. I nagged her for a job until she finally gave in and let me work "when it rained" to take care of all the tourists who flocked in from the beach.
Waters adds,
She was beautiful and grumpy and smart in both senses of the word - brainy and fashionable at the same time. She was my Bohemian mother and father in a way.
Cook continued to work as a professional photographer, making portraits of such luminaries as Eleanor Roosevelt, Walker Evans, Robert Motherwell and Adlai Stevenson, but her career was cut short by the breathing problems which were later to curtail her life: her lungs were unable to cope with the chemicals of the darkroom. Meanwhile, her relationship with the playwright Lorraine Hansberry - author of To Be Young, Gifted and Black and A Raisin in the Sun, the first drama by a black woman to be produced on Broadway (in 1959) - ended with Hansberry's early death from cancer, aged 34, in 1965.
Cook had met Mary Oliver in 1958, at the former home of the poet Edna St Vincent Millay in upstate New York - the two women having come to visit Millay's sister Norma. Six years later Cook and Oliver moved into a Provincetown boathouse owned by one of the port's Portuguese families, the Seguras. They travelled together on Oliver's trips to give readings or classes, and spent several years visiting Virginia in search of Cook's Southern roots - she was delighted to discover that her ancestry stretched back to Judith Jefferson, aunt of President Thomas Jefferson.
In the 1970s, Cook worked as assistant to another friend and near neighbour. Norman Mailer had summered in Provincetown since the 1950s, memorably describing it to Jacqueline Kennedy as "the Wild West of the East". The famously irascible writer's relationship with Cook was colourful, to say the least: both were strong-willed personalities, with deeply entrenched opinions of their own. Their friendship ended on a down note, yet both still spoke of each other with affection.
Cook went on to establish her own literary agency, representing Mary Oliver and other writers; "I know I wouldn't want to have to negotiate with her," says Waters. Cook was duly proud when Oliver - who dedicated many of her exquisite works to her partner - won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1984 collection, American Primitive. In 1992, when Oliver won the National Book Award for her New and Selected Poems, she turned her acceptance speech into a tribute to "Molly Malone Cook, the best reader anybody could ever have. She is the light of my life, and I'd like to thank her publicly."
Molly and Mary were at their best in Provincetown. Their house seemed to have grown around them. Its windows looked out from grey-shingled walls on to the limpid light of Cape Cod Bay and past the harbour breakwater, where schools of dolphins swam. At night they watched the blinking green light of Long Point lighthouse. Their rooms were filled with light, books, people and animals, all seemingly spilling in from the beach that ran outside their back door. The walls were equally filled, with an extraordinary array of art; from Molly's own photographs, to a rare screenprint advertising an appearance by Andy Warhol and the Exploding Plastic Inevitable in Provincetown.
And here, even as she was increasingly disabled by illness, Molly Malone Cook sat in splendour, drinking in all the local gossip while scanning the piles of magazines and papers John Waters brought her each day. When I last saw her, in July, sitting up in bed, she was as thirsty for news as ever, as she watched the boats sail past her window.
Philip Hoare
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A time for us - Los Angeles Times
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A time for us
USED to be, if you telephoned the poet Mary Oliver, her partner Molly Cook would invariably answer. She’d ask you to hold on a moment, feign footsteps and return to the phone as Oliver, making no pretense at a different voice (editors across the country routinely played along). Cook was, for many years, Oliver’s agent. Oliver, everyone understood, was a bit of a recluse. She needed nature and solitude to create her poems. “Writers must . . . take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems,” she wrote in “A Poetry Handbook.” Cook, who died in 2005 of lung cancer, at 80, was the sociable one.
These days the phone goes pretty much unanswered. “From the complications of loving you,” Oliver wrote in “A Pretty Song,” “I think there is no end or return. / No answer, no coming out of it. / Which is the only way to love, isn’t it?”
Molly Malone Cook was a photographer, but she was far more comfortable promoting the work of others (Edward Steichen, Berenice Abbott, Minor White, Harry Callahan and Ansel Adams, to name a few) in her Provincetown gallery than with the idea of making her own work public. Cook wouldn’t put her photographs into a book, no matter how often people, including Oliver, asked. After she died, Oliver decided to do it. She went through thousands of negatives, many never printed, and boxes and boxes of photographs.
Oliver notes, in her accompanying text, that her own work often prompts readers and reviewers to comment on the keen quality of her attention. But watching Cook take her photographs and work in the darkroom, she writes, “and no less watching the intensity and openness with which she dealt with friends, and strangers too, taught me what real attention is about. Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness -- an empathy -- was necessary if the attention was to matter. Such openness and empathy M. had in abundance, and gave away freely.”
The photographs Oliver has chosen reflect Cook’s intuitive relationship with her subjects (even inanimate objects). The little girl on the stoop in New York City looks directly at the photographer, as does a kindly Robert Motherwell and a fierce, almost intimidating Walker Evans. Even though most of the photographs are dominated by a central person or object, there is a lot to look at in the margins, all part of the story. The stance of her subjects -- reading a book, looking through a telescope -- is always distinctive, creating the mood of the entire composition. The two photos of Oliver could have been taken only by someone who knew the subject well.
Several paragraphs on how the couple ate (simply, and often things that Oliver found on walks near their home, in Provincetown, Mass. -- blackberries, bolete mushrooms, orach, clams, mussels) are a fond recollection of a time when there was not much money but plenty of love and creativity and determination. “In all our time together we were rarely separated,” Oliver writes. “Three or four times I went away to teach, but usually M. would come with me, and we simply made our home, temporarily, somewhere else. And, while I always loved the stillness I found in the fields and the woods, our house was a different thing, and I loved that too. We were talkers -- about our work, our pasts, our friends, our ideas ordinary and far-fetched. We would often wake before there was light in the sky and make coffee and let our minds rattle our tongues. We would end in exhaustion and elation. Not many nights or early mornings later, we would do the same. It was a forty-year conversation.”
Cook taught the poet “to see,” Oliver writes, “with searching compassion.”
AND so, to look at these beautiful, artful, simple, photographs feels strangely intimate. As it does to meet the poet -- still raw, two years after Cook’s death -- in their house overlooking Cape Cod Bay. On this fall day, the water a bright expanse of broken glass, she has agreed to be interviewed, only for the sake of the photographs. She sits curled on the sofa in a black sweat shirt and blue jeans, with a broken wrist from a tussle on the beach with Percy, her dog, and a bad case of bronchitis. “Wasn’t it Emerson who said ‘My life is for itself and not for a spectacle’?” she remarks. “I have a happy, full, good life because I hold it private.”
Through the windows behind Oliver, one can see gannets diving into the water. A friend comes to take Percy for a walk. The house, which was once her office, is full of animals. Apologies for shabbiness. There’s a huge Audubon lithograph of a barn owl in the hall. Upstairs are shells, necklaces and talismans. Over the bed are three of Cook’s photos. In the corner, with the finest view of the water, is a bed for Percy. Oliver gets up early, at 5, and goes to bed early, except during the baseball season.
Oliver grew up in Ohio. She began writing poetry when she was 13. Writing and walking in the woods were both avenues of escape, but the poet doesn’t believe in writing as therapy, or even, really, in talking about her past. “I grew up in a confused house; too much unwanted attention or none at all,” she says, and adds, quoting Rainer Maria Rilke, “ ‘You must change your life.’ This is another thing death teaches you. Everything vanishes; not a thing matters.”
In 1953, when she was 17, Oliver paid her first visit to the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay, in upstate New York; later, she would move in and help Millay’s sister organize the poet’s papers. Millay, who died in 1950, was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Oliver remembers this period with a combination of reverence for Millay and gratitude that she had the good sense to leave Millay’s world before getting too mired in someone else’s life and work. But it was there, in 1958, that she met Molly Cook. Six years later, the two women moved into the house by the bay. Cook had opened the VII Photographer’s Studio in Provincetown in 1960 (before photography was fully respected as an art form) and shortly after that the East End Bookshop. In 1966, Cook hired an assistant, countercultural filmmaker John Waters, who later described her as “a wonderfully gruff woman who allowed her help to be rude to obnoxious tourist customers.”
In the 1970s, Oliver and Cook worked as amanuenses for Norman Mailer, who summered for decades in Provincetown, in (Oliver notes with some amusement) the only brick house on Commercial Street. Mailer referred to his relationship with the two of them, she tells me, as “his best marriage.” (For a recluse, Oliver is inordinately fond of the literary anecdote. About a third of our conversation is gleefully “off the record.”)
The poet and the photographer were full of respect for each other’s creativity. “I never showed my poems to anyone but Molly,” Oliver says, sipping a glass of white wine. “She rarely said ‘good.’ She often said, ‘You don’t need that word,’ or, ‘Kill the adjectives.’ Molly wrote a few poems herself” -- Oliver smiles, a little wickedly -- “but they were quite awful.”
Oliver won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1983 collection, “American Primitive,” and a National Book Award in 1992 for “New and Selected Poems.” In her acceptance speech for the latter, she acknowledged Molly Cook as “the best reader anybody could ever have. She is the light of my life, and I’d like to thank her publicly.”
Oliver is an ecstatic poet, in the tradition of Shelley, Keats, Hopkins, Yeats and Whitman. She believes in beauty and in the responsibility of the poet to elevate the soul. She thinks she has sometimes come perilously close to a kind of rapture in nature -- the Stendhal Syndrome (most famously attributed to Van Gogh), in which the viewer achieves a kind of ecstasy, literally crazy over beauty. “The natural world is full of small and large miracles,” she says. In “Blue Pastures,” a collection of essays about writing, she referred to nature as an “antidote to confusion” and language as a “tool of consciousness.”
“I’d rather write about polar bears than people,” she tells me. “The natural world for me is safe and beautiful and leads to sublime thoughts. Beauty leads to virtue. Poetry speaks to that natural world.”
She is also a poet of sounds (mutes, liquids and aspirates), playful with language, though she has written in “A Poetry Handbook,” and elsewhere, about the formal structure of the poetic line.
IT is astonishing that she has been able to maintain such distance from her readers. Just weeks before our interview, the editorial page editor of the Boston Globe named Oliver one of the seven wonders of Massachusetts (along with MIT, the Big Dig and the Great Salt Marsh). It’s a quiet cult but widespread and fervid: Her poems pop up at many of life’s turning points, including death. Readers go to her for solace, regeneration and inspiration. Her name is passed between generations, with a knowing look. After a few hours in her quiet, exuberant presence, one feels as though the raw sunlight in the room, the brightness of the water, the white wood and flashing wings outside the window are bleaching unimportant details from the day.
“A consonant cannot be perfectly uttered till joined to a vowel,” Oliver declaimed in “A Poetry Handbook.” The last photographs in “Our World” are of Oliver, lean in the arms and ankles but with a lushness about the mouth. There’s an endless youthfulness in them -- something summery and wind-swept. “A Pretty Song” continues:
This isn’t a playground, this is
earth, our heaven, for a while.
Therefore I have given precedence
to all my sudden, sullen, dark moods
that hold you in the center of my world.
And I say to my body: grow thinner still.
And I say to my fingers, type me a pretty song.
And I say to my heart: rave on. *
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