One of the America’s most popular poets finds her inspiration in an unconventional way: on frequent walks through the forest with a small hand-sewn notebook in her back pocket, brandishing pencils she had previously hidden in trees so sudden ideas would never leave her bereft of something to write with. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Mary Oliver pulls much of her subject matter from the nature that she immerses herself in. She is intensely private and secretive, preferring instead “to let her poetry speak for itself” (Duenwald). Oliver’s highly commended work is dedicated to her late partner of over 40 decades, Molly Malone Cook, an established photographer responsible for many of the photographs available of the seclusive Oliver (Popova). Drawing inspiration from her Ohio childhood and Provincetown home, Oliver’s unique style of poetry features straightforward imagery that is easy to …show more content…
Perhaps it is this presence of everyday subject matter and natural beauty that has made Oliver so accessible and popular, but it is the profound questions that she ponders in her work that have made her such a distinguished and honored poet (Yaros). Oliver’s New and Selected Poems Volume One is a collection of her greatest poems from almost thirty years, including the poem “The Moths”. Typical of her traditional natural settings and deep philosophical questions, this poem’s unidentified narrator details observations of a forest populated with white fluttering moths and ponders the impermanence and powerlessness of all life.
The imagery in the first stanza creates a visually tangible setting, ensuring that everything that happens has a physical, sensory element in addition to the symbolism or metaphors also present. By opening with the explanation that “There’s a kind of white moth, I don’t know / what kind” (Oliver lines 1-2),
Annie Turnbo Malone was an entrepreneur and was also a chemist. She became a millionaire by making some hair products for some black women. She gave most of her money away to charity and to promote the African American. She was born on august 9, 1869, and was the tenth child out of eleven children that where born by Robert and Isabella turnbo. Annie’s parents died when she was young so her older sister took care of her until she was old enough to take care of herself.
Kathleen Orr, popularly known as Kathy Orr is a meteorologist for the Fox 29 Weather Authority team on WTXF in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was born on October 19, 1965 and grew up in Westckave, Geddes, New York with her family. The information about her parents and her siblings are still unknown. As per bio obtained online, Kathy Orr is also an author. She has written a number of books like Seductive Deceiver, The drifter's revenge and many others. She graduated in Public Communications from S. I. Newhouse which is affiliated to Syracuse University.
Mary Oliver was a famous poet and nature-lover, she used nature as center of her poetries. She was observant and thoughtful, which endowed her poetry a unique charm and depth. In her poem “The Black Snake” also manifests everything in the natural world is equal. This poem narrated that the speaker found a black snake was killed by a truck and thus to start thinking death and life. Meanwhile, Mary’s poetic language also has strong power. This poetry is a simplicity and short but she used many elements of poetry to make this poetry more profound and meaningful, and the symbolism and figures of speech are the two main element in “The Black Snake”. Figures of speech brings value
An influential American printmaker and painter as she was known for impressionist style in the 1880s, which reflected her ideas of the modern women and created artwork that displayed the maternal embrace between women and children; Mary Cassatt was truly the renowned artist in the 19th century. Cassatt exhibited her work regularly in Pennsylvania where she was born and raised in 1844. However, she spent most of her life in France where she was discovered by her mentor Edgar Degas who was the very person that gave her the opportunity that soon made one of the only American female Impressionist in Paris. An exhibition of Japanese woodblock Cassatt attends in Paris inspired her as she took upon creating a piece called, “Maternal Caress” (1890-91), a print of mother captured in a tender moment where she caress her child in an experimental dry-point etching by the same artist who never bared a child her entire life. Cassatt began to specialize in the portrayal of children with mother and was considered to be one of the greatest interpreters in the late 1800s.
This anthology is beautifully diverse and unique. Although the poems are new, they take reader back in time through issues that are relevant to the 21st century life. Most of the poems are experimental form probably because the poets are trying to get their voices heard by doing new things, which I think work well for a majority of these poems and others, not so much. Analicia Sotelo’s “I’m Trying to Write a Poem About A Virgin and It’s Painful” is an experimental prose form, and it’s beautiful. A part of the poem reads, “Some people said I should take her out of the poem. Other people said No, take her out of the lake and put her in the bedroom” (40). The poet making the process of writing a poem the poem itself is something new for me. The contrast in this piece also works well, although I still do not understand the metaphor of the lake. Also, Damian Caudill has a beautiful form in “Tuesday Ordinary.” The form and the style seem experimental but worthwhile. The poem is written from the perspective of Trayvon Martin’s hoodie, which many, especially in the African-American community believed contributed to his murder. The depth of thought that might have gone into the penning of this poem is commendable. However, I did not think this experimental form works well for “It was a miracle route everyone had been searching for and the story caused a sensation” on page 5. The later part of the first section left me with the question, “why is this a poem, or included in a poem? And I find it hard to comprehend why these different sections are fused under one poem. Also in Kara Kai Wang’s “Idiom,” I find the footnote alienating as a reader, because of the language used. I would have preferred if the footnoted words are in another languag...
Nature’s beauty has the ability to both entice its audience and frighten them. Mary Oliver in her passage explains her experiences with the two sides of nature. Her experiences with the owls elicit both an awe response and a frightened one. In connection, her experiences with a field of flowers draws a similar response where she is both astonished by them and overwhelmed. Oliver’s complex responses display the two sides of nature. It's ability to be both captivating yet overwhelming in its complexity. In “Owl” Mary Oliver uses descriptions of nature demonstrated by owls and fields of flowers in order to convey her complex responses to the two sides of nature.
Mary Bryant was in the group of the first convicts (and the only female convict) to ever escape from the Australian shores. Mary escaped from a penal colony which often is a remote place to escape from and is a place for prisoners to be separated. The fact that Bryant escaped from Australia suggests that she was a very courageous person, this was a trait most convicts seemed to loose once they were sentenced to transportation. This made her unique using the convicts.
Therefore, Oliver’s incorporation of imagery, setting, and mood to control the perspective of her own poem, as well as to further build the contrast she establishes through the speaker, serves a critical role in creating the lesson of the work. Oliver’s poem essentially gives the poet an ultimatum; either he can go to the “cave behind all that / jubilation” (10-11) produced by a waterfall to “drip with despair” (14) without disturbing the world with his misery, or, instead, he can mimic the thrush who sings its poetry from a “green branch” (15) on which the “passing foil of the water” (16) gently brushes its feathers. The contrast between these two images is quite pronounced, and the intention of such description is to persuade the audience by setting their mood towards the two poets to match that of the speaker. The most apparent difference between these two depictions is the gracelessness of the first versus the gracefulness of the second. Within the poem’s content, the setting has been skillfully intertwined with both imagery and mood to create an understanding of the two poets, whose surroundings characterize them. The poet stands alone in a cave “to cry aloud for [his] / mistakes” while the thrush shares its beautiful and lovely music with the world (1-2). As such, the overall function of these three elements within the poem is to portray the
It is a way to crucially engage oneself in setting the stage for new interventions and connections. She also emphasized that she personally viewed poetry as the embodiment of one’s personal experiences, and she challenged what the white, European males have imbued in society, as she declared, “I speak here of poetry as the revelation or distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean — in order to cover their desperate wish for imagination without insight.”
Riley, Jeannette E. "Mary Oliver." Twentieth-Century American Nature Poets. Ed. J. Scott Bryson and Roger Thompson. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 342. Literature Resource Center. Web. 1 Nov. 2011.
Her poetry is greatly informed by her childhood in hockey town Swift Current, Saskatchewan, with that environmental aesthetic often forming the backdrop to her stories of poverty, alcoholism, and the natural world. As a prairie girl myself, it’s easy for me to picture the agricultural landscapes and rustic animals described in poems such as “Inventing the Hawk”. Her authorial voice is wistful yet confessional, a voice that looks back fondly, but not blind to the issues of the past. Sex is also a recurring theme of her work, and the intimacies of her relationship with her husband Patrick Lane are a common topic of her work. One of her poems, “Watching My Lover”, tells of Lane bathing his dying mother, the mother’s scent lingering "so everyone who lies with him / will know he’s still / his mother’s son". Animals from cats to horses feature heavily in her work, tying in once again to her love of nature.
Hayden, Robert. "Mary Oliver : The Poetry Foundation : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry." The Poetry Foundation: Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry. Web. 27 Sept. 2010. .
“A story comes to you; it isn’t like you choose it. You have no real control.” Mary Downing Hahn has been a part of my childhood ever since I learned how to read. Finding new stories from her in my school’s library brightened my day. From The Doll in the Garden to All the Lovely Bad Ones she has brought out the scary stories for young audiences to enjoy.
“I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.” This quote, found in Wendell Berry’s poem, “The Peace of Wild Things,” absolutely jumped out at me as my eyes trailed across the text. I have read many, many poems throughout high-school and my first years of college but, none of which have stood out to me such as this poem did. As I read it, I fell in love with the musicality of the short, simple poem. I adored the directness of it; it was straight to the point, no beating around the bush. As I read this work of art, my mind was transported to my favorite place in the outdoors. My imagination was filled with the waving of the tall grass, the stillness of the trees, and the feeling that time is standing still and I’m the only one who notices.
Oliver doesn’t seem to be asking these questions to an audience, introspectively. By writing them down and publishing the words in poetry, Oliver simply allows other people to analyze themselves in the same way. I found this reassuring because it makes the emotion expressed in the poem seem more genuine. “Do you think there is anywhere, in any language, a word billowing enough for the pleasure that fills you, as the sun reaches out,” (stanzas 6/7). The imagery of “filling” and “reaching out” confident that Mary Oliver writes out of necessity for her soul, not anything worldly. She wants the essence of connectedness with the universe to fill her half-full cup; I need it to fill my half-empty