I knew I was overdue to make a run to the grocery store when I found myself standing in front of the open refrigerator in the middle of the night snacking on cooked, cold cauliflower with the dog. He loves it and I only eat it because it’s good for something besides adding pounds on my hips or spiking my blood pressure. Levi will probably out live me; he loves all the vegetables on the ‘color wheel’ and I’m all about the dressing and croutons that goes on top of salads. My normal mid-night raiding bounty is sugar free parfait snack cups. Twenty-five calories topped with twenty more calories of sugar free whipped cream from a can. You gotta love whoever it was who invented spray cans and sweet, bread and butter pickle chips. I’ve never eaten the two together but I’m not dead yet and that’s still on my Bucket List.
Seven years ago when I couldn’t sleep I wrote new blog posts. My husband had recently passed away and I wrote more philosophical stuff than I do now. Case in point: “I am reminded of a passage I read in a book a long time ago, Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden: ‘We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.’ Grief and its aftermath is that kind of a force that makes us find a new direction in our lives, an uncharted course that eventually picks its way back down the hill with the volume of our tears added to its flow.” I’m not sure if my sentence about grief and its aftermath is brilliant, sappy or cliché but it’s as close to Mary Oliver as I’ll ever write.
“And that is just the point... how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That's the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. 'Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?'”
Mary Oliver
Do you know how hard it is get a Pulitzer Prize in poetry? Actually, I don’t but considering how few people voluntarily sit down and read a book of poems I’m guessing it’s pretty difficult. Mary also got the prestigious National Book Award as well as other great honors to add to her resume. She started writing poems at fourteen. And so did I. Her writer’s voice came from living a hard life in a dysfunctional family that included sexual abuse that caused her to focus more on poignant observances of the natural world around her instead of on what was happening to her. My early poems came with common teenage hormones---little, love sick crushes and bruises that no other eyes than mine has ever seen. It’s on my Bucket List to destroy those poems soon, another part of my past gone. How many parts will end up on the trash heap before I’m no longer me?
“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
Mary Oliver
While Mary was writing about things that resonates world-wild, my teenaged mind was coming up with trite like this:
My heart stands naked
Like the wintered dogwood tree
And the wind blows strongly
Through the branches left to see.
The snow lies heavy
On the cold, harden bark
And the limbs bow lowly
As the day turns dark.
Yadda, yadda, yadda and after a few more verses I predicted the boy who dumped me would come back in the spring when dogwood blossoms. Re-reading some of my old poems this morning reaffirms the fact that I need to stick to writing memoir-style prose. And here's your laugh for the day: I don't even remember the guy's name who broke my heart. ©
"Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.”
Arthur Golden
I love that last quote! My favorite Mary Oliver one is, "If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happened better than all the riches or power in the world...."
ReplyDeleteI love that quote too and tried to work it in here but it just didn't fit what I was going for. Thanks for sharing it.
DeleteLove Mary Oliver
ReplyDeleteShe definitely resonates with a lot of us.
DeleteThat was a darned good poem for an early teen. I'd have been happy with it as a Creative Writing teacher. (Although I'd have asked you to perhaps re-craft it as a free verse at a later time.)
ReplyDeleteMary Oliver is always so thoughtful and deliberate. She is deceptively simple, but her words are full of power and impact. I was introduced to her by one of my readers several years ago, and I remain grateful. How I was ignorant of her for so long, I'll never know. Luckily, she waited for me.
I'll take the compliment, especially from someone who taught Creative Writing to teenagers. Why is it so hard to throw out stuff like our early writings? I struggled last summer when I had to throw out a lot of artwork I'd kept. I'm guessing I just like to see the progress over a lifetime of creative attempts?
DeleteMy experience with finding and reading Mary Oliver is exactly the same as yours. I didn't know her until another blogger introduced my 4-5 years ago.
Your "naked heart" definitely portrayed the pain of teen years. Don't throw those poems away.
ReplyDeleteI keep going back and forth on that decision. On one hand most of them embarrass me, but on the other hand they are so typical of what comes out of a boy crazy young person's mind that they make me smile.
DeleteMan, we are living parallel lives lately. I've been going through journals and writing assignments (with instructor notes on them) from some writing and poetry classes I took in my 40s and 50s - when I thought I would write more but never kept at it. While I'm recycling a fair bit, I'm also organizing my stuff so I can come back to it if I get the initiative. It's hard to part with it IMO, because I can read it and really remember how I felt writing it. It brings me right back to that time. So I advise keeping it...it doesn't take up that much room, does it? (Not knowing how much you have, I think I can get mine into a couple binders.)
ReplyDeleteAs for the midnight snacks, I'm right there with you, too. And I LOVE Mary Oliver. I heard a great interview with her just after she died. I think it was on Fresh Air, but I'm not sure. I do remember, however, that I was painting the basement stairway when I listened to it. Isn't the brain weird?
My problem is I use the "It doesn't take up such room" excuse way too often and it adds up. LOL I have 23" wide by 30" tall bookcase that I keep all my writing stuff including genealogy books on. I plan to put the bookcase in a closet. You are SO right about how writing your own, old stuff does bring you back in time. I guess it makes me feel young again.
DeleteI'm guessing all us wanna be writers admire Mary Oliver. She can say so much with so few words.
You
This was timely, since I've been scouring the web looking for just the right Mary Oliver poem to recite at a friend's memorial service.
ReplyDeleteDo we have any examples of poems Mary Oliver wrote as a teenager? I bet she did some sappy stuff, too.
Is this the friend who you helped and looked after in her last year? Either way, I'm sure you'll find something fitting in Oliver's work.
DeleteI don't know her body of work well enough to know the answer to your question. But it's a good question. I love the early work novelists, to compare with their later work. Makes me better about my own writing. LOL John Steinbeck's "Travels with Charley" is one of my favorite books for his short character sketches and he's writing about his own life, not fiction.
Love this. Maybe you could scan your diaries and store them neatly on your computer. Then you can toss them. A long boring project for sure. 30 minutes a day?
ReplyDeleteWouldn't be worth the time to me and part of the fun of looking at old stuff like that is seeing your handwriting done with real ink pens in old spiral notebooks.
DeleteI wish I could appreciate poetry more. I have some Mary Oliver books of poems and dip into them from time to time because she writes about nature, and that I love. Poetry for me is like chocolate - not my favourite treat but I can enjoy a bit of it from time to time. But I will never choose it if there is another dessert choice on the menu...like a well-written novel.
ReplyDeleteWhen I hear people who love poetry speak about it, and quote it, I feel like I am the tone-deaf one in a group of musicians. I missed that poetry-loving gene somehow. And that makes me sad.
I think you should hang on to all of your writings, Jean. I got rid of a lot of my very early stuff and regret it.
Deb
Now that's what I wanted to hear...people who had early writings or artwork who got rid of it and either regretted it or didn't miss it.
DeleteI don't read a lot of poetry either but I love country western song lyrics. Telling a story in so few words impresses me. I don't own a single book of poetry. Like you, it's not my first choice on the dessert menu of life.
Song lyrics? Now you’re talking! 😁
DeleteI’m one of the people who read poetry, daily, evening or morning. I have shelves and shelves of poetry books, my Beloved’s shelves among them. I’ve given some away since he died, but not that many. They’ll be the last to go. What’s more. I still buy new ones.
ReplyDeleteI too have tried to write poetry but, in my opinion, there’s an awful lot of bad poetry that has actually been published, so I don’t feel like adding to it any longer, even if just for my own consumption. How much more satisfying and uplifting it is to read the wisdom of such as Mary Oliver.
I have a trunk full of diaries and misery memoir stuff from years and years back, I really must remember to burn all of it one of these days. After rereading, of course, although I might feel nauseous long before I’ve got through the whinings and whingeing.
Perhaps that’s something to do while we are sheltering from the storms outside?.
Wow, how wonderful it must have been to have shared a love of peotry with your husband. My husband's and my reading tastes were so different I couldn't just show him a sentence that I fell in love with for the way it rolled off the tongue and expect him to love it too. But put that same quote on a coffee cup or tee-shirt and he'd get it. LOL He read a lot of biographies and history.
DeleteI had planned to burn all of my old diaries this summer but I have no where to do it here in the city and the pandemic has kept me from bringing them out to my niece's to do the job.
On occasion I find my teenage poems. I can relate.
ReplyDeleteI think it would be easier to win a poetry prize than a book prize. Seems like there are fewer poets.
My favorite was the actor Victor Buono who wrote a book of poems. THis is my favorite:
I think that I shall never see
My feet.
That poem made me chuckle. And now that I think about it, you're probably right about winning a Pulitzer Prize in poetry.
DeleteThis was AAA a bloody great post
ReplyDeletehey, thanks!
DeleteWe forget the Names, so many of them, that never really mattered. I think the only Heartbreaks that stick had deep Relationship. Tho' Yesterday I was intent on making my Birthday and it's Post a Happy one, I'm going thru a Dark time on a Personal level that I doubt I'll even bother to Blog about. I can do a Rant just fine about the sorry state of the World, laying Personal Pain bare is much harder.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry to hear, that Dawn. We've all got a lot on our plates dealing the pandemic and state of the nation but you have so much MORE trying to balance your family's needs and safety. Be easy on yourself and try not to let the darkness take you too far down before reaching out for support.
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