About Mary Oliver

First, I cannot say it strongly enough-I think Mary Oliver is great. She is my favorite living poet. If you could see my dogeared, old-love-letter-filled copy of her New and Collected Poems Vol 1 you might be able to appreciate just how much I think of her. (Purists beware-I believe in marking up the books I love. What greater compliment to an author than my own margin scrawls or the food smears in my most used cookbooks? Anyone reading after me would be able to follow my steps easily for they are clearly marked.)

So when I discovered, while looking for something else completely, her CD "At Blackwater Pond Mary Oliver Reads Mary Oliver" it was a delightful surprise. I didn't even know she had a CD! And since I had been struggling with a bad dismount in a poem of my own it was actually more than delight, it felt like poetic Providence. Excited, I hurried home and put it in. And it was good, it wasn't all the poems I would have picked (no "The Journey"? no "Dogfish"?) but, like with a live performance, a bit of that feeling is probably inevitable unless it's a command performance. Yes, it was good but (and you knew there was a 'but' coming) I have to say, though I feel like the worst kind of cocky upstart for doing so, that I think she reads them wrong.

I know she is a National Book Award winner. I know she won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Most importantly I know they are her poems but I still gotta say she reads them wrong. Her poems are so alive-with more nature metaphors than you can shake a walking stick at-they cry out for a dynamic, full throated performance (with gestures, gestures would be good). What is offered instead is a modestly formal reading that sounds like, well like she's reading with a Robert Frost stick up her butt.

Mary, Mary, Mary you have to sell these.

The last line of "When Death Comes" is a powerhouse, you have to emphasize it. It's your manifesto line that could sum up your entire body of work. Please, deliver it accordingly.