Running Head: PICKING BLUEBERRIES,
AUSTERLITZ, NEW YORK, 1957
Picking Blueberries, Austerlitz,
New York, 1957
[Author's Name]
[Institution's Name]
Picking
Blueberries, Austerlitz, New York, 1957
In
doing her work, Mary Oliver creates an integrated
spirituality of the ordinary. The nature, spirit and
imagination found in Oliver's poetry are very natural
and relating to her day-to-day emotional and spiritual
experiences. What Oliver does in writing is to make
the reader visualize and feel the idiosyncratic beauty
of things offered to us by chance. The main focus
is on driving pleasure and retaining for lifetime
the unusual and remarkable occurrences of our life.
She takes a detail and infuses it with greater meaning,
makes us inhabit the moment. She takes a great thing
and draws it toward the human heart so that the great
and the small, the I and the not-I interpenetrate,
and confer meaning upon each other, and grant that
the space between us is made sacred by the presence
of both.
Mary Oliver, located as she is in the natural world,
writes again and again of lives transistorizes, and
calls us nonetheless to be present in it for the moment,
the sacred, brief time we have in life. She writes
about how once in summer she fell asleep after picking
blueberries, and a deer stumbled against her:
...I
guess
she was so busy with her own happiness
she had grown careless
and was just wandering along
listening
to the wind as she leaned down
to lip up the sweetness.
So, there we were
with
nothing between us
but a few leaves, and the wind's
glossy voice
Shouting instructions. 1
In
the above phrases it is so apparent that Mary Oliver,
on seeing the deer so near her, lost in her own world
and obviously very happy and content, desires for that
carefree way of life filled with absolute happiness.
Childhood is a period in a person's life where worries
of the world are far away from us and do not touch us
in any way. But, paradoxically, a person when in the
childhood phase is not capable of understanding the
true bliss of life. It is only in the later years that
we realize the happiness of childhood and therefore
love to cherish the memories of that period of our lives.
The above phrases mention the incident that when the
Deer stumbled across the poet she was invariably drawn
to that particular period (childhood) of her life.
but
the moment before she did that
was so wide and so deep
it has lasted to this day;
I have only to think of her ---
the
flower of her amazement
and the stalled breath of her curiosity,
and even the damp touch of her solicitude
before she took flight ---
to
be absent again from this world
and alive, again, in another,
for thirty years
sleepy and amazed, 2
In the above phrases the poet could either be talking
to the deer, or to herself. This poem can be used to
describe a moment filled up with a timing all its own.
And it was a grace so real and unexpected that, because
of it, the poet's life was never being the same again.
The poet could not have chosen the experience described
in the poem even if she had tried. She could only receive
it.
Writing in The Poet's Notebook, Stephen Dunn says: "The
trouble with most nature poetry is that it doesn't sufficiently
acknowledge nature's ugliness and perversity."
In other words, we often fail to pay attention. And
attention is the luminous gift of Mary Oliver's writing,
poems with clarity of detail, memorable music, and deft
linkage of human insight to the carefully observed world,
which she praises and loves with wide open heart and
eyes." 3
Picking Blueberries is an unlikely poem of hers that
actually comes quite close to describing an unexpected
encounter with grace. She is talking about a moment--a
sacred moment. The exact circumstances of her poem speak
about the mystery of Tran figurative experiences; experiences
not limited by our own narrow notions of where they
might occur.
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Endnotes
1.
Austerlitz. Picking Blueberries. New York, 1957. [Both
from Poems Selected and New, Boston, 1992]
2. Austerlitz. Picking Blueberries. New York, 1957.
[Both from Poems Selected and New, Boston, 1992]
3. Lohmann, J. Mary Oliver, Earth Saint 1997-8, p 16.
Retrieved from the World Wide Web:
http://www.earthlight.org/earthsaint28.html
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