Mary Oliver, poet

 Mary Jane Oliver (September 10, 1935 – January 17, 2019) was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

There are so many of her poems that I just love!

And one should read of her own life as well, to know the source of such beauty! Much of it is described in her poetry.

Of Love

I have been in love more times than one,

thank the Lord. Sometimes it was lasting

whether active or not. Sometimes

it was all but ephemeral, maybe only

an afternoon, but not less real for that.

They stay in my mind, these beautiful people,

or anyway beautiful people to me, of which

there are so many. You, and you, and you,

whom I had the fortune to meet, or maybe

missed. Love, love, love, it was the

core of my life, from which, of course, comes

the word for the heart. And, oh, have I mentioned

that some of them were men and some were women

and some — now carry my revelation with you —

were trees. Or places. Or music flying above

the names of their makers. Or clouds, or the sun

which was the first, and the best, the most

loyal for certain, who looked so faithfully into

my eyes, every morning. So I imagine

such love of the world — its fervency, its shining, its

innocence and hunger to give of itself — I imagine

this is how it began.

~Mary Oliver

Blue Iris

Now that I'm free to be myself, who am I?

Can't fly, can't run and see how slowly I walk.

Well, I think, I can read books.

"What's that you're doing?"

the green-headed fly shouts as it buzzes past.

I close the book.

Well, I can write down words, like these, softly.

"What's that you're doing?" whispers the wind, pausing

in a heap just outside the window.

Give me a little time, I say back to its staring, silver face.

It doesn't happen all of a sudden, you know.

"Doesn't it?" says the wind, and breaks open, releasing

distillation of blue iris.

And my heart panics not to be, as I long to be,

the empty, waiting, pure, speechless receptacle.

~Mary Oliver

From~Blue Iris Poems and Essays

Needing one, I invented her—
the great-great-aunt dark as hickory
called Shining-Leaf, or Drifting-Cloud
or The-Beauty-of-the-Night.

Dear aunt, I'd call into the leaves,
and she'd rise up, like an old log in a pool,

and whisper in a language only the two of us knew

the word that meant follow,

and we'd travel

cheerful as birds

out of the dusty town and into the trees

where she would change us into something quicker—

two foxes with black feet,

two snakes green as ribbons,

two shimmering fish—and all day we'd travel.

At day's end she'd leave me back at my own door

with the rest of my family,

who were kind, but solid as wood

and rarely wandered. While she,

old twist of feathers and birch bark,

would walk in circles wide as rain and then

float back

scattering the rags of twilight

on fluttering moth wings;

or she'd slouch from the barn like a gray opossum;
or she'd hang in the milky moonlight

burning like a medallion,

this bone dream, this friend I had to have,

this old woman made out of leaves.

Mary Oliver, (from Twelve Moons)

“For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.”

~ Mary Oliver - Rest In Peace

Don't Hesitate

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 happens better than all the riches or power in the world.

It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty.

Joy is not made to be a crumb.

~Mary Oliver

Sleeping In The Forest

I thought the earth remembered me, she

took me back so tenderly, arranging

her dark skirts, her pockets

full of lichens and seeds. I slept

as never before, a stone

on the riverbed, nothing

between me and the white fire of the stars

but my thoughts, and they floated

light as moths among the branches

of the perfect trees. All night

I heard the small kingdoms breathing

around me, the insects, and the birds

who do their work in the darkness. All night

I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling

with a luminous doom. By morning

I had vanished at least a dozen times

into something better.

~Mary Oliver

Praying. It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.

Mary Oliver

 

Poet Phillis Wheatley

 She was called Phillis because that was the name of the ship that brought her and Wheatley which was the name of the merchant who bought her. She was born in Senegal. In Boston the slave Traders put her up for sale: "she's 7-year-old! She will be a good mare!" She was felt,naked by many hands. At 13 she was already writing poems in a language that was not her own .

No one believed that she was the author. At the age of 20 Phillis was questioned by a court of eighteen enlightened men in robes and wigs. She had to recite passages from Virgil and Milton and some verses from the Bible and she also had to vow that the Palms she had composed were not copied. From a chair she underwent her lengthy examination until the court approvd her: she was a woman, she was Black, she was enslved, but she was a poet.

Phillis Wheatley was the first African-American writer to publish a book in the United States.

Langston Hughes

 

It's the birthday of poet and novelist Langston Hughes, born in Joplin, Missouri (1902). He went to Columbia University for a year, but then he decided that he wanted to learn from traveling instead of books, so he traveled to West Africa and Europe. He moved back to the United States and got a job working as a busboy in a Washington, D.C., hotel, and one day he left three poems he had written next to the plate of the poet Vachel Lindsay. Lindsay loved them and read them to an audience the very next day. Within a few years, Hughes had published his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues (1926).

He became a pivotal figure during the Harlem Renaissance and started to write poetry influenced by the music he heard in jazz and blues clubs. He said, "I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on Seventh Street ... [songs that] had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going."

Hughes was one of the first African-American poets to embrace the language of lower-class black Americans. In his essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926), he said, "[I want to write for] the people who have their nip of gin on Saturday nights and are not too important to themselves or the community, or too well fed, or too learned to watch the lazy world go round."

In his poem "Laughers," he made a list of what he called "my people": "Dish-washers, / Elevator boys, / Ladies' maids, / Crap-shooters, / Cooks, / Waiters, / Jazzers, / Nurses of Babies, / Loaders of Ships, / Rounders, / Number writers, / Comedians in Vaudeville / And band-men in circuses — / Dream-singers all."

Poetry & Marc Chagall

  “We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. So medicine, law, business, engineering... these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love... these are what we stay alive for.”

N.H. Kleinbaum - Dead Poets Society, 1989.

Marc Chagall - The Betrothed and the Eiffel Tower, 1913.

I don’t speak Yiddish, my grandparents (probably quite like yours) successfully kept it as their own secret language.

However, those who know Yiddish and the beauty of it, reflected in its sayings and proverbs, can “read” Marc Chagall’s paintings like a book.

Let’s take a look:

"Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers" – Seven fingers: In Yiddish, to work with seven fingers means to work quickly and also be like G-d who created the world in seven days.
"Birth" – Have you noticed a man standing on his arms at the back of the painting? There’s a Yiddish saying: “When there’s disorder, fuss, and balagan, the world turns upside down and stands on its head.”
"Spoonful of Milk" – One of Chagall’s grandfathers was a melamed, a teacher for Jewish boys. He didn’t make much money, like most melameds, but worked from dawn to dusk, and his wife had to take good care of him. There’s a Yiddish saying for this as well: “She brings a spoon to his mouth.”

These are just a few examples of what an attentive observer can find in Marc Chagall’s paintings. I am going to share more this Monday during the online conversation, "Jewish Artists Who Shook the World." - https://jt-club.com/parisian_school.

Facebook post by Evgenia Kempinski

Kahil Gibran

"Khalil Gibran, born in a mountain village in Lebanon (1883). When Gibran was a boy, his mother decided to leave her alcoholic husband and take her four children to America. They settled in Boston, where they had relatives, and it was there that a charity worker noticed that Gibran appeared to be artistically gifted. Members of the aristocratic Boston society found him charming, and they began inviting him to social gatherings, where he discussed philosophy and poetry. Numerous aristocratic ladies fell in love with him and became his patrons, but he never married any of them.

One day, a man named Alfred A. Knopf was invited to a gathering at Gibran's apartment. Knopf was just starting up a publishing company, and when he saw how fascinated people were with Gibran, he decided to offer the man a publishing contract. Gibran's first two books with Knopf weren't very successful, but his third was a book called The Prophet. When it came out in 192, The Prophet sold slowly at first, but its sales kept growing and growing over time. By 1931, it had been translated into 30 languages. In the 1960s, it became popular with college students. And today, passages from it are still read at weddings, baptisms, and funerals. It is the best-selling book in Alfred A. Knopf's history."

Thanks Writer's Almanac

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The Prophet is often quoted at weddings ("Love one another, but make not a bond of love: / Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls"),

and baptisms ("Your children are not your children. / They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. / They come through you but not from you, / And though they are with you they belong not to you"),

and funerals ("When you are sorrowful look again in / your heart, and you shall see that in truth / you are weeping for that which has been / your delight").

Rainer Maria Rilke

 It's the birthday of poet Rainer Maria Rilke, born in Prague (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926 was an Austrian poet and novelist. Acclaimed as an idiosyncratic and expressive poet, he is widely recognized as a significant writer in the German language. His work is viewed by critics and scholars as possessing undertones of mysticism, exploring themes of subjective experience and disbelief. His writings include one novel, several collections of poetry and several volumes of correspondence. He spent most of his life traveling, never settling anywhere for more than a few months. And since he only wrote in spurts, he supported himself by getting rich noblewomen to fall in love with him and support his work. He apparently wasn't the best-looking guy in the world, but women found irresistible because he was so romantic and poetic.

Rilke's most important patron was a woman who wouldn't be seduced, the Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis. She offered Rilke her Castle Duino near Trieste as a place to live for a while. It was a medieval castle with fortified walls and an ancient square tower. Rilke's room had a view of the gulf of Trieste, which he loved. In a letter from his room he wrote, "I am looking out into the empty sea-space, directly into the universe, you might say." He lived there for a while with the princess and her entourage, but then she left him there alone, with just a few servants, to concentrate on his work.

Rilke met and fell in love with the widely travelled and intellectual woman of letters Lou Andreas-Salomé in 1897 in Munich. He changed his first name from "René" to "Rainer" at Salomé's urging because she thought that name to be more masculine, forceful and Germanic. His relationship with this married woman, with whom he undertook two extensive trips to Russia, lasted until 1900. Even after their separation, Salomé continued to be Rilke's most important confidante until the end of his life. Having trained from 1912 to 1913 as a psychoanalyst with Sigmund Freud, she shared her knowledge of psychoanalysis with Rilke. 

In 1900, Rilke stayed at the artists' colony at Worpswede.  It was here that he got to know the sculptor Clara Westhoff, whom he married the following year. Their daughter Ruth (1901–1972) was born in December 1901.

In the summer of 1902, Rilke left home and travelled to Paris to write a monograph on the sculptor Auguste Rodin. Before long his wife left their daughter with her parents and joined Rilke there. The relationship between Rilke and Clara Westhoff continued for the rest of his life; a mutually-agreed-upon effort towards a divorce was bureaucratically hindered by the fact that Rilke was a Catholic, albeit a non-practising one.

 At the same time his encounter with modernism was very stimulating: Rilke became deeply involved with the sculpture of Rodin and then the work of Paul Cézanne. Rilke dramatically transformed his poetic style from the subjective and sometimes incantatory language of his earlier work into something quite new in European literature. The result was the New Poems, famous for the "thing-poems" expressing Rilke's rejuvenated artistic vision. During these years, Paris increasingly became the writer's main residence.

 Rilke had developed an admiration for El Greco as early as 1908, so he visited Toledo during the winter of 1912/13 to see Greco's paintings.  The outbreak of World War I surprised Rilke during a stay in Germany. He was unable to return to Paris, where his property was confiscated and auctioned. He spent the greater part of the war in Munich. From 1914 to 1916 he had a turbulent affair with the painter Lou Albert-Lasard. Rilke was called up at the beginning of 1916 and had to undertake basic training in Vienna. Influential friends interceded on his behalf – he was transferred to the War Records Office and discharged from the military on 9 June 1916. He returned to Munich, interrupted by a stay at Hertha Koenig's [de] manor Gut Bockel [de] in Westphalia. The traumatic experience of military service, a reminder of the horrors of the military academy, almost completely silenced him as a poet.

On 11 June 1919, Rilke travelled from Munich to Switzerland. He met Polish-German painter Baladine Klossowska, with whom he was in relationship to his death in 1926. The outward motive was an invitation to lecture in Zurich, but the real reason was the wish to escape the post-war chaos and take up his work on the Duino Elegies once again. The search for a suitable and affordable place to live proved to be very difficult.

 In May 1922, Rilke's patron Werner Reinhart bought and renovated Muzot so that Rilke could live there rent-free.

From 1923 on, Rilke increasingly struggled with health problems that necessitated many long stays at a sanatorium in Territet near Montreux on Lake Geneva. 

In 1924 Erika Mitterer [de] began writing poems to Rilke, who wrote back with approximately 50 poems of his own and called her verse a Herzlandschaft (landscape of the heart). This was the only time Rilke had a productive poetic collaboration throughout all his work. Mitterer visited Rilke in November 1925. In 1950 her Correspondence in Verse with Rilke was published and received much praise.

Shortly before his death, Rilke's illness was diagnosed as leukemia, he died in the arms of his doctor on 29 December 1926, in the Valmont Sanatorium in Switzerland. He was buried on 2 January 1927, in the Raron cemetery to the west of Visp.

Rilke had chosen as his own epitaph this poem: 

Rose, o pure contradiction, desire

to be no one's sleep beneath so many
lids.

A myth developed surrounding his death and roses. It was said: "To honour a visitor, the Egyptian beauty Nimet Eloui Bey, Rilke gathered some roses from his garden. While doing so, he pricked his hand on a thorn. This small wound failed to heal, grew rapidly worse, soon his entire arm was swollen, and his other arm became affected as well", and so he died.

Rilke is one of the best-selling poets in the United States. In popular culture, Rilke is frequently quoted or referenced in television shows, motion pictures, music and other works when these works discuss the subject of love or angels. His work is often described as "mystical" and has been quoted and referenced by self-help authors. Rilke has been reinterpreted "as a master who can lead us to a more fulfilled and less anxious life".

SOURCE: Wikipedia