mary oliver

Here is an article written by Mary Oliver titled "The First Requirement for Writing Poetry." Oh drat! I have probably bored you already. That title has so many reasons to stop reading. The word first is like when a teacher or pastor says "But we'll get to that later," which makes the listener assume it will be a very long discourse. First makes you assume there is something else to follow. Requirement is no less friendly a term. Requirement is not an easy house guest. It always seems to ask you to cater to its needs and then judges you when they are not met, whether or not you have agreed to their terms (The very reason men don't read instruction manuals or road maps). Writing and poetry is also a sale stopper. It is the scary territory of mixing discipline and mysticism. Poetry is not satisfied repeating the old jargon. Poetry is always squinting its eyes to see clearer. It would stand on its head if it helped. Poetry finds the unwritten lyrics to the tune everyone is humming.

Anyway, imagine the essay below is describing our rendezvous with God. It hurt my heart to think how cheaply I treat my relationship with him. But let us now wait at that same spot for renewal...

"The First Requirement for Writing Poetry" by Mary Oliver

"If Romeo and Juliet had made appointments to meet, in the moonlight-swept orchard, in all the peril and sweetness of conspiracy, and then more often than not failed to meet — one of the other lagging, or afraid, or busy elsewhere — there would have been no romance, no passion, none of the drama for which we remember and celebrate them. Writing a poem is not so different — it is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind. They make appointments with each other, and keep them, and something begins to happen. Or, they make appointments with each other but are casual and often fail to keep them: count on it, nothing happens.

The part of the psyche that works in concert with consciousness and supplies a necessary part of the poem — a heart of a star as opposed to the shape of a star, let us say — exists in a mysterious, unmapped zone: no unconscious, not conscious, but cautious. It learns quickly what sort of courtship it is going to be. Say you promise to be at your desk in the evenings, from seven to nine. It waits, it watches. If you are reliably there, it begins to show itself — soon it begins to arrive when you do. But if you are only there sometimes and are frequently late or inattentive, it will appear fleetingly, or it will not appear at all.

Why should it? It can wait. It can stay silent a lifetime. Who know anyway what it is, that wild, silky part of ourselves without which no poem can live? But we do know this: if it is going to enter into a passionate relationship and speak what is in its own portion of your mind, the other responsible and purposeful part of you had better be a Romeo. It doesn’t matter if risk is somewhere close by — risk is always hovering somewhere. But it won’t involve itself with anything less than a perfect seriousness.

Various ambitions -- to complete the poem, to see it in print, to enjoy the gratification of someone's comment about it -- serve in some measure as incentives to the writer's work. Though each of these is reasonable, each is a threat to that other ambition of the poet, which is to write as well as Keats, or Yeats, or Williams -- or whoever it was who scribbled onto a page a few lines whose force the reader once felt and has never forgotten. Every poet's ambition should be to write as well. Anything else is only a flirtation.

And, never before have there been so many opportunities to be a publicly and quickly, thus achieving earlier goals. Magazines are everywhere, and there are literally hundreds of poetry workshops. There is, as never before, company for those who like to talk about and write poems.

None of this is bad. But very little of it can do more than start you on your way to the real, unimaginably difficult goal of writing memorably. That work is done slowly and in solitude, and it is as improbable as carrying water in a sieve."