Mary Oliver is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose body of work is largely filled with imagery of the natural world — cats, opossums crossing the street, sunflowers and black oaks in the sunshine. Her most recent collection is entitled A Thousand Mornings.
In one poem, "I Happen to bе Standing," Oliver describes herself as witnessing all these things as she stands by her door every morning, notebook and pen in hand. But, she tells NPR's Rachel Martin, she doesn't actually do that every morning. "Almost. I thought, gee, I do lie a little bit, and I should have said, 'which is the way I begin most mornings,' " she laughs.
Mornings with the notebook are part of a regular ritual for Oliver, though. "Most mornings I'm up to see the sun, and that rising of the light moves mе very much, and I'm used to thinking and feeling in words, so it sort of just happens."
Those morning moments are a kind of prayer for Oliver. "I think one thing is that prayer has become more useful, interesting, fruitful, and ... almost involuntary in my life," she says. "And when I talk about prayer, I mean really ... what Rumi says in that wonderful line, 'there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.' I'm not theological, specifically, I might pick a flower for Shiva as well as say the hundredth [psalm]."
Oliver says her work has become more spiritual over the years, growing from her love of the poets who came before her and the natural world — but she feels a great sorrow over humanity's lack of care for that world. "The woods that I loved as a child are entirely gone. The woods that I loved as a young adult are gone. The woods that most recently I walked in are not gone, but they're full of bicycle trails," she says.
Enlarge Rachel Giese Brown
Mary Oliver has won a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.