How Mary Oliver Demystified the Creative Process
The Hidden Work Behind Poetry That Feels Like Magic
Ever wonder how someone can write something this beautiful?
Mary Oliver, Wild Geese:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
It reads like perfection.
Something inevitable.
As natural as breathing.
But it wasn't like that.
Mary Oliver didn't wait for inspiration.
She trained for it.
She believed great writing isn’t born.
It’s built—by imitation, repetition, and revision.
Imitation
She practiced by studying and replicating the masters:
“You would learn very little in this world if you were not allowed to imitate. And to repeat your imitations until some solid grounding in the skill was achieved and the slight but wonderful difference—that made you and no one else—could assert itself. Every child is encouraged to imitate. But in the world of writing it is originality that is sought out, and praised, while imitation is the sin of sins. Too bad.”
Because:
“To write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers. Perhaps they are the only teachers.”
Repetition
She understood that creativity must be courted:
“The part of the psyche that works in concert with consciousness and supplies a necessary part of the poem—the heat of a star as opposed to the shape of a star, let us say—exists in a mysterious, unmapped zone: not unconscious, not subconscious, 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.”
Revision
She revised relentlessly:
“In my own work, I usually revise through forty or fifty drafts of a poem before I begin to feel content with it.”
Mary liked to say:
“I write poems for a stranger who will be born in some distant country hundreds of years from now. This is a useful notion, especially during revision. It reminds me, forcefully, that everything necessary must be on the page. I must make a complete poem—a river-swimming poem, a mountain-climbing poem. Not my poem, if it's well done, but a deeply breathing, bounding, self-sufficient poem.”
What looked like an inevitability was actually craftsmanship.
Mary Oliver trained for decades so that when the moment came, she could make her words fly.
For more of her insights, read:
A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver.
