Hello Reader

My first real love as a writer was for poetry. And today, in honor of the spring, my son's 26th birthday (I started to write poetry seriously when he was born), and poetry itself, I invite you to join me next week for a free Poetry Masterclass. In the class, we look closely at poems by Mary Oliver, Walt Whitman, and Lucille Clifton and explore the ways poetry helps us pay greater attention to language, ourselves, and the world around us.

The free class will be available for you to watch for a few days on your own schedule starting next Thursday. If you'd like access to the class, simply click here or use the button below and I'll be sure you get access :)

I also want to share an essay I wrote about Mary Oliver soon after she died.

This essay mentions trauma, but I hope that despite some of the difficult material in the essay, it offers hope and inspiration. I know Oliver certainly inspired me, and I find that poetry is one of the most powerful tools for healing and for coming back to a state of wonder.

Trauma, Mary Oliver, And Me

In 2009, I was a mother of two young kids when memories of sexual abuse as a child came flooding back. I was a poet, and though I had always turned to poetry as a place to explore and express my feelings, now, the memories felt so overwhelming that I felt trapped in the pain. My own poems could express my pain but didn't seem to offer a way out.

As I looked back on the poetry I loved, I worried that much of it seemed to express violence and suffering but not healing. Two of my poet friends had recently died by suicide. I thought back to Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, two mother poets who had famously also died by suicide. Did poets sometimes get stuck in their own pain and in the articulation of that pain?

Then I read the 2011 interview with Maria Shriver in O Magazine, in which Mary Oliver said--for the first time-- that she’d been sexually abused as a child and that poetry had been a big part of her healing.

Before reading that essay, I had thought of Oliver's work as relatively easy and happy. In fact, in the intellectual, literary circles I was a part of, she was often thought of a poet who only wrote about "easy" or "simple" themes. But what if we’d misread her—and in misreading had not only missed the wisdom and weight of her poetry, but also our own ability to come to greater happiness through poetry?

What if Oliver was model for the way poetry could provide a path out from suffering?

I went to my shelf and got one of Oliver's books, then I bought another and another. I read them slowly at first, and then voraciously.

Although Oliver is roughly the same generation as Plath and Sexton (just 3 and 7 years younger), her poetry followed a different path. Her poems are, above all, celebrations: “When it’s over, I want to say: all my life/ I was a bride married to amazement./ I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms” she wrote in “When Death Comes.”

That celebration now did not seem "easy" or "simple" but instead hard-won.

And though Oliver hadn’t shared in earlier interviews that she’d been sexually abused as a child, the abuse was right there in her poems, if you looked. The abuse shows up most clearly in Dream Work, the book she wrote after winning the Pulitzer Prize.

Dream Work includes several poems about the devastation of Native American people and culture, and it also includes a poem that is clearly about Oliver's own abuse as a child.

Perhaps by looking deeply at suffering and injustice in the larger world, Oliver was able to start to look at and write more clearly about her own personal suffering.

In “Rage”, the poem from which the book gets its name, the speaker addresses her father:

But you were also the red song
in the night,
stumbling through the house
to the child’s bed,
to the damp rose of her body,
leaving your bitter taste.
And forever those nights snarl
the delicate machinery of the days.

These are powerful and difficult lines about powerful and very difficult experiences, and they acknowledge the long-term harm that the abuse creates.

But instead of remaining in that harm, Oliver is able to move through it.

“Wild Geese,” one of Oliver’s most famous and most widely quoted poems, comes directly after “Rage” in Dream Work, and can be read as a response to childhood trauma. “Tell me about despair, yours and I’ll tell you about mine,” she writes in "Wild Geese".

But the poem doesn't get stuck in despair; it continues: “Meanwhile the world goes on./ Meanwhile the sun and clear pebbles of the rain/ are moving across the landscapes…”

So much of what happens in trauma is that we get frozen in the traumatic moment. But in Oliver's poetry, there is always movement. And there is always the turn to the body itself: "You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves," she also

Oliver reminds us that "soft animal of the body" is always connected to the natural world around us, to the natural cycles, and to a larger family that, whatever happened to her in her own family of origin, we are always a part of.

"Wild Geese" continues.

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.

This poem is so beloved because it's so generous. From her own pain, Oliver turns to the readers and invites them into a larger family--a place of belonging, no matter how lonely we are.

Each poem in the collection builds on the previous poem, and so toward the end of the collection, we come to another of her most famous poems, "Journey":

There she reminds us that though others' voices will want to direct us: "though the voices around you/ kept shouting/ their bad advice—" we should listen to our own voice:

there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company

By listening to our own voice, we come to keep our own company; we come to fill that loneliness in us. This is what poetry can help us do.

The poem ends with the injunction to: "save/ the only life that you could/ save.”

We are all part of the family of things, but we all must also find our own voice and save our own lives. No one else will do that for us.

Oliver's poems are beloved because they’re lifelines for so many. Her poems ask us to take responsibility, to choose what we pay attention to and how we live--in relation to others and to ourselves.

And this, it seems to me, is deeply important not just for us individually, but also for us collectively. I

In a world so full of destruction and trauma, Oliver reminds us again and again to pay attention, to honor our individual journeys, to believe in our belonging, to care for the beautiful.

So much media seems to subsume us in more of the same toxic energy, but Oliver offers us something different. This is the gift of poetry.

For a while, I doubted my own ability to heal, to write my way to something more positive, but Oliver was a guide. She reminded me that I could name the pain but also continue to look for the good, that I could keep moving, and come back to celebration.

Today Oliver’s past as an incest survivor is still rarely mentioned, and her childhood is a side note in her biography. But as other survivors know and as careful readers of her poems feel, the pain of her childhood is central to the way she experienced the world. Her poems document the hard work--and also the rewards--of healing.

I hope that Oliver can be remembered not only as a nature poet and a gay poet celebrating love and connection, but also as a survivor.

To be a survivor of abuse is not just a personal experience. Children of abuse know what happens when people are treated as things, when hierarchy is abused, when men's power becomes sick. This is not just a domestic experience; it's a symptom of an entire culture's imbalance.

And Oliver's poetry is a response to that imbalance; it helps us see differently and come into greater harmony in ourselves and in the world.

The poet Audre Lorde writes that poetry "forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams."

Because we are language-using animals, language and poetry literally help us "see" our world, ourselves, and the possibilities for our own future differently.

Oliver gave language to suffering and also to the beautiful and rewarding path of growth; she encourages us to be conscious not just of how we put words on the page (she is always masterly in her craft) but also of how we live.

As she got older, her poems got happier and happier.

Hope can feel like a simplistic word, but it's one of the most profound human experiences, and Oliver and poetry itself give me hope. I hope they can do the same for you.

Thanks for reading!

As always, please share this with anyone who might enjoy it, and let me know your thoughts :)

with love,
Nadia

PS: Click here to sign up to get access to the free poetry masterclass next week, where we'll look closely at some poems by Oliver, Whitman, and Clifton.