For a long time, I dismissed her work without having read it surely a poet this popular must be sentimental and facile, an aging hippie mom writing about flowers and nature and God. I came to her work late, in my mid-20s, because of the pervasive misogyny that so often overshadows the work of female artists and writers. Oliver published more than 15 books of poetry in her lifetime, and received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. The internet had already built an online tribute to Oliver, while she was still living, by making memes out of her poems. But of course, the magic of the poem, and that of many of Oliver’s poems in particular, is how it creates this sense of being implausibly singled out and told what you were waiting to hear. I felt like it was speaking to me in my exact personal situation in that moment. There is no possible way to support an assertion like “you do not have to be good.” It resists all evidence and specificity, while at the same time feeling so personal to any one individual reader that to read it is intoxicating. “You do not have to be good” is a stunner of a first line, an all-time great, an opening sentence for the ages, the kind of opening sentence that demands, and gets, its reader’s absolute surrender. I was waiting at the 15th Street–Prospect Park subway stop in the summer of 2012, a summer so sweaty that recalling it still summons up the sensation of damp hairs curling at the back of my neck. I remember exactly where I was when I read the Mary Oliver poem “Wild Geese” for the first time.
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