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S40E5: Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World | Clip

The political nature of Mary Oliver’s poems

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Mary Oliver sought to call attention to the destruction of the earth in her work. According to Oliver, “our enjoyment of the natural world is, in the long run, political.”

TRANSCRIPT

- You have said what a poem is not.

You say a poem is not the world.

- Oh, I'm changing my ideas about that.

I'm in trouble.

I went a little crazy at one reading a few months ago and started shouting that I wanted my poems to be inflammatory.

We're all better people for literature.

Meanwhile, the world burns.

Our enjoyment of the natural world is, in the long run, political.

(gentle piano music) - The poem that I think about the most is "Was It Necessary to Do It?"

And it's a poem about an ant being stepped on.

(gentle piano music) "I tell you, that ant is very alive.

Look at how he fusses at being stepped on."

The reason this poem matters so much to me is because so many people that I know know what it is to be the ant.

(gentle piano music) Whether it's people of color in this country, whether it's women, whether it's folks from the LGBTQIA+ community, whether it's disabled people.

And the assumption is that either the ant does not exist because it is not seen or that the ant is easy to kill.

(gentle piano music) And so what she does in the poem is says you can tell by how the ant fusses at being stepped on, which mean the ant is not dead, the ant is fighting for its life.

(gentle piano music) - [Mary] The thing I'm most worried about actually is what I consider a most serious ongoing devastation of the earth, which we need both spiritually and materially, and we're not dealing with it.

I worry about little children.

Are they going to know what the earth looked like?

(gentle piano music)