A Lobotomy

On Thursday night I picked up volume 1 of the New and Selected Poems of Mary Oliver. The reasons were simple: I don’t have volume 2 and the last books I’d read were too dense. I was desperate for less factual words. 

My relationship with Oliver had always been incidental. A poem somewhere, a quote on Instagram, an article that pushed me to google her. Quite often the search resulted in the last two lines of her much-celebrated ‘The Summer Day’: ‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?’

Over the last few days I’ve been reading Oliver. The result is quite physical, as if I had gone through a lobotomy. Her poetry has bypassed my pre-frontal cortex, the place where human rationality lives. Where we analyse, strategise, understand abstractions and are aware of our death. And since that’s our main difference with animals, I’ve become one. 

Animals act purely and solely by instinct. They experience fear, hunger and danger, or they’re hot or cold or wet. Oliver observes them with profound and rare empathy. She almost talks through them. As humans, the closest we are to that string of primal feelings is our pre-verbal period. When words cannot comfort, make sense of anything or be a shield. When the only available option is just feeling the world. 

One of the most predictably boring consequences of Oliver’s ‘anti-intellectual’ body of work is the rejection from the academia and highbrow judges like book reviewers. In 2017, the New Yorker published ‘What Mary Oliver’s Critics Don’t Understand’, a praise of her poetry as well as an analysis of how and why it’s become so popular and necessary.