The One You Feed - Special Episode: Tribute to Mary Oliver

Episode Date: April 28, 2023

April is National Poetry Month and we put together this special episode to pay tribute to the late poet, Mary Oliver.  Special guests James Crews, Danusha Lameris, Ross Gay, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, and Ginny Gay will read one of their favorite Mary Oliver poems and share why the poem is meaningful to them.  Whether you are a fan of Mary Oliver's work or are just learning about her for the first time, we hope you'll be inspired by some of the beautiful poetry in this episode!   For more on this episode, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.

Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, everyone. What you are about to hear is a special episode featuring Mary Oliver's poems.

Now, Mary Oliver is my favorite poet of all time and probably the person most responsible for me actually getting into and enjoying poetry. And she was on my list of top people I wanted to interview. However, it never came to be. Mary Oliver passed just over four years ago now. Boy, it seems like it was more recent than that, but it's been four years. As I look at this, I also see that she was born in Ohio, so no wonder I love her. Anyway, I wanted to interview Mary Oliver. It never happened. So this is the next best thing. I was talking to a bunch of poets for National Poetry Month, and I thought it might be enjoyable to ask them to each read their favorite Mary Oliver poem and say a few words about it. And

then we would stitch it together into an episode, which would be the closest thing to a Mary Oliver interview I would ever get to. So that is what you are about to hear. You are about to hear some extraordinarily gifted poets who have been interviewed for The One You Feed, in their own right, read their favorite Mary Oliver poem and talk a little bit about it. In addition, our very own Ginny will be reading her favorite poem and talking about it. So I hope that you enjoy this episode. I hope that you find some poems that you've never heard that you love, or if you're not familiar with Mary Oliver, I hope this introduces you to a whole new world of beautiful poetry. So enjoy, and thanks for listening. First up, we have poet James Cruz.

James, welcome. Thank you. Thanks again for having me. Yeah. Do you want to start with the poem you picked, or you just want to start talking about Mary Oliver first? Which feels better to you right now? I'll start with the poem I chose. All right. And this one is called Invitation, again by Mary Oliver. And this one is called Invitation, again by Mary Oliver.

Oh, do you have time to linger for just a little while out of your busy and very important day for the gold finches that have gathered in a field of thistles for a musical battle to see who can sing the highest note or the lowest or the most expressive of mirth or the most tender. Their strong blunt beaks drink the air as they strive melodiously, not for your sake and not for mine, and not for the sake of winning, but for sheer delight and gratitude. Believe us, they say, it is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world. I beg of you, do not walk by without pausing to attend to this rather ridiculous performance. It could mean something.

It could mean everything. It could be what Rilke meant when he wrote, you must change your life. That's such a good one. I don't know if I knew that one. I think I knew the last part of it, but Rilke gets thrown around all over the place, so I could be confusing. But that is a beautiful poem, and I love goldfinches too. We have some that come to our bird feeder, and they are exquisite. Yeah, they're such magical birds. And as folks know, Mary Oliver was so good at drawing us into consideration of the natural world and really paying attention to those, just those elements that we might be tempted to just walk past or not think are very important in the midst

of busyness and distraction. And I think I love this poem. I almost get emotional every time I read it when I get to that ending part about, you know, it could mean something, it could mean everything. And this idea that just pausing to look at a bunch of goldfinches, being kind of ridiculous, just showing off for each other, caught in their delight and gratitude, the idea that that could change your life, you know, might feel kind of grandiose to some people. But I think that that just feels very true to me, that the practice of pausing, whether it's related to mindfulness and meditation practice or the writing practice that I do each day, has allowed me to change my life, to become a different person, and just to be available to

some of those moments that come up. As you're saying that, I was thinking about this idea of change your life and how we often think that that is a thing that just happens all at once. Like I'm going to stop and see the goldfinch and according to Mary Oliver, it's going to change my life. And I just sat and watched the goldfinches and yes, it was nice, but it didn't change my life. So I'm going to discount the experience versus recognizing that the way change really works is we may have an insight. We have a moment that may be very impactful or insightful, but then usually it's thousands of small moments after that, that is, you and I've talked about in other places, incrementally add up. And I think that's what you're saying. I mean, maybe you have an enlightenment experience and you see the gold finches and like a Zen master of the past,

time and space falls away, but that's not necessarily what it means to change your life. Is that little moment does change your trajectory just a hair. That's right. And that's all we're looking for, really, I think at this point. Maybe some people are looking for enlightenment, you know, and that's great. But I'm just looking for some moments of relief, you know, some invitations to slow down and pause, which I think is what that poem is. But doing that, and I think doing that regularly, can and will change our lives because it just builds that muscle. I always think like just a little space in the day just makes me feel so much better. Like when I go to bed at night,

I can feel like, okay, you know, not everything has been just chock-a-block, one thing right after another, that I've had some breathing room, you know, some space in between that. And the book that I read it from is the selected poems of Mary Oliver. It's called Devotions. So, you know, devotion doesn't happen just showing up once. It happens when you show up over and over again. And I think that's what she was getting at. And I think I relate to this poem and to Mary Oliver so much because I believe that she was

often writing to herself. She may sound like this joyful, connected, enlightened being, but my impression, and I may be wrong, but my impression is that she was someone who was given to a lot of depression, that she had trauma in her past that came up often. So she was writing these poems to lift herself out of that and directing them at herself and then sharing them with the world in the hopes that they would help others too. That feels right to me. I don't know her history that well. The knowing that is in so many of her poems, you know, it's never preachy, right? It's always like, it's always here I am doing my best. And I think that's maybe why she's so relatable to so many people. That's right. Yeah. And there are certain people we meet out in the world who

seem so kind and so present, and you get that same sense that they've been through the ringer, so to speak. You know, they have had their sorrows and their difficulties, and they've come out the other side having fed that good wolf that you often talk about much more than they fed the bad wolf. They've made that choice consciously over and over again. And you get that impression in her work. Well, James, thank you for coming on and sharing that wonderful poem and talking a little bit about Mary Oliver with us. Thanks so much, Eric. Coming up next is Danusha Lamaris.

Hi, Danusha. Thank you for coming on and sharing some of your love of Mary Oliver with us. I am happy to be here doing just that. And this is a poem from her book, House of Light. And it's actually the first poem in the book, and it's called Some Questions You Might Ask. And we've been talking a lot lately, and I have in my life about asking questions and asking the right questions, or just more questions and sitting in the questions. And so I like that this poem in a whimsical way does just that. Some questions you might ask, is the soul solid like iron or is it tender and breakable like the wings of a moth and the beak of an owl. Who has it and who doesn't? I keep looking around me. The face of the moose is as sad as the face of Jesus. The swan opens her white wings slowly.

In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness. One question leads to another. Does it have a shape like an iceberg, like the eye of a hummingbird? Does it have one lung like the snake and the scallop? Why should I have it and not the anteater who loves her children? Why should I have it and not the camel? Come to think of it, What about the blue iris? What about all the little stones sitting alone in the moonlight? What about roses and lemons and their shining leaves? What about the grass? I love how that loops back to Walt Whitman there, asking questions of the grass to get to the bottom of all the questions. Yeah, that's a great one. It's been interesting to hear different people select Mary Oliver poems because A, there are so many of them that I don't know a lot of them. And so it's been great to hear ones that I didn't know. And I don't think I've ever heard that one. think I've ever heard that one. Well, it doesn't have wild geese in it, but it has these swans slowly opening her wings. And it said that, someone told me just the other day that Mary Oliver would hide pencils for herself in the woods, that she knew in which little crevice of

a tree or wherever it was that she would have her pencils and she would go out there with her notebook. And if she forgot a pencil, no problem. It was hidden in a tree somewhere or under a leaf and she would pick up her writing. And I just love that not only did she attend to the craft of writing, but she attended to very carefully. She's a teacher and was a strong student of rhythm and meter and all of those things. But she really attended to the world as if it were a classroom in which she wanted to take notes. And so why not just hide pencils everywhere out in the world, knowing that your job was to go out there and just take notes on the face of a moose, the eye of a hummingbird. Yeah. I love that about this. Yeah, I love the image of the bear carrying leaves too.

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on and sharing that with us. Thank you for asking. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door to life's baffling questions like... Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor.

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on the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. The forces shaping markets and the economy are often hiding behind a blur of numbers.

So that's why we created The Big Take from Bloomberg Podcasts, to give you the context you need to make sense of it all. Every day in just 15 minutes, we dive into one global business story that matters. You'll hear from Bloomberg journalists like Matt Levine. A lot of this meme stock stuff is, I think, embarrassing to the SEC. Amanda Mull, who writes our Business Week buying power column. Very few companies who go viral are like totally prepared for what that means. And Zoe Tillman, senior legal reporter.

Courts are not supposed to decide elections. Courts are not really supposed to play a big role in choosing our elected leaders. It's for the voters to decide. Follow the Big Take podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. And now we hear from Rosemary Tromer. Hi, Rosemary. Hi, Eric. I'm so happy that you are able to join us for this special Mary Oliver episode. And you could either talk about the poem before you

read it, or you could read it and talk about it, or you could just read it and hang up the phone, whatever works for you. Well, I'll say maybe just one or two things about it before, and then we could talk about it together after. But the Buddhist last instruction feels a little bit different than a lot of her poems to me because it is telling a story and it's a little more narrative than a lot of her poems. And I also like very much how she weaves two stories together, one the story of the Buddha in his last day and the other of her waking up to begin a day.

So we'll hear those two pieces weave in and out of each other. The Buddha's last instruction. Make of yourself a light, said the Buddha before he died. I think of this every morning as the east begins to tear off its many clouds of darkness, to send up the first signal, a white fan streaked with pink and violet, even green. An old man, he laid down between two solid trees, and he might have said anything, knowing it was his final hour. The light burns upward, it thickens and settles over the fields. Around him the villagers gathered and stretched

forward to listen. Even before the sun itself hangs, disattached in the blue air, I am touched everywhere by its ocean of yellow waves. No doubt he thought of everything that had happened in his difficult life. And then I feel the sun itself as it blazes over the hills like a million flowers on fire. Clearly, I'm not needed. Yet I feel myself turning into something of inexplicable value. Slowly, beneath the branches, he raised his head. He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd. It strikes me that it's a poem about death,

about the Buddha meeting his death, and yet it's very much a poem about meeting life. And when she says, clearly I'm not needed. I love this line so much. The humility of that line, the truth of that line, just to see the self in terms of the big picture and how insignificant we are and to follow it with the paradox of this. Yet, I feel myself turning into something of inexplicable value. And here she is radiant, right?

She's radiant and just inexplicably lit up. And so here it is that we are both absolutely not needed and so worthy, so full of light at the same time in that gorgeous instruction, make of yourself a light. same time in that gorgeous instruction, make of yourself a light. How often, you know, like the Buddha's followers at the end, he looked into the faces of that frightened crowd. And so what he tells them, they're so afraid he's going to die. What are we going to do next? What happens when he's gone? And he gives them the most beautiful teaching, make of yourself a light. I love this poem. Yeah, it's so good. I was just reflecting today on that very idea of being absolutely unnecessary. And I was reflecting on, I was listening to this history thing. They were talking about Charlemagne,

the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne and how he became the Holy Roman Emperor. And, you know, there's a tendency to think like, or I used to think this a lot when I was younger, which was I wanted to be someone significant. I wanted to matter, you know, and on a certain time scale, none of us do. Even Charlemagne, for crying out loud, like who thinks about Charlemagne? Charlemagne for crying out loud. Like who thinks about Charlemagne? Very few people, not very often. So what? Like who cares? And yet it is that insistence on I have to be special and necessary, needed and important that I do think does block us from making ourselves a light. At least for me, it does. I'll say that for me. That, when I get into that, I am all in my ego. What an important difference, exactly. Yeah.

Clearly, I'm not needed yet. That little yet, how that yet turns it right there, right? Yeah, it is that paradox. I often think about, you could look at the magnitude of the universe. We can't even understand it. And It's, it's, we can't even understand it, you know, and from that frame of reference, we are absolutely nothing, you know, the insignificance is hard to imagine. But if you go down to the atomic scale, I am enormous by that scale. I am an absolute Goliath by that scale. Right? Like unimagined, you know, if you're an atom, I mean, I'm, you can't understand

how big I am, you know, again, same level of mind boggling. And I just love doing that reflection. And I think that's kind of this, you know, I am not needed and yet. And, you know, I think about Mary Oliver herself, what a light, what a light she was slash is, you know, how her poems continue to illuminate so many hearts and lives, how she continues to inspire this relationship with the natural world and with each other, with God. She's so remarkable what she did do with her one wild and precious life, right? She is very special. Well, thank you, Rosemary, for coming on and sharing that poem with us. Thank you, Eric.

So happy to celebrate Mary Oliver. My goodness. Before ending with our final poet, we have resident poetry fan, Ginny Gay. Well, hello, Ginny. Well, hello, Eric. So nice to be here with you and with our dear listeners once again. Yeah, and I've asked you, along with some of the other poets that we've interviewed, to share a Mary Oliver poem that you love and say a little bit about it. So you can say a little bit

about it and read the poem or read the poem and say a little bit about it, whatever you want. All right, but first, let's clarify, I am not a poet. Well. You said some of the other poets we've interviewed. I'm not a poet, although I have kind of a deep longing to like explore that in myself one day, but we'll see. I mean, Mary Oliver, who can choose, right? I mean, she is just incredible. But when forced to choose, I first selected a book that's really special to me.

And it's her book, Dog Songs, poems by Mary Oliver. The book is special to me because when it was published back in 2013, that year at Thanksgiving, my family gathered with my sister's husband and his family, her in-laws, who happened to be already, before my sister was married, best friends with my parents. So it was kind of the largest family gathering that our very small, non-extended family tended to have. But anyway, so this was a year that I wasn't doing great personally. I was sort of in my years of deep burnout and addiction and just really struggling, feeling very lost. However, this was before my mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. This was before my mom and dad divorced. This was

before my sister divorced her husband. So it's kind of my last memory of my family as I had always known it. And then my sister's new family, kind of all together, right? And my mom was well, and she was still who she was that I had always known her to be. And she gave this book, Dog Songs, to me, to my sister, and to my sister's mother-in-law at Thanksgiving dinner, just as a little gift with a sweet note to each of us. And so it feels like a connection point to my mom, this book. And then on top of that, I mean, you and I share just this love of dogs as pets. So it captures a lot of the aspects of what it's like to have a dog and to love a dog and have a dog love you. And there's so many of these poems that capture just the pure, uncomplicated joy and love

that exists in that relationship and watching dogs be playful and all the things that they are. So anyway, within this book, it was even hard to choose a poem, but I chose one and I chose a poem called Percy Wakes Me. Percy wakes me and I'm not ready. He has slept all night under the covers and now he's eager for action. A walk, then breakfast. So I hasten up. He is sitting on the kitchen counter where he is not supposed to be. How wonderful you are, I say. How clever if you needed me to wake me. He thought he would hear a lecture, and deeply his eyes begin to shine. He tumbles onto the couch for more compliments. He squirms and squeals. He has done something that he needed, and now he hears that it's okay.

I scratch his ears. I turn him over and touch him everywhere. He is wild with the okayness of it. Then we walk. Then he has breakfast, and he is happy. This is a poem about Percy. This is a poem about more than Percy. Think about it. And that poem speaks to something that feels really deep in me. And maybe even if I'm going to psychoanalyze myself for a second, it makes me think back to when I was a little girl with my mom, and maybe I did something that I needed, and she praised me for doing so when I was afraid she might scold me. And how I delighted in her approval, and delighted in doing something to get what I needed, and delighted in our love and her affection. So it could be that, or it could just be the

beautifulness of that poem. So I bow with deep gratitude to Mary Oliver. Thank you, Ginny. That's wonderful. And I also love many of those dog poems. So thank you for sharing. Yeah, thanks for giving of the episode, Ross Gay. Hi, Ross. Good to talk to you. Yeah, how are you? Good. I'm excited to talk to you

about Mary Oliver. So you could either read the poem you chose first and then talk about it, or you could talk about her in the poem first and then read it. I'm open to take this whichever way works for you. I think I'll just read the poem and then I'll say a few words about it. That's good? Perfect. So this is a poem by Mary Oliver called The Real Prayers Are Not the Words, but the Attention That Comes First. The little hawk leaned sideways and tilted, rode the wind. Its eye at this distance looked like green glass. Its feet were the color of butter. Speed, obviously, was joy.

But then so was the sudden slow circle it carved into the slightly silvery air, and the squaring of its shoulders, and the pulling into itself the long sharp-edged wings, and the fall into the grass where it tussled a moment like a bundle of brown leaves, and then again lifted itself into the air, that butter color clenched in order to hold a small, still body. And it flew off as my mind sang out, oh, all that loose blue rink of sky. Where does it go to and why? Beautiful. So beautiful. I was drawn to the poem, first of all, by the title. I love the title. The real prayers are not the words, but the attention that comes first. That's a really powerful thing for a poet to articulate

because the poet's the one who puts them in words. So it's beautiful to say actually the most important part of this work is the attention. This is an after effect or this is an artifact of the attention. I think that's really beautiful. I also, obviously, the sort of description that Mary Oliver does as beautifully as anyone, but that she's able also to witness the sort of entanglement of life. And among the things that are beautiful is this bird moving around beautifully, but also that the bird is living the bird's life. And part of the bird's life is taking another creature's life. And it's sort of a witness, a witness of what is actually. And I think Mary Oliver can do that really beautifully. It's a witness of what is.

She sees the bird. She sees the bird probably get a field mouse or something, and she sees it take off. And that last kind of couplet, I wonder if this is a sonnet. I don't know, but there's a little bit of a rhyme at the end there, beautiful rhyme. That butter color clenched the talons in order to hold a small, still body. And it flew off as my mind sang out, oh, all that loose blue rink of sky, where does it go to and why? There's something magical about the question of where does the blue rink of sky go? Meaning the contemplation of death, which we all get to do. But also the question of where does the little critter go who just got taken is beautiful. But to me, it also holds somehow in that grammar, it also holds that

bird. Where is the bird or the creature that is taking us go off to and why? So it's just like this really intense, beautiful, you know, multiple consideration of things in whatever, 14 lines or something. Yeah, that's remarkable. I'm glad you broke that down the way you did. As you were going through that, I thought, you know, this would be an interesting poem from the field mouse's perspective, right? Like, you know, like, that's the flip side to it. Yeah, I love the title too. And it made me have a question. I'll just I'll ask you real quick, which is, there's the attention. Yeah, we talked about in our other conversation being like the core thing I get from poets is how to pay attention. There's the attention and then there's the words. And I'm kind of curious for you, are those things discrete steps? Are they together? Because I often find sometimes if I'm experiencing and I have attention on something, my brain will start to say, well, let's think about how to capture this. And then something shifts and not necessarily in a good way. Yeah. Yeah. That's a very hard question. I feel like me too. Me too. It's funny.

I have a delight in this next book of essays coming out where I talk about, I sort of witness a squirrel is inside of a pumpkin. It's around Halloween and a squirrel is like sort of inside of a pumpkin and it's magic. And I reach into my notebook to start writing about it. And of course the squirrel takes off, sees me and takes off, you know? So it's kind of the end of the light because I'm trying to put it into language. But it's such a good question because like I said, I feel like if I were to be witnessing this thing that Mary Oliver is witnessing, or if I'm looking at a hummingbird go into the bee bomb, or if I'm looking at whatever, trying to describe the kid opening his crackers on the airplane or something. I'd also put it to language.

But then I feel like as far as the crafting of language into a kind of experience that maybe can almost approach something like the experience that's being described, that then is sort of like, to me, the crafting of the poem, so that it's not simply the language, but it's the sort of real, you know, the kind of laboring with language to make the experience as both, you know, maybe palpable, but also as sort of intense. And in a way, I kind of want to say, I might not quite mean this, but I'll say it anyway, like it's sort of new to make the experience unlike another experience, because every experience is actually unlike every other experience, you know?

And I feel like that's part of the labor of like making poems is like trying to arrange the words in such a way that meaning, experience, et cetera, becomes something different. Yeah, something different maybe. Yeah, it's almost as if there's a moment of knowing that is this very beautiful thing. And then there's a, this is the wrong word, but a collapsing of that into concept and thinking. And then if done right, you emerge back into knowing or experience, right? It's almost as if you pass through this tunnel, where there's, you know, it's not the best tunnel to be in. Maybe that's not even the right word, but you get where I'm going. Like on both sides of it, there's experience. Yes. Capital E. Yes.

Right. And in between, you may be thinking about experience with a lowercase e because you're trying to get back to. Yeah. It's a beautiful way of thinking of it. Yeah. Yeah. That's right.

Yeah. It's lovely. Yeah. I'm glad to talk about that poem. Well, thank you so much. Thank you. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast.

When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts.