One of my favourite internet sites is brain pickings. It is compiled by the wonderful Maria Popova. The site is full of stuff which reflects its title. I wanted to include it for the readers of Advocacy as a thinking piece, a reflective interlude. And to introduce you to a site which is part of the treasure trove of good things to be found on the 'net!
Mary Oliver (b. September 10, 1935) is among the most beloved and most prolific poets of the past century — a devoted craftswoman of exquisite poems and a sage of the secrets of the craft itself.
In this recording from a 2001 event held by the Lannan Foundation — the same reading that gave us Oliver on the magic of punctuation — the beloved writer reads the poem that would go on to become one of her most celebrated and lend its title to her 2004 volume Wild Geese: Selected Poems (public library). Oliver’s work speaks so deeply and with such courageous honesty to some of our most profound human perplexities, struggles, and exaltations that it is read everywhere from commencement addresses to yoga classes, endlessly replicated on the social web and borrowed for those formulaic chapter-opening quotations in pop-psychology and self-help books. And yet despite the vast exposure, something singular, something mesmeric and immutably moving happens as Oliver swirls the intricate thought-things of her poem in her own mouth — to say nothing of the impossibly charming George Eliot anecdote with which she prefaces the reading:
WILD GEESEYou do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
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.
Wild Geese: Selected Poems is a soul-stretching read in its entirety. Complement it with Oliver’s deeply endearing Dog Songs, one of the best books of 2013.
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