The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building.
Mary OliverThere is a notion that creative people are absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true for they are in another world altogether.
Mary OliverLet me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers. Let me keep company always with those who say โLook!โ and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads. (from โMysteries, Yesโ)
Mary OliverLITTLE DOGS RHAPSODY IN THE NIGHT (PERCY THREE) He puts his cheek against mine and makes small, expressive sounds. And when I'm awake, or awake enough he turns upside down, his four paws in the air and his eyes dark and fervent. Tell me you love me, he says. Tell me again. Could there be a sweeter arrangement? Over and over he gets to ask it. I get to tell.
Mary OliverI want to write something so simply about love or about pain that even as you are reading you feel it and as you read you keep feeling it and though it be my story it will be common, though it be singular it will be known to you so that by the end you will thinkโ no, you will realizeโ that it was all the while yourself arranging the words, that it was all the time words that you yourself, out of your heart had been saying.
Mary Oliver