Found an amazing new author!
While wandering downtown on Monday afternoon, I found a 1991 trade paperback at The Attic (a used stuff store). It's called The Pushcart Prize, XVI - Best of the Small Presses. It's an amazing collection of essays, poetry, prose, and short stories - "an annual anthology of the best from America's alternative presses." This 574 page book cost me $1.06 in total, but I would gladly have paid the original $13 cover price.
[And, yes, it's still going. The 2006 edition celebrates the anthology's 30th anniversary.]
Anyway, partway through the book, I found this little gem of a poem. It grabbed me in a way that most poems don't. I can't get it out of my head. It's a meme-poem! Enjoy!
Little Owl Who Lives in The Orchard
by Mary Oliver
His beak could open a bottle,
and his eyes - when he lifts their soft lids -
go on reading something
just beyond your shoulder -
Blake, maybe,
or the Book of Revelation.
Never mind that he eats only
the black-smocked crickets,
and dragonflies if they happen
to be out late over the ponds, and of course
the occasional festal mouse.
Never mind that he is only a memo
from the offices of fear -
it's not size but surge that tells us
when we're in touch with something real,
and when I hear him in the orchard
fluttering
down the little aluminum
ladder of his scream -
when I see his wings open, like two black ferns,
a flurry of palpitations
as cold as sleet
rackets across the marshlands
of my heart,
like a wild spring day.
Somewhere in the universe,
in the gallery of important things,
the babyish owl, ruffled and rakish,
sits on its pedestal.
Dear, dark dapple of plush!
A message, reads the label,
from that mysterious conglomerate:
Oblivion and Co.
The hooked head stares
from its blouse of dark, feathery lace.
It could be a valentine.
Mary Oliver (b. 1935) was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She spent one year at Ohio State University and a second year at Vassar. Her distinctive poetic talent led to an appointment as the chair of the writing department of the Fine Arts Workshop in Provincetown, Massachusetts (1972-1973). Though she never graduated from college, she was awarded the Mather Visiting Professorship at Case Western Reserve University for 1980 and 1982, and, among her many awards and honors, she received a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship (1972-1973), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1980-1981), and a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for her book American Primitive.
One critic, commenting on her work, asserts that "her vision of nature is celebratory and religious in the deepest sense."
Her poems are all over the Internet. The most complete collection I have found is at FamousPoetsAndPoems.com.
Bibliography
* No Voyage, and Other Poems (1963, first edition; 1965, expanded edition)
* The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems (1972)
* The Night Traveler (1978)
* Twelve Moons (1978)
* Sleeping in the Forest (1979, poetry chapbook)
* American Primitive (1983)
* Dream Work (1986)
* Provincetown (1987, limited edition with woodcuts by Barnard Taylor)
* House of Light (1990)
* New and Selected Poems (1992)
* A Poetry Handbook (1994)
* White Pine: Poems and Prose Poems (1994)
* Blue Pastures (1995)
* West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems (1997)
* Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse (1998)
* Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (1999)
* The Leaf and the Cloud (2000, prose poem)
* What Do We Know (2002)
* Owls and Other Fantasies: poems and essays (2003)
* New and Selected Poems, volume two (2004)
* Why I Wake Early: New Poems (2004)
* Blue Iris: Poems and Essays (2004)
* Long Life: Essays and Other Writings (2004)
[And, yes, it's still going. The 2006 edition celebrates the anthology's 30th anniversary.]
Anyway, partway through the book, I found this little gem of a poem. It grabbed me in a way that most poems don't. I can't get it out of my head. It's a meme-poem! Enjoy!
Little Owl Who Lives in The Orchard
by Mary Oliver
His beak could open a bottle,
and his eyes - when he lifts their soft lids -
go on reading something
just beyond your shoulder -
Blake, maybe,
or the Book of Revelation.
Never mind that he eats only
the black-smocked crickets,
and dragonflies if they happen
to be out late over the ponds, and of course
the occasional festal mouse.
Never mind that he is only a memo
from the offices of fear -
it's not size but surge that tells us
when we're in touch with something real,
and when I hear him in the orchard
fluttering
down the little aluminum
ladder of his scream -
when I see his wings open, like two black ferns,
a flurry of palpitations
as cold as sleet
rackets across the marshlands
of my heart,
like a wild spring day.
Somewhere in the universe,
in the gallery of important things,
the babyish owl, ruffled and rakish,
sits on its pedestal.
Dear, dark dapple of plush!
A message, reads the label,
from that mysterious conglomerate:
Oblivion and Co.
The hooked head stares
from its blouse of dark, feathery lace.
It could be a valentine.
Mary Oliver (b. 1935) was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She spent one year at Ohio State University and a second year at Vassar. Her distinctive poetic talent led to an appointment as the chair of the writing department of the Fine Arts Workshop in Provincetown, Massachusetts (1972-1973). Though she never graduated from college, she was awarded the Mather Visiting Professorship at Case Western Reserve University for 1980 and 1982, and, among her many awards and honors, she received a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship (1972-1973), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1980-1981), and a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for her book American Primitive.
One critic, commenting on her work, asserts that "her vision of nature is celebratory and religious in the deepest sense."
Her poems are all over the Internet. The most complete collection I have found is at FamousPoetsAndPoems.com.
Bibliography
* No Voyage, and Other Poems (1963, first edition; 1965, expanded edition)
* The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems (1972)
* The Night Traveler (1978)
* Twelve Moons (1978)
* Sleeping in the Forest (1979, poetry chapbook)
* American Primitive (1983)
* Dream Work (1986)
* Provincetown (1987, limited edition with woodcuts by Barnard Taylor)
* House of Light (1990)
* New and Selected Poems (1992)
* A Poetry Handbook (1994)
* White Pine: Poems and Prose Poems (1994)
* Blue Pastures (1995)
* West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems (1997)
* Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse (1998)
* Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (1999)
* The Leaf and the Cloud (2000, prose poem)
* What Do We Know (2002)
* Owls and Other Fantasies: poems and essays (2003)
* New and Selected Poems, volume two (2004)
* Why I Wake Early: New Poems (2004)
* Blue Iris: Poems and Essays (2004)
* Long Life: Essays and Other Writings (2004)