BLL: on Mary Oliver and Life with Birds in it
Name:
BLL: on Mary Oliver and Life with Birds in it
Date:
April 4, 2024
Time:
5:30 PM - 6:30 PM EDT
Event Description:
Celebrate National Poetry Month by gathering to explore Mary Oliver’s life and work—including some poems you may not have known. Local Poet Rose Auslander will lead this presentation.
Like many, Mary Oliver wasn’t originally from here—but she was a Cape Cod poet. Born to what she called a “dysfunctional” family in Ohio, in adult life she joyfully became Molly Malone Cook’s lifelong partner in Provincetown, and a poet of our dunes and beaches and woods.
Choosing not to follow the confessional approach of her contemporaries Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, Mary Oliver believed a poem should “have birds in it” and trees, and water, and was a poet most at ease on all fours looking at “the grasses, the first bursting growth of trees, declivities, lumps, slopes, rivulets, gashes, open spaces.” Living on this sometimes isolated spit of land, she believed a poem should speak—and be good company. There are poets who adore her (and a few who don’t have much use for her), but rarely is a poet as loved as she was, and still is. Even though she is no longer with us, in our times of need her poems continue to be good company.
BLL, 1822 Main Street
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