News of Our Lives

I came across this interview of Mary Oliver done by my dear friend Renee Olander. I don’t agree with everything anyone says, not even the very clever and brilliant Mary Oliver, but one thing she said in this interview has been turning over and over in my head.

I never had any other notion than that the eye/I of the poem should be not the writer of the poem but the reader of the poem, and that was the point; it’s not that I care whether I’m a male voice speaking or a female voice speaking—or anything on a this-world basis—it’s that I believe very much and always have that readers want poems that will bring them news of their lives, not news of the poet’s life.

We write first to discover the news of our lives, the interior news (here David Abrams‘ image of the part of the bowl we cannot see—the patterns between the glaze and the clay—comes to mind). But in the process of articulating these truths, we discover the great overlaps between our experiences and those of others. Or perhaps we come only to a hazy understanding of the overlap when we’re writing. Perhaps the real creative work of the reader is to discover the overlap, to explain it to the writer. Every reading is a collaboration in this way, every time I read something to a new audience, it seems I discover something about the writing.

Sunday I’m reading in the Sunday Kind of Love reading series at Busboys and Poets 14th & V. Tickets are $5 and there’s an open mic after, so maybe you’ll come and bring a new poem and see for yourself. We’ll be your hype crew for sure.

I’ve maybe used the poem below, from Mary Oliver’s The Leaf and the Cloud before. But it’s spring again (despite temperatures to the contrary, I feel it in the angle of the sun, don’t you?) and I keep thinking of it.

Your opening phrase, “I rose this morning…” write for 18 minutes. Then sum up some idea you’ve arrived at with the flexibility of thinking signaled by the word “maybe.”