At the time of her death in 2019, the late Mary Oliver was one of the most successful American poets ever published. He wrote dozens of collections, and many highly quotable bangers that a reader would be as likely to see on a family bookshelf as the SAT.
With champions like Oprah and Maria Shriver, Oliver crossed the cultural barrier that often separates poetry from other papers, tied to the academy.
Their biggest hits – “Don’t Hesitate,” “wild Geese“—that rare thing: recognizable, which helped him gain a reputation as a people’s poet. Beloved for writing accessible, romantic poems about the natural world.
A new documentary from filmmaker Sasha Waters Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographableaims to evoke that gentle influence, and to complicate an artist who is sometimes dismissed as a “nature poet”.
Waters, a filmmaker of avant-garde origins, discovered Oliver’s work more than 30 years ago thanks to the care of Garrison Keillor Writer’s Almanac. She was drawn to making a film of Oliver’s life story because of a lifelong fascination with images. “There is a connection between representational photography and poetry,” she told me in a recent phone interview.
“At best they both draw from the real world – the visual world, the social world – and then transform their content through metaphor.”
Oliver in his adopted provincetown.
Produced by Kino Lorber, Mary Oliver: Saved by the World’s Beauties Uses Mary’s “material” to show the poet’s unruly side. This was no easy task, as Oliver was fierce in protecting his personal life. And there is very little filmed footage of the artist’s exit.
Furthermore, the tendency to write about modern animals combined to give the impression that Oliver – as Waters told me – was “a sweet little old lady”, more accessible than sophisticated. but in saved by the beauty of the worldA more dynamic picture emerges.
Composed of interviews with Oliver’s close friends (John Waters, David Keplinger) and adoring companions (Major Jackson, Ariana Reigns), and featuring vocals from celebrity fans (Stephen Colbert, Lucy Dacus), the film has a lighthearted quality. We keep wandering between tribute and analysis.
In the early scenes, Oliver’s eccentricity and ambition, two under-sung traits, are emphasized. Casual fans may be surprised by the poet’s assortment in the film: it Mary is bohemian, stubborn and willing.
A young Mary Oliver, surrounded by books.
For example, this reader did not know that Mary Oliver was a teenage runaway—although she had abandoned the allure of a major city for the wilderness. (“Some people go to the library,” Mary explains at one point. “I went into the woods.”) I also didn’t know that she’d left home again at age 17 to talk her way into an internship at Steepletop, the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay.
I didn’t know that Oliver had a bohemian era in Greenwich Village, or that she was a lifelong smoker. Or that for most of her life, she lived at the poverty line, so that her devotional practice was structured around daily walks in the woods surrounding her home in Provincetown.
Mary and her partner of decades, Molly Malone Cook. In the film, Oliver mentions their incredible bond. “We were having a conversation. It was a 40-year conversation.”
I Too I didn’t know Oliver was a gay poet, fellow gallerist, and photographer Molly Malone Cook For thirty years. In the film, John Waters (no relation to the filmmaker), offers a particularly fascinating reflection on their love story, which shaped Oliver’s early work and facilitated his career.
And although Oliver never wrote about physical lust as some colleagues have, saved by the beauty of the world He repeatedly emphasizes that love was the writer’s guiding star.
More than nature, his real subject – the suggestion of both waters – was awe-inspiring. Oliver trafficked in deep emotion, and insisted on respecting life in every sense. She measured a poem’s success by a three question metric: If a work served a spiritual purpose, had true energy and real body, then she felt she could stand behind it.
Mary Oliver with her two dogs.
The film works well enough as an elaborate tribute with a dash of lyricism (see: celebrity singing). But for all its revelations, Saved… Not a fully developed biography. This is its credit. There are quirky, whimsical aspects to it – such as when John Waters describes the time Mary was bitten by a badger during a woodland walk.
Then there are deeper mysteries.
There is room for Oliver’s critics, who wish we had considered the AIDS crisis as a queer woman writing in its heyday. Another rift in the poet’s life concerns the late-life relationship Oliver began with Cook after his death. The film depicts Mary’s other partner, Anne, becoming angry as friends question the couple’s compatibility, and moving to Florida late in the day.
In another significant moment of faltering, the poet Nick Flynn offers a summary critique of Oliver’s caution on the page for which he was known. When asked about the range of his admirers, he said, “He always presented himself in the light.” “He had no wrestling with his shadow.” Highlights are given in the canon of what seems appropriate.
Oliver at his typewriter.
But in the final chapter of the film, when Oliver is garnering praise and the intense public recognition with which she will die, the poet gives a speech about the sexual abuse she suffered as a child.
It’s the ability to speak about your life Finally It has been hailed as an artistic triumph – although the poems chosen for this revelation were not necessarily written during Mary’s later years.
In general, the work is presented as a kind of thematic through-line, a non-chronological companion to Mary’s biography. And as far as the ambient darkness is concerned, Waters (Sasha) told me that all the ambient light in the film was included by design, as a testament to Oliver’s most sacred covenant: Attention equals love.
Waters said, “I think she was really indifferent to the trends of the literary establishment.” “She was playing the long game. She wrote for an audience she always believed was there, and for the future… during her lifetime and beyond.”
As a spectator who went in Saved… A casual but perhaps not so ardent fan of Oliver, I can tell you that I was elated and tender, with poetry on my tongue. I wanted to scream in a valley or walk in a forest – and these activities didn’t feel mundane or gentle to me, so much as they felt sensual and deep.
i hope you can find Mary Oliver: Saved by the World’s Beauties Running in limited release near you.
Images via Kina Lorber
