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News

Writer shares experience

Pulitzer Prize winner Oliver offers wisdom 
to aspiring artists at talk on Monday

by ASHLEY HESS
The Daily Cougar

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver said craft, discipline and openness to improvement are the keys to being a successful writer at a talk Monday in The Honors College Commons. 

"Learn the history of your discipline," Oliver said. "Of course, I'm talking about reading. I bet more people in this room have written more than they have read. I don't mean as an additional or academic way only. I mean until you find some poems that make you jealous. They make you want to make poems just as good. 

"That feel, that wish of understanding, is as important as intellectually being able to interpret the poem. You need to do both."

She also stressed the importance of mechanics in writing.

"You won't be a very good poet unless you become fascinated with the mechanics of the language," she said. This is really craft. I feel that it's my responsibility as a writer to catch what is given, and after years of writing you begin to have a verbal response because you do get given things."

Oliver said a fresh outlook is vital when revising poetry.

"The most important thing that you can do is learn to read your poems as if you didn't write them," she said. "This is a hard one, but it can be learned. But it's the only way, so I have felt with young writers, that you yourself learn to catch what isn't in the poem. … You have to read it as if you're a stranger to the whole story and the whole genesis of the poem."

Oliver said physically writing a poem is important to the process, a suggestion she said she expected almost everyone would disagree with.

"I advise everyone to write your poems by hand, not by computer, and the reason I say this is because when you work by computer you immediately see what it looks like in type, so it looks finished and you instantly lose what came before," she said. "You have no document or evidence to see the errors and changes you've made and why. It's most instructive to look at the scribble on the page and see how you've gotten better."

Oliver said that through craft, a person can learn how to put the feeling into the poem, but writers genuinely have to have the feeling themselves. 

"So much of writing is letting it go and seeing what comes, and many times you learn things about yourself," she said. "And you don't know what your feeling is … maybe you're angry as well as yearning or whatever. But everything can be taught as long as you have fostered the personal ingredients."

Although not everyone may desire to be a writer, Oliver said, "I think all of us want to express ourselves in some way. For some people it's other kinds of work -- it's through love and family, it's through good politics if they're into such things. It could be writing. 

"I think the body needs a spirit and a soul for life to be valuable, and in the same way I believe the soul and the spirit need a body to experience that. Patience, endurance, intensity, love of the language and this whole business and the thousand ways of craft are what help put a poem together successfully."

Oliver, who is the author of more than 20 books of poetry and prose, has been praised for her joyful observations and lyrical connection to the natural world. 

Her accomplishments include being the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984 and the National Book Award for Poetry in 1992.

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