Thank you for this! The Mary Oliver slander is saddening. I'm afraid we've confused 'smarter' with more wise. We've reduced 'unadorned' to simplistic.
What I admire most about Oliver is her ability to distill the spiritual hunger that is often so amorphous to us, and often so, so difficult to articulate. She is able to communicate this to us with a startling plainness, as if the truth had been apparent all along.
And yes - yes to earnestness! God knows we could use more of it these days.
I adore Mary Oliver's work and have for years. Mourned her passing in 2019. In poet Mary Oliver’s 2004 lovely collection of essays _Long Life_, dedicated to her partner before Molly passed in 2005, Oliver comments on life and its questions: “All through our gliding journey, on this day as on so many others, a little song runs through my mind, I say a song because it passes musically, but it is really just words, a thought that is neither strange nor complex. In fact, how strange it would be NOT to think it—not to have such music inside one’s head and body, on such an afternoon. What does it mean, say the words, that the earth is so beautiful? And what shall I do about it? What is the gift that I should bring to the world? What is the life that I should live?”
Man, this is so good. There's a lot going on with this Oliver controversy, much of which you covered beautifully. Thank you for doing the work of thinking this thing through.
Here are a couple additional points that come to mind: 1) The sickly state of the academy--its anemic English departments, its gnosticism, it commitment to ideology before all else. If the academy is the mothership of highbrow culture, I gotta say, they're doing Oliver a service by disowning her. 2) Only mediocre thinkers and artists are afraid of being understood. Really great artists and thinkers risk clarity (their ideas can withstand it). 3) Chris Wiman (poet, essayist) once made a distinction I've come to love...He says there's a difference between plain language and common language. Common language is often lifeless. It's a placeholder, like the cliche; whereas plain language is 'accessible' but charged with the vitality of attention and intelligence. Mary Oliver is a poet of plain but living language. Her poems are compositions of attention and a mind humbly bent towards the world, watching, listening.
I don't actually know what constitutes "highbrow" literature (its placement in the canon, obscurity, the ego-lift a person feels when speaking knowingly about it?), but if literary awards are indicative of anything I'd guess that highbrow literature is easier to theorize--in other words, it's easier to speak abstractly about (the mind not bent in attention but playing at lordship over the world). So, yeah, in that case Oliver isn't highbrow. Thank God.
Thank again for your thoughts. I just became a subscriber!
i'm really glad you've attempted here to rehabilitate Mary Oliver as poet of obvious brilliance. i did suffer a bit from that meme that she wasn't a real, or good poet, but i flatter myself that i did, in time, realise that that simply wasn't true - and before i read this! anyway, i thought this a truly excellent piece, cheers.
I first heard Wild Geese in an interview with David Whyte, who is likewise found on ted talks and tea towels but who likewise brings poetry to the common reader. What do you make of him?
Thanks so much for this. I’d somehow never read Mary Oliver.
You raise a really interesting question - why does poetry have to be highbrow to be respected?
Some of her poems are great. But let’s say the average is just ok. Curious for theories on how we got to this point. What ever happened to - good, on its level. Why can’t we have Beethoven and Abba? (who I’ve realized are really good, by the way).
Another Mary Oliver latecomer here. I find her simple and specific observations sublime. Surely at this time when nature is so threatened, something that brings us closer should be cherished.
I wondered if something might be happening with you on this front when -- after we chatted about it -- you started posting some of her poems on twitter, and all your picks were really subtle. Much stronger choices than many of those I saw that first day. I almost replied to you about that! But I was also really starting to wonder about what exactly it was that made me, and clearly MANY OTHER PEOPLE, so unhappy about the description "middlebrow". As much as everyone wants to say it's totally cool to be middlebrow, evidently, in fact, we feel that it is not. I really got a lot out of your investigation of what it actually means to be middlebrow anyway. I'm still turning all of this over in my mind to be honest. I've also realised I'm probably a little more middlebrow than I had thought! I now wonder if calling ourselves highbrow, or seeking to be highbrow, is a way to defend against the pain of being misunderstood (since the demanding nature of highbrow work makes it easy to misunderstand) -- if that label is taken away from us, we feel a bit defenceless.
They really do! I was't going to write about it (just another Twitter argument) but then I remembered that if I don't sometimes deal with question of how literary popularity relates to literary quality, I might need to change the name of this blog...
You're not the only person to respond to this by saying "maybe I'm more middlebrow than I knew". But I find middlebrow odd. Are any of us **not** middlebrow by Woolf's definition? She was a genius critic and this essay is a rare example of muddy definitions, perhaps why she kept it unpublished in her lifetime.
If I read Milton in the morning and Wendy Cope in the afternoon do I stop being highbrow and become middlebrow? That seems possible, but then the terms become vapid. Which of us isn't "mixed indistinguishably" between these two these days? I find most television dull and second rate, but if I watch it anyway what maters more, my watching or my ability to distinguish?
Woolf complains about people who are "betwixt and between" but that's a mindset which is quite difficult to define. She also talks about appreciating "living art" but it surely those people who read more modern lit than anything else who are the most likely to be "middlebrow" these days? (Christian Lorentzen has few peers.) If anyone prominent in literature today is middlebrow, it might be Lauren Oyler, but she proclaims herself to be a highbrow in her essays in terms that look almost cribbed from Woolf (the same self-referential, half-joking tone, too.) Though since I am unsure about the term I say this as a speculation only.
Woolf thinks middlebrow is all about money, but that surely can't be true. Bad taste exists among those dedicated to things beside their annual income. If middlebrows are the ones who earn more than they need to live, as VW says, then what are we to make of Wallace Stevens!? I wonder sometimes if her whole essay isn't anything more than a joke taken too seriously by those who really do want to be called highbrow in the New Statesmen, though they only say it ironically because that works as counter signalling and thus preserves their dignity. (Oyler counter signals in her interviews a lot. She tells people at highbrow parties she's the most widely admired literary critic of her generation (quoting some newspaper piece about her) which a very telling ironic pose where all the irony is doing is disarming her interlocutor's ability to scoff. Similarly, she told one interviewer that she goes to underwear raves in Berlin because she has a great bum and needs to show it off when she can. I don't care or judge any of this, but it's clearly an act of counter signalling that makes it safe for her to plead her case as a snob in a manner that would otherwise be irredeemably middlebrow.)
Woolf says we can be high and low: we can live in pursuit of art and of the best and still watch murder mysteries and drink cheap wine, as W.H. Auden, that veritable highbrow, used to do. The problem with the middle is the refusal to see the difference, which, ironically, was implied in a lot of the Mary Oliver apologies.
I think the real meaning, if there is any longer a good use of the term, might be to do with knowing and respecting the difference. A lot of the response about Mary Oliver was as if to say "I like therapy poetry, don't be a snob!" Now, that accepts the middlebrow accusation, but also disputes that it matter. And "why should people who know more than me dispute what is good?" isn't a very convincing question.
Scott Sumner wrote about this when the NYT doxxed SSC and I think his essay is one of the best things out there on this topic. "Any time a powerful middlebrow entity (which wrongly thinks it’s highbrow) evaluates an actual highbrow entity, you will end up with a mixture of resentment and incomprehension. " To understand what happened with the Mary Oliver debate, I think we invert that. First the MFA crowd were all "resentment and incomprehension" about MO, and then the MO-as-therapy people were the same about the MFA crown. One other question that occurred to me, but which I kept out of my piece was, "Is **anyone** in this debate really highbrow?" If often read like two different tastes of middlebrow bickering with each other. As you say, many poems cited in her defence were.... not the best poems! (https://www.themoneyillusion.com/understanding-middlebrow/)
The other piece of writing on this topic I find helpful is a letter Ted Hughes sent to Seamus Heaney in ~1990, when they were working on the School Bag anthology. Hughes set out a three tiered ranking of poets. To be A team, you had to be excellent technically and speak to the state of the nation (Milton, Wordsworth etc). Tennyson was B team because while he met those criteria, he was speaking for a time that was saccharine and hysterical and phoney. (Not Hughes words, working from memory.) Maybe Mary Oliver is a bit like that? She spoke to a culture that was often vacuous and bleurgh, even though she did it as well as it could, perhaps, be done, and often went beyond it. That she did it at all blinds many to her depths.
Sorry, too long, but topic v v interesting. And of course I linked, your last essay was splendid! Hope it sent you some readers.
It did send me a spike in traffic yes :^__^ ! Thank you again :)) !!
I share your thought that Virgina Woolf must be substantially wrong on this point. I also shared your thought that everyone involved in this debate seemed to be engaging along some pre-determined lines or to have some surprisingly large areas of shared understanding. I've been thinking a lot about how I did not see even one single person defend Rupi Kaur. That's good as far as I'm concerned because her poetry is absolutely terrible. But it kind of surprises me in retrospect -- everyone getting extremely offended on Oliver's behalf is implicitly shading Kaur as a result!
I also think that we can learn something about poetry by comparing 3 poets we might characterise as low, middle and highbrow. I'm going to choose Ginnie Bale for low, Oliver for middle, and Izumi Shikibu for high. Here are the 3 very short poems that I have in mind:
.
.
[apparently untitled poem from the collection Drama Queen]
by Ginnie Bale
He didn't like drama
And I was fucking shakespeare
.
.
.
.
I Did Think, Let’s Go About This Slowly
by Mary Oliver
I did think, let’s go about this slowly.
This is important. This should take
some really deep thought. We should take
small thoughtful steps.
But, bless us, we didn’t.
.
.
.
.
"Although the wind..."
by Izumi Shikibu, translated by Jane Hirshfield
Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.
.
.
So one thing I'm going to say immediately jumps out is the progressive compression of meaning in the 3 poems. The first poem does not compress any meaning at all. It's about as thoughtful and substantive as the average tweet; it should have been a tweet. It's trying to be funny but barely succeeds, primarily because of the clunky manner in which it uses the single allusion it contains -- Shakespeare is not widely considered a dramatic artist -- but also because there's just nothing substantial in the poem at all. It would make an acceptable couplet in a diss rap but it can't stand alone by itself.
This Oliver poem does a much better job of condensing meaning and using allusion. We know when we read it to what it refers, which is cool. But I think this poem, specifically, is middlebrow. The first four lines are repetitive, and the sentiment is too insubstantial for this to work as it otherwise might (it doesn't bully you but it's not florid enough to be a good portrait of self-justification). "We know better than to do this, but we do it anyway" just isn't powerful as subject matter. There's no hysteria or rending or grief here that might make it more powerful.
The Shikibu poem is the masterclass (imo!). The compression of meaning in these 5 lines is just unreal. The work is dense with emotion and allusion. The japanese zen-influenced poets are usually good at this because they know to invoke nature in a way that highlights its hostility and its grace -- the wind blowing terribly, the moonlight -- and then to juxtapose it with human endeavours -- the ruined house -- and they have an extraordinary grasp of imagery, so that you can almost see the vision, the moonlight *leaks between the roof planks* (so now alluding to water), the pale moon in the dark night, leaking down into the ruined house, which to me is obviously the stand-in for human endeavour, and the construction of the self, so when I read the poem I feel as if I am the ruined house, and the poem describes my experience.
So that poem from Oliver really isn't very good work, and really is pretty middlebrow. (It's not bad, but it's just simply not great.) I really liked her other poems that you highlighted, and your efforts gave me a new appreciation for her less popular stuff... which is always a delight with any artist. This reminds me, I hate Andy Warhol, (a middlebrow hack!!!!), but one time in the Boston ICA I saw a really excellent photograph (of someone in a semi-chaotic posture wilding out at a rural campsite or something) that he had taken earlier in his life. Woah, I thought, so Andy Warhol could have actually been good. Spooky.
This is amazing. You should put it on your stack. (Or guest post here...) Agree that Shikibu is wonderful! Those last three lines! ALso, HARD AGREE about Warhol. I semi-defended Rupi Kapur once upon a time, quoted below. (Is she the least well-understood poet of our times, relative to her popularity?)
Rupi reminds me of no-one more strongly than the original lyricist, Sappho.
I don’t read Ancient Greek, so I can only read translations. And, to be fair to the insta poets, who are not judged on their context only on their ‘artless’ poetry, I’ll leave aside any of the context about who Sappho was, which I think plays an outsized role in much of the appreciation of her writing.
Let’s start with a famous fragment:
Come, holy tortoise shell,
my lyre, and become a poem.
I’m not sure this is so much better than most of what Rupi writes. Here’s three other translations, if you want to compare. You can put it in more formal register, break the lines differently, but it comes down to the same thing.
Compare it to this, by Rupi.
i am a museum full of art
but you had your eyes shut
Here’s another Sappho poem I wouldn’t be so surprised to see on Instagram:
Virginity, virginity, when you leave me,
where do you go?
I am gone and never come back to you.
I never return.
Are her line breaks here really any better than Rupi’s above? The translation is the most highly thought of. Is it so different in tone or style?
How about when Rupi writes this, is she so awful?
I will not subject myself to their ideology
cause slut shaming is rape culture
virgin praising is rape culture
There’s some rather neat, if not obvious, use of technique that reinforces the basic structure and message of that short poem.
Here’s one more comparison, this time using two longer poems.
You lay in wait
behind a laurel tree,
and everything
was pleasant:
you a woman
wanderer like me.
I barely hear you,
my darling;
you came in your
trim garments,
and suddenly: beauty
of your garments.
Note the repeated use of garments in the last two lines, like Rupi repeated ‘rape culture’ in the poem above. To the literary type, this is concise, honed, ‘worked on language’, and yet when Rupi uses the same techniques in the following poem, she is part of the new insurgency that’s going to bring the culture of poetry to its knees.
i always
get myself
into this mess
i always let him
tell me i am beautiful
and half believe it
i always jump thinking
he will catch me
at the fall
i am hopelessly a lover and
a dreamer and
that will be
the death of me
‘I always jump thinking/ he will catch me/ at the fall.’ What lovely bathos. Rearrange the lines a little and you’re dealing with classic English language love poetry here. Of course, not the best English language love poetry, but go ahead and read the anthologies. A lot of poetry that is honoured in one generation is seen as sentimental, cliched, or just plain naff later on. Look at Cowley.
‘I am hopelessly a lover and dreamer,’ is a perfectly respectable line of verse (repeat it to yourself, it’s really quite good) that I suspect most people would sooner memorise than most of what gets written by the poets who are angry that this poem was printed by a ‘respectable’ publisher.
My comment here is yours to do what you like with. When I realised this was the place I wanted to put the comparison I had been thinking of for the 3 poems, I realised it would be unusual to do so, but I felt like it belonged here. I'm glad you enjoyed it, thank you for the kind words. :)
You've made an admirable case for Kaur, I don't agree with you but you made me have to think really hard about it to be sure!
Can I ask a question? I agree that the house is a stand-in for what humans do, what we create, but why is it specifically a stand in for the construction of the self?
This is a great question and I was almost wanting someone to ask -- it's because of this poet's association with the Zen tradition, and the construction of the self is perhaps the most central concern of Zen buddhist thought.
Great article. I too only learned of her not long ago but have enjoyed all her work that I have so far read! Must seek out some of her books. A poet is a poet is a poet on whatever level they are. Enjoy who you want too and don't believe every negative comment. Poetry has changed its tone and style a lot in recent years and I don't like/understand all of it but that doesn't mean it is wrong or middlebrow/highbrow or in the gutter!!
Thank you for this, for the reminder of why “Summer Day” is such a great poem, and for the several st the end that are new to me. I read “In Blackwater Woods” at my mother’s memorial. Another with final lines that sear and soothe the soul.
IN BLACKWATER WOODS
Mary Oliver
Look, the trees are turning
their own bodies into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders
of the ponds.
and every pond, no matter what its name is, is
nameless now. Every year everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side
is salvation
whose meaning
none of us will ever know. To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal; to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go
I'm not familiar with Oliver's poetry (I only know her name from the dismissive discourse, CF Anis Shivani's famous observation that "her “poems all seem to follow the same pattern: time, animal, setting, observation, epiphany. For example, 5 a.m., opossum, backyard, broken, it ran. Or 3 p.m., kitten, field, how real, peace. Only has to mechanically alter the variables, to get the same desired effect.”)
I think the word earnest is good here. For some people, probably post-Gen X, sincerity is essentially middlebrow; highbrow necessarily involves some level of ironic detachment. Thinking of how people of my generation use "tryhard" as a derogatory term.
Thank you for this! The Mary Oliver slander is saddening. I'm afraid we've confused 'smarter' with more wise. We've reduced 'unadorned' to simplistic.
What I admire most about Oliver is her ability to distill the spiritual hunger that is often so amorphous to us, and often so, so difficult to articulate. She is able to communicate this to us with a startling plainness, as if the truth had been apparent all along.
And yes - yes to earnestness! God knows we could use more of it these days.
I adore Mary Oliver's work and have for years. Mourned her passing in 2019. In poet Mary Oliver’s 2004 lovely collection of essays _Long Life_, dedicated to her partner before Molly passed in 2005, Oliver comments on life and its questions: “All through our gliding journey, on this day as on so many others, a little song runs through my mind, I say a song because it passes musically, but it is really just words, a thought that is neither strange nor complex. In fact, how strange it would be NOT to think it—not to have such music inside one’s head and body, on such an afternoon. What does it mean, say the words, that the earth is so beautiful? And what shall I do about it? What is the gift that I should bring to the world? What is the life that I should live?”
Man, this is so good. There's a lot going on with this Oliver controversy, much of which you covered beautifully. Thank you for doing the work of thinking this thing through.
Here are a couple additional points that come to mind: 1) The sickly state of the academy--its anemic English departments, its gnosticism, it commitment to ideology before all else. If the academy is the mothership of highbrow culture, I gotta say, they're doing Oliver a service by disowning her. 2) Only mediocre thinkers and artists are afraid of being understood. Really great artists and thinkers risk clarity (their ideas can withstand it). 3) Chris Wiman (poet, essayist) once made a distinction I've come to love...He says there's a difference between plain language and common language. Common language is often lifeless. It's a placeholder, like the cliche; whereas plain language is 'accessible' but charged with the vitality of attention and intelligence. Mary Oliver is a poet of plain but living language. Her poems are compositions of attention and a mind humbly bent towards the world, watching, listening.
I don't actually know what constitutes "highbrow" literature (its placement in the canon, obscurity, the ego-lift a person feels when speaking knowingly about it?), but if literary awards are indicative of anything I'd guess that highbrow literature is easier to theorize--in other words, it's easier to speak abstractly about (the mind not bent in attention but playing at lordship over the world). So, yeah, in that case Oliver isn't highbrow. Thank God.
Thank again for your thoughts. I just became a subscriber!
Interesting comments thank you! Hope you enjoy reading!
i'm really glad you've attempted here to rehabilitate Mary Oliver as poet of obvious brilliance. i did suffer a bit from that meme that she wasn't a real, or good poet, but i flatter myself that i did, in time, realise that that simply wasn't true - and before i read this! anyway, i thought this a truly excellent piece, cheers.
PS I’m teaching Oliver in the fall (for the first time—new course for me. Your piece will be a great way to start the conversations …
I first heard Wild Geese in an interview with David Whyte, who is likewise found on ted talks and tea towels but who likewise brings poetry to the common reader. What do you make of him?
less familiar with his work, but I'm not an admirer...
“Ted Talks and Tea Towels” Ha! I have the same reaction to David Whyte - curious as to your analysis of why
Check out Rachel’s comments interesting on this point
Thanks so much for this. I’d somehow never read Mary Oliver.
You raise a really interesting question - why does poetry have to be highbrow to be respected?
Some of her poems are great. But let’s say the average is just ok. Curious for theories on how we got to this point. What ever happened to - good, on its level. Why can’t we have Beethoven and Abba? (who I’ve realized are really good, by the way).
I've come late to Mary Oliver's party, as I've posted about, but I'm here to stay. I'm a fan.
Beautiful defense of moving poetry with lyrical combinations that are not trite. Nor are they middlebrow.
Another Mary Oliver latecomer here. I find her simple and specific observations sublime. Surely at this time when nature is so threatened, something that brings us closer should be cherished.
I dare anyone to read a single one of her poems that allude to the darkness of her childhood and tell me she didn’t have it in her.
She wasn’t just good — she was one of the best.
Wowww the people yearn for Mary Oliver posting!
I wondered if something might be happening with you on this front when -- after we chatted about it -- you started posting some of her poems on twitter, and all your picks were really subtle. Much stronger choices than many of those I saw that first day. I almost replied to you about that! But I was also really starting to wonder about what exactly it was that made me, and clearly MANY OTHER PEOPLE, so unhappy about the description "middlebrow". As much as everyone wants to say it's totally cool to be middlebrow, evidently, in fact, we feel that it is not. I really got a lot out of your investigation of what it actually means to be middlebrow anyway. I'm still turning all of this over in my mind to be honest. I've also realised I'm probably a little more middlebrow than I had thought! I now wonder if calling ourselves highbrow, or seeking to be highbrow, is a way to defend against the pain of being misunderstood (since the demanding nature of highbrow work makes it easy to misunderstand) -- if that label is taken away from us, we feel a bit defenceless.
Thank you for linking to my substack :) <3
They really do! I was't going to write about it (just another Twitter argument) but then I remembered that if I don't sometimes deal with question of how literary popularity relates to literary quality, I might need to change the name of this blog...
You're not the only person to respond to this by saying "maybe I'm more middlebrow than I knew". But I find middlebrow odd. Are any of us **not** middlebrow by Woolf's definition? She was a genius critic and this essay is a rare example of muddy definitions, perhaps why she kept it unpublished in her lifetime.
If I read Milton in the morning and Wendy Cope in the afternoon do I stop being highbrow and become middlebrow? That seems possible, but then the terms become vapid. Which of us isn't "mixed indistinguishably" between these two these days? I find most television dull and second rate, but if I watch it anyway what maters more, my watching or my ability to distinguish?
Woolf complains about people who are "betwixt and between" but that's a mindset which is quite difficult to define. She also talks about appreciating "living art" but it surely those people who read more modern lit than anything else who are the most likely to be "middlebrow" these days? (Christian Lorentzen has few peers.) If anyone prominent in literature today is middlebrow, it might be Lauren Oyler, but she proclaims herself to be a highbrow in her essays in terms that look almost cribbed from Woolf (the same self-referential, half-joking tone, too.) Though since I am unsure about the term I say this as a speculation only.
Woolf thinks middlebrow is all about money, but that surely can't be true. Bad taste exists among those dedicated to things beside their annual income. If middlebrows are the ones who earn more than they need to live, as VW says, then what are we to make of Wallace Stevens!? I wonder sometimes if her whole essay isn't anything more than a joke taken too seriously by those who really do want to be called highbrow in the New Statesmen, though they only say it ironically because that works as counter signalling and thus preserves their dignity. (Oyler counter signals in her interviews a lot. She tells people at highbrow parties she's the most widely admired literary critic of her generation (quoting some newspaper piece about her) which a very telling ironic pose where all the irony is doing is disarming her interlocutor's ability to scoff. Similarly, she told one interviewer that she goes to underwear raves in Berlin because she has a great bum and needs to show it off when she can. I don't care or judge any of this, but it's clearly an act of counter signalling that makes it safe for her to plead her case as a snob in a manner that would otherwise be irredeemably middlebrow.)
Woolf says we can be high and low: we can live in pursuit of art and of the best and still watch murder mysteries and drink cheap wine, as W.H. Auden, that veritable highbrow, used to do. The problem with the middle is the refusal to see the difference, which, ironically, was implied in a lot of the Mary Oliver apologies.
I think the real meaning, if there is any longer a good use of the term, might be to do with knowing and respecting the difference. A lot of the response about Mary Oliver was as if to say "I like therapy poetry, don't be a snob!" Now, that accepts the middlebrow accusation, but also disputes that it matter. And "why should people who know more than me dispute what is good?" isn't a very convincing question.
Scott Sumner wrote about this when the NYT doxxed SSC and I think his essay is one of the best things out there on this topic. "Any time a powerful middlebrow entity (which wrongly thinks it’s highbrow) evaluates an actual highbrow entity, you will end up with a mixture of resentment and incomprehension. " To understand what happened with the Mary Oliver debate, I think we invert that. First the MFA crowd were all "resentment and incomprehension" about MO, and then the MO-as-therapy people were the same about the MFA crown. One other question that occurred to me, but which I kept out of my piece was, "Is **anyone** in this debate really highbrow?" If often read like two different tastes of middlebrow bickering with each other. As you say, many poems cited in her defence were.... not the best poems! (https://www.themoneyillusion.com/understanding-middlebrow/)
The other piece of writing on this topic I find helpful is a letter Ted Hughes sent to Seamus Heaney in ~1990, when they were working on the School Bag anthology. Hughes set out a three tiered ranking of poets. To be A team, you had to be excellent technically and speak to the state of the nation (Milton, Wordsworth etc). Tennyson was B team because while he met those criteria, he was speaking for a time that was saccharine and hysterical and phoney. (Not Hughes words, working from memory.) Maybe Mary Oliver is a bit like that? She spoke to a culture that was often vacuous and bleurgh, even though she did it as well as it could, perhaps, be done, and often went beyond it. That she did it at all blinds many to her depths.
Sorry, too long, but topic v v interesting. And of course I linked, your last essay was splendid! Hope it sent you some readers.
It did send me a spike in traffic yes :^__^ ! Thank you again :)) !!
I share your thought that Virgina Woolf must be substantially wrong on this point. I also shared your thought that everyone involved in this debate seemed to be engaging along some pre-determined lines or to have some surprisingly large areas of shared understanding. I've been thinking a lot about how I did not see even one single person defend Rupi Kaur. That's good as far as I'm concerned because her poetry is absolutely terrible. But it kind of surprises me in retrospect -- everyone getting extremely offended on Oliver's behalf is implicitly shading Kaur as a result!
I also think that we can learn something about poetry by comparing 3 poets we might characterise as low, middle and highbrow. I'm going to choose Ginnie Bale for low, Oliver for middle, and Izumi Shikibu for high. Here are the 3 very short poems that I have in mind:
.
.
[apparently untitled poem from the collection Drama Queen]
by Ginnie Bale
He didn't like drama
And I was fucking shakespeare
.
.
.
.
I Did Think, Let’s Go About This Slowly
by Mary Oliver
I did think, let’s go about this slowly.
This is important. This should take
some really deep thought. We should take
small thoughtful steps.
But, bless us, we didn’t.
.
.
.
.
"Although the wind..."
by Izumi Shikibu, translated by Jane Hirshfield
Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.
.
.
So one thing I'm going to say immediately jumps out is the progressive compression of meaning in the 3 poems. The first poem does not compress any meaning at all. It's about as thoughtful and substantive as the average tweet; it should have been a tweet. It's trying to be funny but barely succeeds, primarily because of the clunky manner in which it uses the single allusion it contains -- Shakespeare is not widely considered a dramatic artist -- but also because there's just nothing substantial in the poem at all. It would make an acceptable couplet in a diss rap but it can't stand alone by itself.
This Oliver poem does a much better job of condensing meaning and using allusion. We know when we read it to what it refers, which is cool. But I think this poem, specifically, is middlebrow. The first four lines are repetitive, and the sentiment is too insubstantial for this to work as it otherwise might (it doesn't bully you but it's not florid enough to be a good portrait of self-justification). "We know better than to do this, but we do it anyway" just isn't powerful as subject matter. There's no hysteria or rending or grief here that might make it more powerful.
The Shikibu poem is the masterclass (imo!). The compression of meaning in these 5 lines is just unreal. The work is dense with emotion and allusion. The japanese zen-influenced poets are usually good at this because they know to invoke nature in a way that highlights its hostility and its grace -- the wind blowing terribly, the moonlight -- and then to juxtapose it with human endeavours -- the ruined house -- and they have an extraordinary grasp of imagery, so that you can almost see the vision, the moonlight *leaks between the roof planks* (so now alluding to water), the pale moon in the dark night, leaking down into the ruined house, which to me is obviously the stand-in for human endeavour, and the construction of the self, so when I read the poem I feel as if I am the ruined house, and the poem describes my experience.
So that poem from Oliver really isn't very good work, and really is pretty middlebrow. (It's not bad, but it's just simply not great.) I really liked her other poems that you highlighted, and your efforts gave me a new appreciation for her less popular stuff... which is always a delight with any artist. This reminds me, I hate Andy Warhol, (a middlebrow hack!!!!), but one time in the Boston ICA I saw a really excellent photograph (of someone in a semi-chaotic posture wilding out at a rural campsite or something) that he had taken earlier in his life. Woah, I thought, so Andy Warhol could have actually been good. Spooky.
This is amazing. You should put it on your stack. (Or guest post here...) Agree that Shikibu is wonderful! Those last three lines! ALso, HARD AGREE about Warhol. I semi-defended Rupi Kapur once upon a time, quoted below. (Is she the least well-understood poet of our times, relative to her popularity?)
Rupi reminds me of no-one more strongly than the original lyricist, Sappho.
I don’t read Ancient Greek, so I can only read translations. And, to be fair to the insta poets, who are not judged on their context only on their ‘artless’ poetry, I’ll leave aside any of the context about who Sappho was, which I think plays an outsized role in much of the appreciation of her writing.
Let’s start with a famous fragment:
Come, holy tortoise shell,
my lyre, and become a poem.
I’m not sure this is so much better than most of what Rupi writes. Here’s three other translations, if you want to compare. You can put it in more formal register, break the lines differently, but it comes down to the same thing.
Compare it to this, by Rupi.
i am a museum full of art
but you had your eyes shut
Here’s another Sappho poem I wouldn’t be so surprised to see on Instagram:
Virginity, virginity, when you leave me,
where do you go?
I am gone and never come back to you.
I never return.
Are her line breaks here really any better than Rupi’s above? The translation is the most highly thought of. Is it so different in tone or style?
How about when Rupi writes this, is she so awful?
I will not subject myself to their ideology
cause slut shaming is rape culture
virgin praising is rape culture
There’s some rather neat, if not obvious, use of technique that reinforces the basic structure and message of that short poem.
Here’s one more comparison, this time using two longer poems.
You lay in wait
behind a laurel tree,
and everything
was pleasant:
you a woman
wanderer like me.
I barely hear you,
my darling;
you came in your
trim garments,
and suddenly: beauty
of your garments.
Note the repeated use of garments in the last two lines, like Rupi repeated ‘rape culture’ in the poem above. To the literary type, this is concise, honed, ‘worked on language’, and yet when Rupi uses the same techniques in the following poem, she is part of the new insurgency that’s going to bring the culture of poetry to its knees.
i always
get myself
into this mess
i always let him
tell me i am beautiful
and half believe it
i always jump thinking
he will catch me
at the fall
i am hopelessly a lover and
a dreamer and
that will be
the death of me
‘I always jump thinking/ he will catch me/ at the fall.’ What lovely bathos. Rearrange the lines a little and you’re dealing with classic English language love poetry here. Of course, not the best English language love poetry, but go ahead and read the anthologies. A lot of poetry that is honoured in one generation is seen as sentimental, cliched, or just plain naff later on. Look at Cowley.
‘I am hopelessly a lover and dreamer,’ is a perfectly respectable line of verse (repeat it to yourself, it’s really quite good) that I suspect most people would sooner memorise than most of what gets written by the poets who are angry that this poem was printed by a ‘respectable’ publisher.
My comment here is yours to do what you like with. When I realised this was the place I wanted to put the comparison I had been thinking of for the 3 poems, I realised it would be unusual to do so, but I felt like it belonged here. I'm glad you enjoyed it, thank you for the kind words. :)
You've made an admirable case for Kaur, I don't agree with you but you made me have to think really hard about it to be sure!
Can I ask a question? I agree that the house is a stand-in for what humans do, what we create, but why is it specifically a stand in for the construction of the self?
This is a great question and I was almost wanting someone to ask -- it's because of this poet's association with the Zen tradition, and the construction of the self is perhaps the most central concern of Zen buddhist thought.
Great article. I too only learned of her not long ago but have enjoyed all her work that I have so far read! Must seek out some of her books. A poet is a poet is a poet on whatever level they are. Enjoy who you want too and don't believe every negative comment. Poetry has changed its tone and style a lot in recent years and I don't like/understand all of it but that doesn't mean it is wrong or middlebrow/highbrow or in the gutter!!
Thank you for this, for the reminder of why “Summer Day” is such a great poem, and for the several st the end that are new to me. I read “In Blackwater Woods” at my mother’s memorial. Another with final lines that sear and soothe the soul.
IN BLACKWATER WOODS
Mary Oliver
Look, the trees are turning
their own bodies into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders
of the ponds.
and every pond, no matter what its name is, is
nameless now. Every year everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side
is salvation
whose meaning
none of us will ever know. To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal; to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go
Wonderful essay. You chose the poems that everyone should read. They are beautiful as Scripture, and should be read as such.
I'm not familiar with Oliver's poetry (I only know her name from the dismissive discourse, CF Anis Shivani's famous observation that "her “poems all seem to follow the same pattern: time, animal, setting, observation, epiphany. For example, 5 a.m., opossum, backyard, broken, it ran. Or 3 p.m., kitten, field, how real, peace. Only has to mechanically alter the variables, to get the same desired effect.”)
I think the word earnest is good here. For some people, probably post-Gen X, sincerity is essentially middlebrow; highbrow necessarily involves some level of ironic detachment. Thinking of how people of my generation use "tryhard" as a derogatory term.
I recommend trying some of her work. It's worth some time, imo.