Today is her birthday. She is 78. Just 5 years older than I am. Garrison Keillor's daily poems and notes gives some background on her life below..most of which I had read before. But it is always interesting to know more about people who write fascinating things.
I own a copy of American Primitive her book that won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. I keep it here in the north woods as it seems the nicest place to read it.
Although the poems are written about all different places. There is even one about Flamingo, Florida in the Everglades...a place I have fun memories of.
Here is some interesting things about her life:
It's the birthday of one of the best-selling poets in America, Mary Oliver (books by this author), born in Maple Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland (1935). When she was a teenager, she dropped out of college and made a pilgrimage to Edna St. Vincent Millay's estate in upstate New York, and although Millay had been dead for some time, her sister Norma still lived there. The two women hit it off, and Oliver ended up living on the estate for several years. It's there that she met Molly Malone Cook, who had come to pay a visit to Millay. Oliver and Cook fell in love and moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, together. Cook became Oliver's literary agent, and also sometimes impersonated Oliver for phone interviews because she hated talking to the press. They were together for more than 40 years, and after Cook died in 2005, Oliver published Thirst (2006), a collection of poems about her grief.
She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984, for her collection American Primitive (1983), and she's one of the best-selling American poets, but she's a very private person who rarely gives interviews. Oliver's most recent book is A Thousand Mornings (2013), and her upcoming bookDog Songs (2013) will be released this October.
Mary Oliver wrote: "Every day I walk out into the world / to be dazzled, then to be reflective."
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