Mary Oliver's instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
This is a stanza in her poem "
Sometimes," and it's also great professional advice for writers. (I'm
not the only one who thinks so.) It's a more economical version of something I used to say as an editor: If you find yourself thinking about something nonstop and noticing it everywhere, odds are you have something to say about it. Or at least a question to ask about it. And maybe you should be finding a way to communicate that to the world. Oliver's instructions are also a deceptively simple explanation for creative droughts: You're not paying attention. You're not letting yourself be astonished. And so you've got nothing to tell the world.
Do an image search for these succinct sentences, and you'll find Oliver's words hand-written in neat but whimsical script, plastered over photos of sunsets and daisies, and painted onto rustic wooden boards you can hang in your kitchen:
Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. It's hard for me to admit I love a quote that's been endlessly Pinterest-boarded and reworked by legions of self-styled influencers.
When my own words have been given a typographical treatment and shared by some stranger, I've felt flattered but also found myself cringing. Maybe because this is a medium of communication that's highly feminized, and therefore not respected. ("Is it me or is it internalized sexism?" is a game I play with myself almost every day.) Maybe because I want everyone to come up with their own goddamn mantras and
bon mots. Maybe because complicated and difficult sentiments—those with a grappling quality that I admire most in other people's writing—aren't suited to Instagram calligraphy.
The instructions are not the only Oliver line to be aggressively Etsied. There's also this one, from her poem, "
The Summer Day":
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
You've probably seen that one before! Maybe on a keychain? These handmade treasures never include the line that comes before it in the poem, though:
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Put
that in your handwritten-font generator and smoke it like a Springsteen
lyric! The other stanzas of "
Sometimes" don't find their way onto inspirational moodboards, either. Here's a sample. See if you notice a pattern:
Death waits for me, I know it, around
one corner or another.
This doesn’t amuse me.
Neither does it frighten me.
Mary Oliver died this week, probably not laughing but also, I hope, not frightened. "That side of Oliver’s work is necessary to fully appreciate her in her usual exhortatory or petitionary mode," Ruth Franklin
wrote in 2017. "Nobody, not even she, can be a praise poet all the time. The revelations, if they come, should feel hard-won." Tell me about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment