Poetry, personal transformation and peace

You could say that I am a poetry convert. For me, literature—especially poetry—has channeled new ways of believing and being, bursting open my understanding of what is true and just.

I didn’t need poetry to convert me to belief in Jesus or to the way of peace. But it was poetry that enabled me to enter, if just for a moment, someone else’s psyche and worldview and rich internal life. And once there, I found my perspective changing.

I suppose it began with Mary Oliver. I met her work in my late teens (and it felt like an encounter, as if someone had pushed through the page to speak with me). Oliver’s words soon became like a second set of Scriptures for me. I read them when I woke up in the morning and before I went to bed at night. I memorized them during long walks in the woods, speaking their rhythm in time to the plodding of my feet. When I heard that my normally indefatigable mother was struggling, I sent her one of Oliver’s poems, hoping it would help her. When my younger sister wondered about her place in the world, I used Oliver’s words to assure her:

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and
exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things. (from “Wild Geese” in New and Selected Poems, Vol. 1)

Oliver used the stuff of the natural world to pose surprisingly stark questions: “Who made the world? … / Who made the grasshopper? / This grasshopper, I mean— …” (from “The Summer Day”). “Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches / of other lives … ?” (from “Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches”). “… what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” (from “The Summer Day”). Oliver’s words felt like a homecoming for me—to the self, the Spirit and the world.

Soon after it was published in 2006, I came across Oliver’s volume Thirst while browsing in a Pittsburgh bookstore. The poems in Thirst were more personally revealing than much of Oliver’s previous work. Now it was impossible to miss her Christian convictions; the poems brimmed with allusions to the Psalms, to church, to “the Lord.”

Thirst was also permeated with hints about the death of someone Oliver held fiercely dear. The book’s back cover described the collection as Oliver’s “grappling with grief at the death of her beloved partner of over 40 years.” I had never considered Oliver’s sexual orientation before. But paging back through Thirst, I saw how clearly she was speaking about her longtime partner/lover Molly Malone Cook, to whom the volume was dedicated. And what love was present there. What holy, healthy desire. When I returned home, I looked at the various volumes of Oliver’s poetry I owned. They were all dedicated to Molly Malone.

I knew that some people—people I respected—in my religious tradition thought that homosexuality was a sin. But I also knew there was nothing sinful about the kind of erotic dedication I had been reading about, explicitly or implicitly, in so much of Oliver’s work. My love and acceptance for queer folks in all their being ultimately developed due to real relationships with gay, lesbian and transgendered people, and through serious biblical study with open-hearted companions.

Yet all through this evolution, this refining, of my understanding, Mary Oliver was there, whispering her words in my ear. Oliver’s poetry and person opened me to a different way of loving the world and living in it—a way I experienced as beautiful, even if not my own. This transformation, this blossoming, this deepening, has helped form me into a person more filled with peace—not a stolid and staid peace but a wide-open peace, one that welcomes and wonders instead of drawing lines, frowning.

Perhaps it happened next with Rumi …

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