There are poets we read, and there are poets we return to. Their words find us again in classrooms, in our own writing, in seasons of change, grief, wonder, and becoming. Sometimes we return to a single poem. Sometimes to a line we have carried for years. Sometimes we discover that a poet has been accompanying us longer than we realized.

The Poets We Return To is a new Wednesday series from Ethical ELA featuring writers reflecting on the poets whose words remain with them—and why they keep returning.

We begin today with Cari Barber and Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver in Middle Age

by Cari Barbour

I was introduced to Mary Oliver with one question – the one we all know – the one that burrowed into my heart and mind in a way I wouldn’t recognize for years: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” In my 20s, I felt like she was asking me directly and I did not know the answer. I wasn’t sure, then, if I felt like my life was wild or precious. It felt ordinary, nothing to write poems about. It was only later that I realized that perhaps that is part of the magic of Mary Oliver: seeing wonder in the ordinary. Her use of language that is clear, precise and unpretentious is what makes her work accessible and universal. I know I am not alone in believing she was speaking to me. 

From “The Summer Day,” I started on my Mary Oliver deep dive. I read everything I could get my hands on. Maybe I was looking for answers to questions I had not yet formed and her words, her reassurance, to “let the soft animal of [my] body love what it loves” felt like an invitation to discover what that was. In this phrase, she gave me permission to acknowledge my emotions, and stand proud in the things I did love – reading, writing, teaching, the sound of the wind high in the trees and the smell of my neighborhood after the rain. There could be pleasure in the everyday and I learned to see it.

When Oliver told me “you do not have to be good,” I thought I understood what she meant, though I pushed back on this line in my younger years. Wasn’t being “good” what was programmed into us from early age? Don’t we all aspire to being “good” people?  I wonder now if I confused “being good” with “doing good.” These are not the same idea. As I grew, as I learned, I understood, that as women, we are trained from the youngest age to be “good”: to make ourselves smaller, to quiet our voices, to put on a smile even when our hearts are breaking. But goodness isn’t synonymous with authenticity. Good is sometimes a performance that betrays desire, anger, passion and other emotions we are taught to minimize. What is the price of obedience?  I wondered. What would it mean to aspire toward being real instead of being good? Would the world love me less? Did the world know who I was? Did I?

Over time, I came to see the next line in “Wild Geese” as an echo and an emphasis of the first. In this line, I felt like Oliver made space for me to be who I was. I did not have to carry the responsibility of everyone else’s emotions. Love did not require me to put my own feelings in a sealed container because they might disturb the peace. When I read,  “you do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting” after a painful breakup, I believed her. For my whole life, I had been willing to sacrifice how I felt for the sake of harmony and reconciliation. In relationships, with family, with coworkers.  It didn’t matter if I felt anger or betrayal, what mattered was fixing the relationship so I would not have to sit in the certainty that it was my fault and that it was my emotions that had caused the break. One apology, sincerely given and sincerely felt, is enough. Whether the person receiving it accepts the apology is up to them, not up to me. This freed me. I could stand tall. I no longer needed to beg.  

Now, in my late 40s, the poem that I most carry with me is “The Journey.” In this poem, Oliver again speaks of the importance of being true to yourself, even if it means walking away or letting go of what we love. It took me more than 4 decades, but I finally “knew what I had to do.” The voice of “should” quieted, and I began to hear “a new voice that [I] slowly recognized as [my] own.” This voice said you have given so much as a teacher. But it is not all of who you are. It is time to do more. And so I did. I took a leap, and the old life “tug[ged] at my ankles,” saying that change would be hard, I was too old, it was impossible to start over.  But I was “determined to save the only life [I] could save” and that was my own. My old life flickers by on Instagram, in emails from former students. They will always be a part of my heart, but I believe there is more for me to do. Not because I should or because I have to, but because I am the only one who can save me. 

These poems are now part of my DNA. Had you asked me about “the uses of sorrow” in my 20s or my 30s, I would have said that we often must endure hardship to find our place in the world. People love to say that things happen for a reason, but this doesn’t turn down the volume on the suffering. I think about “the box full of darkness” almost every day. Of those who gave me this “gift” and what it taught me. Of the ways I learned to show up for myself and sit in my loneliness and despair. Watching someone walk away, watching a dream slip through my fingers, losing my champion in life, willing myself to get out of bed in the morning – none of these felt like gifts. They were splinters in my soul, but they healed. They scarred. They gave me freedom to move on and discover the depths of strength within myself. This is the strength that has filled my reservoir of compassion for others. I am not scared of the dark. Our eyes learn to adjust. 

Mary Oliver’s words have been my companions for most of my life. We have grown together. The words stay the same, but the way that I understand them shifts and changes, like light on water, dappled and fluid. The ability to discover something new in each reading is a pleasure in life of which I will never tire. I want to make her proud, to figure out what to do with my “wild and precious life.” Perhaps for now, this is enough. 

The Poets We Return To continues each Wednesday on Ethical ELA. Explore the series or write about a poet you return to.