The recent PBS American Masters episode on Mary Oliver, and the fact that today is her birthday, has me thinking about artistic trends, bravery in art, and shadow artists.
Though she was loved as a popular poet and widely considered a national icon, Oliver was heavily critiqued as a poet over the course of her life by other writers. Lauded Pittsburgh-born poet Jack Gilbert once supposedly described Oliver’s poems as being merely“ irony, neatness, and rhyme pretending to be poetry.” Critic Michael Robbins repeatedly found new ways to claim that Oliver had no real talent. She was ridiculed by New York City avant-garde poets for her tendency to write in plain language. Or, for using words most people can understand.
This trend isn’t specific to poetry. Politicians and academic spaces have their own versions of “Plain Language” campaigns. The Center for Plain Language, a nonprofit headquartered in Richmond, Virginia that works with organizations to develop easy-to-understand materials, defines their cause as “a movement for clear communication.” The organization raises an important point – what is so cringe about accessible language? Why do we live in a society that favors gatekeeping, in law, academia, the arts? What’s so awful about everyone being able to take part in the same conversation? Must every space form hierarchies? And if “public” language isn’t accessible, who is it for?
Despite facing scathing reviews from other poets, Oliver knew who she was writing for. As we’d say in rhetoric, she knew her audience – it was the world at large. By the time of her death in 2019, the New York Times said Oliver was “far and away, this country’s best-selling poet.” Perhaps, in part, because everyone was able to read her.
There is nothing elusive about the first three lines of Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese” (“You do not have to be good / You do not have to walk on your knees / For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting”). She wrote with empathy and got right to the heart of the things we don’t say, but that which make us altogether human. For example, in her poem “Loneliness,” she wrote, “I too have loneliness / I too have known what it is to feel / misunderstood.” Who hasn’t?
Oliver wasn’t writing for acceptance into the poetic elite. She was writing to capture fragments of beauty and truth she saw in nature all around her. She was writing for us.
I too went to art school – an MFA for creative writing. I loved my program – the exposure to incredible writers like Ocean Vuong and icons like Deborah Eisenburg, the parties with endless supplies of wine, the built-in writing deadlines. But something a professor of mine said has stayed with me many years after graduation. “Keep going to school and you’ll never write another day in your life.” Loosely, 10% of art school graduates actually go on to make a career in art. It’s not news that all genres of art are highly competitive. But is it really that? Or is it that those of us who elect to learn art in an academic environment are setting ourselves up to lose the creative instincts that got us there in the first place?
I adored my program, and yet, I am aware of an unmistakable shame that has followed me around ever since. My prose used to be reflected to me as “raw.” During my MFA program, I worked on a memoir. Over time, as I read memoir after memoir with ethereal and flowery diction, I replaced my own for that which was considered literary. A friend who read the first draft and the last commented that I had “washed away all the emotion.” She said it was like reading a clean version of a terrible tale, but with none of the emotive elements that had been in it on the first go ‘round. It made her think, but it no longer made her feel. That isn’t to blame my professors. Style takes time to develop, and I am still learning. But I’ve never forgotten this feedback. I had learned to equate my natural, uninhibited prose as nonliterary, and thus, not good enough.
I have had similar experiences with poetry. Mary Oliver has since passed, so I can’t ask her if she ever had feels about not having been accepted into that poetic elite. But I do. Are there more of us out there?
Though my experience is with written forms, I’ve met other stifled creates in music, studio art, dance, and drama. I’ve met corporate professionals too who say that aren’t creative. Or simply, won’t be the first to try something, to take a risk, if it hasn’t been vetted before by an external authority. Solomon Asch’s famous conformity experiments come to mind. In the studies, 80% of participants conformed at least once by giving a quiz answer they knew to be wrong because someone else in the room gave that same obviously wrong answer, but seemed confident in the giving of that wrong answer. Is then the need to belong higher than the need for self-expression?
Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way, says that “one of our chief needs as creative beings is support.” If we aren’t acknowledged for our attempts and efforts at an early age, we often get “caught between the dream of action and the feature of failure.” Through this push and pull of desire and weary execution, “shadow artists are born.”
There is something to be said of taste. While Julia Cameron believes creativity to be “the natural order of life,” that doesn’t mean I personally want to experience everyone’s version of it. Yet still, how do I live my life in such a way that I do not stifle the creative impulse in any of my peers or students? Further, how do I reclaim it for myself?
I don’t have concrete answers, but I think some secrets may lie in the vast bread of Mary Oliver’s work. Happy birthday to an American icon.
