“I have hung prints of this poem by @officialdonika in our bedroom AND office, in case you were wondering about what I’m like”

—with that eager, amateur’s love. Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them. Or it might even be in actual school. In my classes, I ask the students to find a poem they like and to get it by heart. To see someone in their late teens or early twenties, often by gender or ethnicity different from the author, shaping his or her mouth around those sounds created by somebody who is perhaps long dead, or perhaps thousands of miles away, and the students bringing their own experience to it, changing it with their own sensibility, so that they’re both possessed and possessing—those moments have been very moving to me.

This domain may be for sale!

I first read Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” on Twitter, which explains something of why her work is both beloved and dismissed. It’s a boring discussion: I enjoyed this, but is it art? I won’t stoop to take the bait of it here. “Wild Geese” is one of those telegraphic poems that announces its meaning without flourish from the very outset: You do not have to be good. I feel worthy of being in the world when I think of “Wild Geese.” I feel that the world has use for me. It’s a poem of arresting lucidity and wisdom. It would be stupid to call it simple in that way that suggests that simplicity is a moral good or an aesthetically preferable state. But I also won’t say that it is complex, as though one needs to apologize for the spare nonpyrotechnics of the piece. Instead, I’ll say simply that “Wild Geese” is a poem that made me want to breathe again. The speaker, in an act of breathtaking generosity, offers the reader, no matter how lowly or afield they have found themselves, an opportunity to reenter the world. There is an entreaty to follow the natural grain of one’s character, to heed one’s desire.

But of course, the magic of the poem, and that of many of Oliver’s poems in particular, is how it creates this sense of being implausibly singled out and told what you were waiting to hear.

Mary Oliver has died. I have a friend who used to keep her poem “Wild Geese” folded up in his wallet. It begins: You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a

"he cares for the egg the only way he knows how: He plants it."

"Friends, it's time for me to recharge the batteries and take a Pome hiatus. This third run has indeed been a charm; thank you so much for reading! Stay well, support your local poet, and see you somewhere down the road. -M x" "the song was in fact the joyous concordance of a moment that would not come again"

Great usage of line breaks on the “narrow passes” line.

“in underground sunlight”

“The poems offer a version of the world in which we might reach toward others’ joy in the same gesture as reaching toward our own, rather than dissecting faults and hoarding happiness.” “I am aware that this is a way of being bad at social media, just like insisting on joy is a way of being bad at poetry. I am aware that documenting my love is basic in the same way that O’Hara being my favorite poet is basic. But, at least for me, this obsessive documentation of the stupid, boring, repetitive things that string a life together is the place where social media aspires to the level of poetry.” “Love celebrates another person’s existence rather than their achievements.” “Look at this pattern of days, this holiday that means nothing outside itself.”

this morningshaking off the rainof early winter— poem.exe (@poem_exe) December 20, 2018