Podcast
On Being with Krista Tippett
Mary Oliver believes that discipline is very important when it comes to poetry. She emphasizes that we are all creative all day long, and that we need to schedule time for ourselves to write. In her book "A Poetry Handbook", she says that this scheduling and discipline is very important for students.
I always, as I talk about in the Poetry Handbook, discipline is very important.
— Episode: Mary Oliver — “I got saved by the beauty...
Episode: Mary Oliver — “I got saved by the beauty of the wo...
Mary Oliver believes that discipline is very important when it comes to poetry. She emphasizes that we are all creative all day long, and that we need to schedule time for ourselves to write. In her book "A Poetry Handbook", she says that this scheduling and discipline is very important for students.
I always, as I talk about in the Poetry Handbook, discipline is very important.
I think we're creative all day long. And if we have to have an appointment to have that work out on the page because the creative part of us gets tired of waiting or just gets tired.
And it's helped a lot of students, young poets doing that, to have that meeting with that part of oneself because there are, of course, other parts of life.
That's from the poetry handbook.
It's been a while.
It's great.
But you say you promise it learns quickly what sort of courtship it's going to be. You're saying that the writer has to kind of be in courtship with this elusive, essential but elusive, you say, cautious part and that if you turn up every day, it will learn to trust you.
Yes, yes, yes, I remember that.
It's a very practical way of talking about something that's quite... The trust is very important.
Yes. Yeah.
And that's the creative process.
That is the creative process.
You know, somebody once wrote about me and said I must have a private grant or something that all I seem to do is walk around the woods and write poems.
But I was very, very poor.
But I was very, very poor. And I found I ate a lot of fish and a lot of clams.
You know, in the poetry handbook you wrote, poetry is a life-cherishing force and it requires a vision, a faith to use an old-fashioned term, yes indeed.
For poems are not words after all but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry, yes indeed.