Mary Oliver Out Loud

Mary Oliver is, some say, the most famous poet to stem from the Cleveland area (Maple Heights, to be precise).  Maria Popova calls her "one of the greatest poets of all time, and perhaps the greatest of our time"-- high praise indeed. The New York Times merely called her "far and away, this country's best-selling poet." And that's not even to mention the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, or the other honors.

But she doesn't talk a lot.  (Maybe she's too busy writing those poems)  But, wait!  You want to hear Mary Oliver interviewed?  In the podcast "On Being," Krista Tippett talks with Mary Oliver.

• Mary Oliver on a Life Well Lived

Poetry for the end of Daylight Saving Time

From the New York Times, a selection of six poems to celebrate the end of Daylight Savings Time, from our poet laureate W.S. Merwin, as well as Vijay Seshadri, Louise Glück, Derek Walcott, James Tate, and Mary Oliver.

Today you get an extra hour, to use as you wish, wisely or foolishly. Make your choice!

photo by GL, 2010

Six poets make the top 15 list!

Anis Shivani of the Huffington Post slaps the sh!t out of the literary establishment with his list of the 15 most overrated writers in America.

Oooh! I love it when media pundits slam on writers who aren't me! (especially when the writers being dissed get eviscerated with witty insults.) More! Do more!

(He's wrong about Junot Diaz, though. The man's cool; he teaches at MIT! How cool is that? Oh, and I like Billy Collins, too, so sue me.)

Amazingly, of his list of fourteen* "most over-rated" writers, six are poets. Wow, he thinks Americans rate poetry that highly?? Really? Almost half** of the "most overrated" writers are poets?

Here's his poets, and a quote from his hatchet job each one:

• John Ashbery (Self-Portrait in a Broken Mirror): "More responsible than anyone else for turning late twentieth-century American poetry into a hermetic, self-enclosed, utterly private affair"
• Mary Oliver (Porcupines and Toads and Opossums and Turtles): "Publishes a book a year with interchangeable contents--how she has put on the brakes on her own evolution is the real wonder. Poems are free of striking images, ideas, or form."
• Sharon Olds (Tampons and Lactation): "Childbirth, her father's penis, her son's cock, and her daughter's vagina are repeated obsessions she can always count on in a pinch. Has given confessionalism such a bad name it can't possibly recover."
• Jorie Graham (The Dream of the Unified Field): "With her last few books, this philosopher of language has sought to become more and more unreadable."
• Louise Gluck (Odysseus and Ostracization): "She is perhaps our greatest example of mediocrity ascending to the very top."
• Billy Collins (Angels on Pins and Walking Across the Atlantic): "His poems have lately become mostly about writing poems--in his pajamas, with a cup of coffee in hand."

Lots of responses, on the webs and in the blogosphere, most of which (paraphrasing here) say he's a dick. Maybe the most succinct summary comes from Charles Jensen, who titles his post "everyone's a critic, but you're a bad one."

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*(he lists a book reviewer who likes the preceeding authors as his final entry)

**42.9%, really. 40%, if you count the reviewer he saved for last.