On the back of my copy of Mary Oliver’s Devotions, amidst one of those warm promotional blurbs, is a sentence from The Washington Post that, honestly more so than any of the poems within, has returned to me frequently. “…the luminous writing provides respite from our crazy world and demonstrates how mindfulness can define and transform a life, moment by moment, poem by poem.” The detail of that prose has condensed some into a shorthand that, in assorted lucid moments, sweeps into my mind: mindfulness can really change a life. In some sense, I think the full quote explains the appeal of Mary Oliver, perhaps the ur-poet of what has now whittled down to the trite sentimentality of Instagram poetry, to pithy quotes of Hallmark-grade suggestion that, just as soon as they appear and form meaning, vanish from the mind like one throws out unwanted mail. Mere observations, rather than insights, than vision.
To be clear, I have nothing against Mary Oliver. In fact, just the opposite. What I’m trying to express is disappointment with how what she represented and wrote down has declined into a shadow of attention, into a mere presence on coffee tables—which is to say willful ignorance and elimination disguising itself as “making sense.” Really, it is because I am convinced of both the importance of her work and the accuracy of The Washington Post’s illumination of her ethos that I am dismayed about how she is perhaps the only publicly read poet and the most publicly misunderstood poet.
What I don’t mean is that the actual writing, the message or detail of individual poems, is misunderstood. Especially in her later work, she writes with—honestly—an overly explicit and thematically redundant style, one that is as obvious in meaning as it is bald in imagery and repetitive in subject matter. What I mean when I suggest that she is misunderstood is that we have often failed to grasp what makes that constant retreading not just interesting or occasionally insightful, but essential. We miss what her work accumulates into in favor of its highly accessible components, and in doing so ignore the simple, yet transformative notion that animates every poem: that how we meet what we see is more important than what we are actually seeing. That mindfulness can really change a life.
Not capital-M Mindfulness, imported from Eastern mysticism and aligned with square-breathing, meditation, yoga—all things whose spirit, like Mary Oliver, have been reduced to colloquial notions of self-help or therapy room tips and tricks. But mindfulness as in awareness, attention, as in attending. As in looking at the world until we know it, not just recognize it. As in naming the colors and shapes, feeling the textures, smelling its air, noticing our bodies in it. As in allowing the input of our senses to not be information, but sensation, a coherent, multi-faceted, multi-salient, multiplying understanding of the space we are in right now, and in the moments directly after. As in receiving the world, listening to it, rather than interpreting it, reading it, making something of it.
Maybe the world feels lonely, or overwhelming, or strange, or disappointing, or discouraging, or corrupt, or violent in part because we spend large portions of our lives ignoring most of it, or at least not training ourselves to see it in its fullness. Maybe our lives need to change, but not by changing jobs, finding new friends, moving to new places, building new habits, trying new trends, solving problems, or self-medicating but instead by changing how we see the world—not what we do with what we see, not how we can make it “useful” to us. But by actually seeing how much of it there is, and with it how much beauty there really is. To strive for that is not to ignore what is evil or broken, but to realize the entire context in which those things sit. It means attending not to what makes itself obvious, but what is waiting for us to find it, what has always been there. And finding those things—sensing them—might just change your life.
Kipp De Man graduated from Calvin University in 2023, having majored in film and media studies. He is currently working towards a master’s degree in the same discipline at Washington University in St. Louis. He enjoys reading and writing poetry, rock climbing, and Coke Zero.
