When Maggie Millner was a child, the first poet she read was Mary Oliver, whose "plain, sensical language made it approachable to a person who had only recently learned to read." The visuals found in the late Oliver's poems resonated with the young Millner and "marked me permanently"—but, per her essay for the Yale Review, when Millner went off to college, she found that her classmates, instructors, and literary critics generally turned up their noses at Oliver. They acknowledged her work was accessible to the masses, but that she was also "conventional" and not much more than "the poet laureate of the self-help biz." Those barbs caused Millner to mostly turn away from Oliver's work, even as she worked on her degrees in creative writing and became a poet herself. "I took her name out of my mouth and never put it back," she writes.
In fact, "when asked to write this piece, I was at first too embarrassed to accept the assignment," Millner writes. But as she started exploring Oliver's work, Millner began looking at it through a different lens—one of social alienation, rooted perhaps in Oliver's "intensely lonely" childhood that was "marred by abuse and neglect." Suddenly, some of Oliver's verses "reveal new, more slippery meanings," with "telltale traces of lyric shame all over Oliver's work." "Oliver is bracingly, uncommonly honest about her fear that she might be a loser," Millner writes. She concedes there are still some duds among Oliver's complete body of work. But "what seems truly singular is [Oliver's] alertness to the way feelings of shame and social inadequacy attend even our most seemingly private and ecstatic moments, and her belief in the lyric poem as an arena for exploring that contradiction." More here.
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