The words “poet” and “bestselling” do not often go together. But they apply in the case of Mary Oliver, the Pulitzer Prize winner who gained a legion of fans – including the famous, from the likes of Oprah and Stephen Colbert to Helena Bonham Carter, Steve Buscemi, and Maria Shriver.
Oliver’s life and career are explored in the new documentary Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World, directed by Sasha Waters. The film opens today at IFC Center in New York City and on July 11 at Laemmle theaters in Los Angeles before expanding to select theaters nationwide.
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“She’s a poet for people who love poetry, but she’s also a poet for people who might think they don’t really like poetry or might not really know about poetry or might feel intimidated or bored by poetry,” Waters tells Deadline in an interview at the Miami Film Festival, where the documentary screened after its world premiere at True/False festival in Columbia, MO. “She invites people into the work at every level, and she’s not interested in playing with language for the sake of playing with language… I think she’s interested in asking the viewer to share an experience or to reflect on their own experience.”
‘American Primitive’ by Mary Oliver
Part of Oliver’s appeal is the accessibility of her poems. Hers was not the modernist approach of T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, aflutter with literary allusions and sprinkled with multiple languages (e.g. Eliot dedicating The Waste Land to Pound with the tribute “Il miglior fabbro.”). Oliver often wrote in the second person, speaking directly to her readers.
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?” Oliver writes in one of her most famous poems, “The Summer Day.”
Mary Oliver at the National Book Awards where she received the poetry award for ‘New and Selected Poems’ in New York City on Nov. 18, 1992.
“She really is inviting the reader or the listener into a conversation with her and that ‘you’ who she addresses changes over time,” Waters observes. “The really best poems, their meaning changes every time you read them, and they can affect you in different ways, depending on what’s happening in your life.”
“The Summer Day” has special meaning for Colbert, the former late-night host, who reads from Oliver’s work in the documentary. He’s so overcome with emotion that he can’t complete her words.
Director Sasha Waters particpates in a Q&A at the Miami Film Festival.
“There’s pressure, I think, to put celebrities in documentaries,” Waters observes. “So, for me, it was really important that if we were going to do that, there needed to be a real connection, like why are they in the film? Helena Bonham Carter, there’s a TikTok of her reading a Mary Oliver poem. So that’s how I found out she was a Mary Oliver fan. Steven Colbert told a guest on his show that he sent the poem ‘The Summer Day’ to his children on the first day of summer every year.”
For Oliver, the answer to the question “what do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” was, of course, to write, but also to spend as much time in nature as she could. She felt as comfortable there as a finch, frog, or winged six-spot burnet, sharing kinship with the protagonist of a Yeats’ poem yearning to “live alone in the bee-loud glade.”
Oliver lived quietly, it might be said, in a degree of isolation — though not to the extent of Emily Dickinson. Like Dickinson, she spent many years in New England, in Oliver’s case Provincetown, MA, where she ran a bookstore with her partner, Molly Malone Cook. One of their bookshop employees was John Waters, later to become renowned as the taboo-assaulting filmmaker.
“John Waters was the very first person we interviewed,” the director said in a Q&A with Thom Powers at the Miami Film Festival. Though they share a last name, Sasha Waters and John Waters are not related. (In the Q&A, Sasha noted that her father’s name was John Waters and that, in fact, her dad “was the only John Waters in the New York City phone book in the 1980s.” People often called his number mistakenly believing they were reaching the Polyester and Pink Flamingos director, who lived in Baltimore, not NYC. That confusion resulted in many invitations to enticing events, including a birthday party for Andy Warhol).
Oliver shared life with Molly Malone Cook for over 40 years until her partner’s death in 2005. She later became romantically involved with a woman named Anne, who seems to have grated on many of Oliver’s friends. (After viewing the film, John Waters told Sasha Waters, “You got the Anne thing right because really no one liked her.”).
Mary Oliver speaks during Maria Shriver’s annual Women’s Conference on October 26, 2010 in Long Beach, Calif.
The last phase of Oliver’s life was marked by an unexpected emergence into the public spotlight. After living so quietly for so long, she began to do public readings, becoming a major draw on the speaking circuit. It was a chance to get her flowers, and the bouquets came from far and wide. Maria Shriver interviewed the poet on television — a surprisingly candid conversation in which Oliver revealed she had been sexually abused as a child.
“I had a co-editor on this film [Meghan Sims], and we really did think about Mary’s life like a fairytale, that she grows up in this abusive, unloving household and she runs away to the woods,” Waters says. “She has this very unusual life, but yet somehow she goes so into it, she’s able to extract wisdom from those experiences, many of which were very lonely and hard for her.”
Waters directed an award-winning 2018 film about another artist, street photographer Garry Winogrand. For Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable she had plenty of visual material to work with. “There’s a million photos,” Waters says. But doing a documentary about a writer – that presents a much more difficult visual challenge.
“With Mary Oliver, [the dilemma] was, what are we looking at?” Waters explains. “We would have these conversations, [co-editor] Meghan and I, how many more flowers and owls and foxes and sunsets and dogs can we really pack in here without it becoming predictable or saccharine or on the nose in terms of trying to illustrate the poems? The idea with having people read the poems on camera was to break up the visuals and ask viewers to just be in the moment with the poem and the person reading it.”
The Miami Film Festival screening of Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of World took place at a theater in Coral Gables. Across the street from that venue is Books & Books, a cherished local purveyor of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and more. Before the screening began, Waters points out, “We checked to make sure that they had Mary Oliver in stock.”
The documentary is certain to boost interest in Oliver’s work, assuring that as the New York Times put it, Oliver remains “far and away, this country’s best-selling poet.”
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