The words \u201cpoet\u201d and \u201cbestselling\u201d do not often go together. But they apply in the case of Mary Oliver, the Pulitzer Prize winner who gained a legion of fans \u2013 including the famous, from the likes of Oprah and Stephen Colbert to Helena Bonham Carter, Steve Buscemi, and Maria Shriver.<\/p>\n
Oliver\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
More from Deadline<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cShe\u2019s a poet for people who love poetry, but she\u2019s also a poet for people who might think they don\u2019t really like poetry or might not really know about poetry or might feel intimidated or bored by poetry,\u201d 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. \u201cShe invites people into the work at every level, and she\u2019s not interested in playing with language for the sake of playing with language\u2026 I think she\u2019s interested in asking the viewer to share an experience or to reflect on their own experience.\u201d<\/p>\n ‘American Primitive’ by Mary Oliver<\/p>\n Part of Oliver\u2019s 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 \u201cIl miglior fabbro.\u201d). Oliver often wrote in the second person, speaking directly to her readers.<\/p>\n \u201cTell me, what is it you plan to do\/with your one wild and precious life?\u201d Oliver writes in one of her most famous poems, \u201cThe Summer Day.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cShe really is inviting the reader or the listener into a conversation with her and that \u2018you\u2019 who she addresses changes over time,\u201d Waters observes. \u201cThe really best poems, their meaning changes every time you read them, and they can affect you in different ways, depending on what\u2019s happening in your life.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe Summer Day\u201d has special meaning for Colbert, the former late-night host, who reads from Oliver\u2019s work in the documentary. He\u2019s so overcome with emotion that he can\u2019t complete her words.<\/p>\n Director Sasha Waters particpates in a Q&A at the Miami Film Festival.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s pressure, I think, to put celebrities in documentaries,\u201d Waters observes. \u201cSo, 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\u2019s a TikTok of her reading a Mary Oliver poem. So that\u2019s how I found out she was a Mary Oliver fan. Steven Colbert told a guest on his show that he sent the poem \u2018The Summer Day\u2019 to his children on the first day of summer every year.\u201d<\/p>\n For Oliver, the answer to the question \u201cwhat do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?\u201d 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\u2019 poem yearning to \u201clive alone in the bee-loud glade.\u201d<\/p>\n Oliver lived quietly, it might be said, in a degree of isolation \u2014 though not to the extent of Emily Dickinson. Like Dickinson, she spent many years in New England, in Oliver\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cJohn Waters was the very first person we interviewed,\u201d 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\u2019s name was John Waters and that, in fact, her dad \u201cwas the only John Waters in the New York City phone book in the 1980s.\u201d 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).<\/p>\n Oliver shared life with Molly Malone Cook for over 40 years until her partner\u2019s death in 2005. She later became romantically involved with a woman named Anne, who seems to have grated on many of Oliver\u2019s friends. (After viewing the film, John Waters told Sasha Waters, \u201cYou got the Anne thing right because really no one liked her.\u201d).<\/p>\n Mary Oliver speaks during Maria Shriver’s annual Women’s Conference on October 26, 2010 in Long Beach, Calif.<\/p>\n The last phase of Oliver\u2019s 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 \u2014 a surprisingly candid conversation in which Oliver revealed she had been sexually abused as a child.<\/p>\n \u201cI had a co-editor on this film [Meghan Sims], and we really did think about Mary\u2019s life like a fairytale, that she grows up in this abusive, unloving household and she runs away to the woods,\u201d Waters says. \u201cShe has this very unusual life, but yet somehow she goes so into it, she\u2019s able to extract wisdom from those experiences, many of which were very lonely and hard for her.\u201d<\/p>\n Waters directed an award-winning 2018 film about another artist, street photographer Garry Winogrand. For Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable<\/a> she had plenty of visual material to work with. \u201cThere\u2019s a million photos,\u201d Waters says. But doing a documentary about a writer \u2013 that presents a much more difficult visual challenge.<\/p>\n \u201cWith Mary Oliver, [the dilemma] was, what are we looking at?\u201d Waters explains. \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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, \u201cWe checked to make sure that they had Mary Oliver in stock.\u201d<\/p>\n The documentary is certain to boost interest in Oliver\u2019s work, assuring that as the New York Times put it, Oliver remains \u201cfar and away, this country\u2019s best-selling poet.\u201d<\/p>\n Best of Deadline<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for Deadline’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The words \u201cpoet\u201d and \u201cbestselling\u201d do not often go together. But they apply in the case of Mary Oliver, the Pulitzer Prize winner who gained a legion of fans \u2013 including the famous, from the likes of Oprah and Stephen Colbert to Helena Bonham Carter, Steve Buscemi, and Maria Shriver. 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