Upstream selected essays
"'In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.' So begins Upstream, a collection of essays in which beloved poet Mary Oliver refl...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Books Print Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
New York :
Penguin Press,
2016.
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| Summary: | "'In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.' So begins Upstream, a collection of essays in which beloved poet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness, as a young child and as an adult, to lose herself within the beauty and mysteries of both the natural world and the world of literature. Emphasizing the significance of her childhood 'friend' Walt Whitman, through whose work she first understood that a poem is a temple, 'a place to enter, and in which to feel,' and who encouraged her to vanish into the world of her writing, Oliver meditates on the forces that allowed her to create a life for herself out of work and love. As she writes, 'I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.' Upstream follows Oliver as she contemplates the pleasure of artistic labor, her boundless curiosity for the flora and fauna that surround her, and the responsibility she has inherited from Shelley, Wordsworth, Emerson, Poe, and Frost, the great thinkers and writers of the past, to live thoughtfully, intelligently, and to observe with passion. Throughout this collection, Oliver positions not just herself upstream but us as well as she encourages us all to keep moving, to lose ourselves in the awe of the unknown, and to give power and time to the creative and whimsical urges that live within us"--Dust jacket. |
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| Physical Description: | 178 pages ; 22 cm |
| ISBN: | 9781594206702 1594206708 |
| Author Notes: | Her books of prose include A Poetry Handbook, Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse, and Long Life: Essays and Other Writings. She held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College from 1995 to 2001. She died on January 17, 2019 at the age of 83. (Bowker Author Biography) |
