Mary Oliver's "Every Morning"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 10 September 2020

⏱️ 6 minutes

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Summary

Mary Oliver was born on September 10, 1935, in Maple Heights, Ohio. Her honors include an American Academy of Arts & Letters Award, a Lannan Literary Award, the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize and Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Oliver held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College until 2001. She lived for over forty years in Provincetown, Massachusetts, with her partner Molly Malone Cook, a photographer and gallery owner. After Cook's death in 2005, Oliver later moved to the southeastern coast of Florida. Oliver died of cancer at the age of eighty-three in Hobe Sound, Florida, on January 17, 2019. --Bio from Poetry.org

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today is September 10th, 2020.
0:05.7	Today's poem is by an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize,
0:10.0	Mary Oliver, one of the most beloved poets of the last 25 years or so. The New York Times
0:15.4	called her in 2007, far and away this country's best-selling poet. Today would have been her
0:20.7	85th birthday.
0:21.8	She was born on September 10th, 1935, and died on January 17, 2019.
0:27.2	And so today is the perfect day to read another Mary Oliver poem.
0:31.2	So today, the poem that I'm going to read to you is called Every Morning,
0:34.2	which originally appeared in the March 1986 edition of Poetry Magazine.
0:39.8	It goes like this.
0:44.5	I read the papers.
0:46.4	I unfold them and examine them in the sunlight.
0:50.3	The way the red mortars in photographs are down into the neighborhoods like stars.
0:56.2	The way death combs everything into a gray rubble before the camera moves on.
1:01.5	What dark part of my soul shivers.
1:06.0	You don't want to know more about this.
1:09.9	And then you don't know anything unless you do.
1:14.1	How the sleepers wake and run to the cellars, how the children scream, their tongues trying
1:19.2	to swim away, how the morning itself appears like a slow, white rose, while the figures
1:25.4	climb over the bubbled thresholds, among the smashed cars the streets where the
1:31.3	clinging ambulances won't stop all day death and death messy death death as history death as a habit
1:40.6	how sometimes the camera pauses while a family counts itself, and all of them are alive,
	...

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