Today is the birthday of poet Mary Oliver (b. 1935), whose poetry usually focuses on the natural world and who has been called one of America’s finest poets (and best-selling poets).

Oliver was born in Maple Heights, Ohio, a few miles southeast of Cleveland. She had a deeply unhappy childhood (abusive father, neglectful mother), and walking in the woods was an escape. She left home immediately after high school and went to visit the estate of the late Edna St. Vincent Millay in upstate New York. (Millay had died about three years earlier.) While there, Oliver became friends with Millay’s sister and ended up staying on for six or seven years to help organize Millay’s papers. (So that worked out weirdly well.)

Oliver studied at both The Ohio State University and Vassar College, though she never completed a degree. (Fun fact: several extremely reliable sources that shall remain nameless refer to the former institution  incorrectly as “Ohio State University,” omitting the all-important “The,” while Wikipedia, which we are taught correctly to eye askance, gets it right. You just never know.) Oliver lived in New York City for a time, but in 1964 moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, with her partner, the photographer Molly Malone Cook, with whom she lived until Cook’s death in 2005. She published her  first collection of poems, No Voyage and Other Poems, in 1963, and several books later won the Pulitzer with American Primitive (1983), then the National Book Award with New and Selected Poems (1992). She’s gone on to publish many more collections of poetry, a couple of books of essays, and two books on writing poetry: A Poetry Handbook (1992), and Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse (1998). At least one critic feels that Oliver’s best poetry is in her 1986 collection, Dream Work.

Oliver now lives in Florida, about which she says, “I’m trying very hard to love the mangroves.” Her poem “Wild Geese” begins:

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves…

(Read the whole thing here.)

Enjoy this green and rainy Monday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.