#devotions: the selected poems of mary oliver
Text
The Mary Oliver poem I chose today is “Don’t Hesitate”, along with a bookmark I painted myself.
Mary Oliver’s “Devotions” poetry collection is something I come back to constantly! So I’m assigning the book it’s very own forever bookmark so I can peruse the pages all I want. Yay!
#godzilla reads#Mary Oliver#devotions: the selected poems of mary oliver#bookmark#poem#poetry#poet#don’t hesitate#booklr#bookworm#bookish#book blog#reading
114 notes
·
View notes
Text
I wake up finally
thinking, how wonderful to be who I am,
made out of earth and water,
my own thoughts, my own fingerprints..
🌿 Mary Oliver, "On Meditating, Sort Of", Devotions
.
#mary oliver#on meditating sort of#devotions: the selected poems of mary oliver#prose and poetry#poetry quotes#photograph via pinterest
44 notes
·
View notes
Photo
Beth Behrs, (Instagram, February 19, 2019)
—Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver, Mary Oliver (2017)
#Beth Behrs#Devotions#Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver#Mary Oliver#books#celebrities#instagram
0 notes
Text
Mary Oliver, from Devotions.
9 notes
·
View notes
Text
Ada Limón, "In the Country of Resurrection" // Jack Kerouac, Big Sur // Mary Oliver, "The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac" // Gregory Orr, "To Be Alive" // Dino Ahmetović // Siniša Simon, Magic Dance // Mary Oliver, Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver // Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Véra (trans. Olga Voronina & Brian Boyd) // Mary Oliver, "Toad" // 木苏里, 全球高考 (Global Examination)
#theme: you’re alive in this world#how wonderful is that#web weaving#webs#web weave#poetry#prose#aesthetic#prose poetry#literature#art#book quotes#novels#novel quotes#books#quotes#poems#poems and poetry#writing#words#inspo#compilation#parallels#hopepunk#hope#romanticism#painting#mary oliver#ada limón#global examination
3K notes
·
View notes
Note
what are your suggestions for starter poetry for people who dont have strong reading/analysis backgrounds
I've answered this a few times so I'm going to compile and expand them all into one post here.
I think if you haven't read much poetry before or aren't sure of your own tastes yet, then poetry anthologies are a great place to start: many of them will have a unifying theme so you can hone in based on a subject that interests you, or pick your way through something more general. I haven't read all of the ones below, but I have read most of them; the rest I came across in my own readings and added to my list either because I like the concept or am familiar with the editor(s) / their work:
Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times (ed. Nick Astley) & Being Alive: The Sequel to Staying Alive (there's two more books in this series, but I'm recommending these two just because it's where I started)
The Rattlebag (ed. Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes)
The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (ed. Ilya Kaminsky & Susan Harris)
The Essential Haiku, Versions of Basho, Buson and Issa (ed. Robert Hass)
A Book of Luminous Things (ed. Czesław Miłosz )
Now and Then: The Poet's Choice Columns by Robert Hass (this may be a good place to start if you're also looking for commentary on the poems themselves)
Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World(ed. Pádraig Ó'Tuama)
African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song (ed. Kevin Young)
The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing (ed. Kevin Young)
Lifelines: Letters from Famous People about their Favourite Poems
The following lists are authors I love in one regard or another and is a small mix of different styles / time periods which I think are still fairly accessible regardless of what your reading background is! It's be no means exhaustice but hopefully it gives you even just a small glimpse of the range that's available so you can branch off and explore for yourself if any particular work speaks to you.
But in any case, for individual collections, I would try:
anything by Sara Teasdale
Devotions / Wild Geese / Felicity by Mary Oliver
Selected Poems and Prose by Christina Rossetti
Collected Poems by Langston Hughes
Where the Sidewalk Endsby Shel Silverstein
Morning Haiku by Sonia Sanchez
Revolutionary Letters, Diane di Prima
Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved by Gregory Orr
Rose: Poems by Li-Young Lee
A Red Cherry on a White-Tiled Floor / Barefoot Souls by Maram al-Masri
Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky
Tell Me: Poems / What is This Thing Called Love? by Kim Addonizio
The Trouble with Poetry by Billy Collins (Billy Collins is THE go-to for accessible / beginner poetry in my view so I think any of his collections would probably do)
Crush by Richard Siken
Rapture / The World's Wife by Carol Ann Duffy
The War Works Hard by Dunya Mikhail
Selected Poems by Walt Whitman
View with a Grain of Sand by Wislawa Szymborska
Collected Poems by Vasko Popa
Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas (this is a play, but Thomas is a poet and the language & structure is definitely poetic to me)
Bright Dead Things: Poems by Ada Limón
Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth by Warsan Shire,
Nostalgia, My Enemy: Selected Poems by Saadi Youssef
As for individual poems:
“Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver
[Dear The Vatican] erasure poem by Pádraig Ó'Tuama // "The Pedagogy of Conflict"
"Good Bones" by Maggie Smith
"The Author Writes the First Draft of His Weddings Vows (An erasure of Virginia Woolf's suicide letter to her husband, Leonard)" by Hanif Abdurraqib
"I Can Tell You a Story" by Chuck Carlise
"The Sciences Sing a Lullabye" by Albert Goldbarth
"One Last Poem for Richard" by Sandra Cisneros
"We Lived Happily During the War" by Ilya Kaminsky
“I’m Explaining a Few Things”by Pablo Neruda
"Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" //"Nothing Gold Can Stay"//"Out, Out--" by Robert Frost
"Tablets: I // II // III"by Dunya Mikhail
"What Were They Like?" by Denise Levertov
"Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden,
"The Patience of Ordinary Things" by Pat Schneider
“I, too” // "The Negro Speaks of Rivers” // "Harlem” // “Theme for English B” by Langston Hughes
“The Mower” // "The Trees" // "High Windows" by Philip Larkin
“The Leash” // “Love Poem with Apologies for My Appearance” // "Downhearted" by Ada Limón
“The Flea” by John Donne
"The Last Rose of Summer" by Thomas Moore
"Beauty" // "Please don't" // "How it Adds Up" by Tony Hoagland
“My Friend Yeshi” by Alice Walker
"De Humanis Corporis Fabrica"byJohn Burnside
“What Do Women Want?” // “For Desire” // "Stolen Moments" // "The Numbers" by Kim Addonizio
“Hummingbird” // "For Tess" by Raymond Carver
"The Two-Headed Calf" by Laura Gilpin
“Bleecker Street, Summer” by Derek Walcott
“Dirge Without Music” // "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed" by Edna St. Vincent Millay
“Digging” // “Mid-Term Break” // “The Rain Stick” // "Blackberry Picking" // "Twice Shy" by Seamus Heaney
“Dulce Et Decorum Est”by Wilfred Owen
“Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition”by Wislawa Szymborska
"Hour" //"Medusa" byCarol Ann Duffy
“The More Loving One” // “Musée des Beaux Arts” by W.H. Auden
“Small Kindnesses” // "Feeding the Worms" by Danusha Laméris
"Down by the Salley Gardens” // “The Stolen Child” by W.B. Yeats
"The Thing Is" by Ellen Bass
"The Last Love Letter from an Entymologist" by Jared Singer
"[i like my body when it is with your]" by e.e. cummings
"Try to Praise the Mutilated World" by Adam Zagajewski
"The Cinnamon Peeler" by Michael Ondaatje
"Last Night I Dreamed I Made Myself" by Paige Lewis
"A Dream Within a Dream" // "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe (highly recommend reading the last one out loud or listening to it recited)
"Ars Poetica?" // "Encounter" // "A Song on the End of the World"by Czeslaw Milosz
"Wandering Around an Albequerque Airport Terminal” // "Two Countries” // "Kindness” by Naoimi Shihab Nye
"Slow Dance” by Matthew Dickman
"The Archipelago of Kisses" // "The Quiet World" by Jeffrey McDaniel
"Mimesis" by Fady Joudah
"The Great Fires" // "The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart" // "Failing and Flying" by Jack Gilbert
"The Mermaid" // "Virtuosi" by Lisel Mueller
"Macrophobia (Fear of Waiting)" by Jamaal May
"Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong" by Ocean Vuong
"Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou
I would also recommend spending some times with essays, interviews, or other non-fiction, creative or otherwise (especially by other poets) if you want to broaden and improve how you read poetry; they can help give you a wider idea of the landscape behind and beyond the actual poems themselves, or even just let you acquaint yourself with how particular writers see and describe things in the world around them. The following are some of my favourites:
Upstream: Essays by Mary Oliver
"Theory and Play of the Duende" by Federico García Lorca
"The White Bird" and "Some Notes on Song" by John Berger
In That Great River: A Notebook by Anna Kamienska
A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib
The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
"Of Strangeness That Wakes Us" and "Still Dancing: An Interview with Ilya Kaminsky" by Ilya Kaminsky
"The Sentence is a Lonely Place" by Garielle Lutz
Still Life with Oysters and Lemon by Mark Doty
Paris, When It's Naked by Etel Adnan
2K notes
·
View notes
Text
astrology notes: 18 (love quotes) 🦇‧₊⁺⭒
quick note: i'm absolutely not an astrologer and this post is just for fun.
i understand that some of these quotes or excepts may not be about love when you consider the full context of the poem or work of literature, but this is how i am intepreting and applying them without context.
lastly, keep in mind that i'm not reading your birth chart and i know nothing about you. these are just quotes that remind me of the signs so you may or may not be able to relate to them. enjoy!
𓆩♡𓆪 aries:
“If we meet each other in Hell, it’s not Hell.”
— Geoffrey Hill, Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012
𓆩♡𓆪 taurus:
“The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all round him. She had become a physical necessity...”
— George Orwell, 1984 ↟♡↟
𓆩♡𓆪 gemini:
“The next day I write him one of the most human notes he has ever received: no intellect, just words about his voice, his laughter, his hands.”
— Anaïs Nin, from Henry and June: From “A Journal of Love”: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1932
𓆩♡𓆪 cancer:
“…Your chest is becoming the field I want to be buried in.”
— Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, from The Year of No Mistakes: “Atlas”
𓆩♡𓆪 leo:
“Attention is the beginning of devotion."
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays 🦇
𓆩♡𓆪 virgo:
Pylades: I’ll take care of you.
Orestes: It’s rotten work.
Pylades: Not to me. Not if it’s you.
― Orestes by Euripides from An Oresteia, translated by Anne Carson
𓆩♡𓆪 libra:
“If there is life after the earth-life, will you come with me? Even then? Since were bound to be something, why not together.”
― Mary Oliver, from “West Wind” ↟♡↟
𓆩♡𓆪 scorpio:
“They had made love in every possible way, or so they believed, and they theorized about new ways but came up only with death.”
― Roberto Bolaño, from '2666', translated by Natasha Wimmer
𓆩♡𓆪 sagittarius:
"All roads lead to you even those I took to forget you."
― Mahmoud Darwish 🦇
𓆩♡𓆪 capricorn:
“She turned to me and said, ‘hold me’. So I dropped the world I had been holding and picked her up with both hands.”
― Zachry K Douglas ↟♡↟
𓆩♡𓆪 aquarius:
“I feel the distance between myself and others. I guard that distance … But when you move away from me, even just the least bit, a blackness descends upon me, I feel engulfed.”
— Henry Miller, "A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller 1932-1953"
𓆩♡𓆪 pisces:
“I asked if you heard the rain in your dream and half dreaming still you only said, I love you.”
— Edwin Morgan, When You Go 🦇
this was just something cute and extra since I haven’t posted anything in a while.
if you read this until the end i hope you enjoyed it & thank you so much for reading. ♥︎♥︎♥︎, those hearts are for you.
245 notes
·
View notes
Text
"The flowers were dressed in nothing but light."
- Mary Oliver, from Devotions: The Selected Poems; "Just as the Calendar Began to Say Summer"
#mary oliver#quotes#poetry#poem#love quotes#dark academia#light academia#literature#dark academism#dark academia quotes#english literature#writerscommunity#writers and poets#poetscommunity#love
352 notes
·
View notes
Note
hiii!! can you please make a web weaving post inspired by anaïs nin's quote "i watched life and wanted to be a part of it but found it painfully difficult." <3 <3
anaïs nin the diary of anaïs nin, vol 6: 1955-1966 \\ mary oliver thirst: "when i am among the trees" \\ roland barthes a lover's discourse: fragments (via @funeral) \\ paula carter dna communiqué \\ may sarton diary of a solitude (via @222tender) \\ mahmoud darwish if i were another (via @astereaus) \\ mary oliver devotions: "tecumseh" (via @weltenwellen) \\ mary oliver new and selected poems, volume two: "work sometimes" (via @weltenwellen)
kofi
#asks#anonymous#on life#on self#on identity#on living#webweaving#web weaving#webweave#web weave#ww#my webweaving#mine#parallel#parallels#parallelism#web#webs#compilation#compilations#comparative#comparatives#intertext#intertextuality#mahmoud darwish#if i were another#anais nin#anaïs nin#the diary of anais nin#the diary of anaïs nin
711 notes
·
View notes
Text
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
— Mary Oliver, from "When Death Comes" in "Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver" (Penguin Press, October 10, 2017)
158 notes
·
View notes
Note
which mary oliver books would you recommend? i have read her poems on different sites and i really like them
hi i recommend devotions, a thousand mornings, felicity, dream work & upstream: selected essays (my personal fave)
70 notes
·
View notes
Text
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
#godzilla reads#mary oliver#poetry#poetry books#books and flowers#reading#devotions: the selected poems of Mary Oliver#poem#quotes#booklr#bookworm#bookish#book blog#booklover
73 notes
·
View notes
Text
Rumi said, there is no proof of the soul. But isn't the return of spring and how it springs up in our hearts a pretty good hint?
Mary Oliver, Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver
45 notes
·
View notes
Photo
Beth Behrs, (Instagram, August 06, 2019)
—Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver, Mary Oliver (2017)
1 note
·
View note
Text
ADDAM & DAERON - Defiant Dance Unto Death
@holyaches on twitter // Fire & Blood, George R.R. Martin // Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out, Richard Siken // Selected Poems: No More Alone, Paul Eluard (trans. Gilbert Bowen) // Dancing With Our Hands Tied by Taylor Swift // The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri // Die Young by Kesha // Holy Ground by Taylor Swift // The Battle Over Tumbleton (The Rise of the Dragon) by Ertaç Altinöz // Manos by Erika Seguín Colás // Devotions: Three Things to Remember, Mary Oliver // Lucian // Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare // Sirens by Norman Lindsay // Erasing Faith, Julie Johnson // Choreomania by Florence + The Machine // Rereading a Classic Book for Young Adults: The Representation of Death in Aidan Chambers’ Dance on My Grave - Dimitrios Politis // E.O Wilson // unsourced painting // Fire and Ice, Robert Frost
#valyrianscrolls#preasoiafedit#asoiafedit#asoiaf#fire and blood#the dance of the dragons#addam velaryon#daeron targaryen#addam x daeron#daeron x addam#addaeron#tidetower#seasmoke#tessarion#vermithor#web weaving#my edits#something about the dancing dragons being a metaphor for queer defiance and love#ending only because of the violence of tradition and duty (represented by vermithor)
64 notes
·
View notes
Note
do you have any poetry/anthology book recommendations? 🤍
- Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) by Charles Baudelaire
- Ariel by Sylvia Plath
- Poems 1962-2012 by Louise Glück
- Averno by Louise Glück
- Certain Magical Acts by Alice Notely
- The Carrying: Poems by Ada Limon
- Selected Poems 1: 1965-1975 by Margaret Atwood
- Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
- The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova
- The Moon Is Always Female: Poems by Marge Piercy
- Extracting the Stone of Madness by Alejandra Pizarnik
- Cherry Blossom Epiphany: the poetry and philosophy of a flowering tree by Robin D. Gill
- I Always Carry My Bones by Felicia Zamora
- Howling at the Moon by Darshana Suresh
- The Black Unicorn: Poems by Audre Lorde
- Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda
- Haruko: Love Poems by June Jordan
- The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu
- Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver
- Orpheus & Eurydice: A Lyric Sequence by Gregory Orr
- Crush by Richard Siken
- Rose by Li-Young Lee
- A Red Cherry on a White-tiled Floor: Selected Poems by Maram al-Massri
45 notes
·
View notes
Last Seen Blogs
tiannarosetarot
Tianna Rose Tarot
audia6-obmen
AudiA6 Обменник
ageingfangirl2
Ageing Fangirl 2.0
mistressarafax
still a third-rate duelist
goodiecornbread
Cool Tumblr Blog™️