Gay oliver

MARY OLIVER (1935–2019) was famously secret and accustomed to her ways of working as a poet, writing often about how she walked with pad and stylus at dawn every date through the woods and along the shoreline of Provincetown, and later in Hobe Sound, Florida. Years ago, when I was an editor at Country Living magazine, a glossy Hearst title, I wanted to have her contribute a personal essay. Productive through her publisher, I was told that Oliver was wary of a magazine so commercial and that she didn’t exploit the fax (yes, I’m dating myself) and wouldn’t respond to email. Eventually, I was told that she would write a piece, but insisted on hand-delivering the finished essay to me at Recent York’s 92nd Street Y, where she was scheduled to make an appearance.

Prior to the reading, amid a crowd of Birkenstock-clad, gray-haired fans with PBS tote bags, young lesbians sporting multi-colored hair, and other fans of all ages and persuasions, she graciously handed me a sealed envelope. She shook my hand and said with genuine modesty: “I hope that what I wrote is good enough.”

As a longtime reader of hers, I felt as if Sappho herself had waded from

.

.

.

.