Mary Oliver

Tent as Artist’s Canvas Sparks Mary Oliver

Spotted at artist Izhar Patkin’s instagram: the tent he has on his New York roof deck with an interior painted by Scooter LaForge. We can imagine hiding out in its dreamy magic… A fragment of a Mary Oliver poem comes to mind:

Dial-a-Poem’s Strangely Wonderful Experience (+ Poem Texts and Random Readings)

As soon as we read “Dial-a-Poem: The Groundbreaking Phone Service That Let People Hear Poems Read by Patti Smith, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg & More” at the great Open Culture, we picked up our phone and dialed. We were surprised by a curiously intimate experience, to add to our arsenal of ways to weave poetry into our life.

May You Go Easy, To Be Filled with Light, and To Shine (Mary Oliver)

This poem by Mary Oliver expresses our wishes for you this wild season:

Fearsome Poetry of an Owl in Flight (Mary Oliver)

A convergence of two owl poems: one, wordless…one by Mary Oliver, when we opened Blue Horses…

Snow Day: ‘Why, How, Whence Such Beauty and What the Meaning’ (Mary Oliver)

When I went into the blizzard sweeping the East Coast, I was surprised to find so many people hanging out or happily at work on all sorts of creations…Mary Oliver’s poem came to mind.

What The Trees Do When We’re Not Looking (with Poem)

We love things that find ways around constraints and are committed to being wholeheartedly themselves. On a walkabout recently, we saw a startling example.

Alt Universe We Want to Inhabit

This New Yorker cartoon nailed in in the most surprising way. It completely changed our view.

Rocks and Stones Make Endlessly Useful Tools and Beautiful Objets

A personal compendium of the pleasures and uses for rocks and stones, with John Cage and Mary Oliver…

Halloween: Inspiration, Scary Stuff, Song

Suddenly, it is Halloween, one of the strangest and most magic days of the year. If it snuck up on you, here is just the thing:

Artful Fireworks and a Poem for the 4th of July

On July 4, 2010, poet Mary Oliver found a whale bone on the beach and wrote a poem about it. She forged just the right poem for this summer day, as always giving it a bigger view…(as do these fireworks envisioned by artists.)

The Inferno in Our Pages

The day a friend remarked that “Books are the closest humans have come to making seashells”, we read about the library ISIS burned in Mosul, and a blogger’s defiant declaration and challenge.

We Leap into The New Year (With Yoko Ono, Mary Oliver, Muybridge, More)

As always we are taking the week between Christmas and New Year’s off. It’s a time to slow way down and reflect on the year that’s passed so quickly, and on the new one we are about to begin. Here’s a few of the things we look at, and think about.

The Fabulous Revenge of Analog

According to David Sax author of the Revenge of the Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter, analog, that is, the very tactile world of things outside the computer, is experiencing a bracing revival. Here’s how analog sparks joy and balances digital life.

Instructions for a Tumultuous Election Day

Has any election in America’s history created as much anxiety as this one? It seems like our very lives are on the line. So we’ve put together some instructions for navigating Election Day.

Blackberry August: Island Harvest Crumble with Poem

Blackberries are considered both a scourge and a blessing. They grow anywhere and everywhere, bristling with thorns, invading civilized gardens, threatening to obliterate freeway on-ramps. But in August, if you see a car pulled off the side of the road, you can bet everyone’s piled out to gather wild blackberries to eat out-of-hand and transform in the kitchen.

Morning Practice: Reading a Poem…..Again

For some time, our morning practice, before email or anthing digital, has been to read a poem aloud (sometimes with a friend). Recently, we decided to try reading the same poem every morning for a week. We discovered that each day, we’d hear it differently and find something new in those same few lines, as…

A Poem for Starting A New Year or Day or Hour

One of the best gifts we received for Christmas was Mary Oliver’s book of poems Blue Horses. No matter where we open it, we find a few words that reminds us of a way of living and seeing we’d like to follow. (The epigraph features the remarkable Kabir quote, above.) Here’s a catalyzing fragment from the…

Snow as Transformation, via Mary Oliver + Susan Dworski

Watching the evening news and the huge white swirl bearing down on the Eastern seaboard, we inhabitants of the West coast’s eternal green dream of the joy of a new snowfall and the ways it can reconfigure our lives.

‘make a mark!’ with whatever is at hand

Last Fall, designer Susan Dworski, a reader and frequent commenter, happened to mention carving rubber stamps out of Staedler Mars erasers to make artworks. “How did you get into that? we asked. Her answer was stunning: Been carving them since 1980 when our house burned down, and only my studio was saved. All four of us all…

‘lines written in the days of growing darkness’ (mary oliver)

Mary Oliver‘s poem “Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness” appeared in the New York Times last Sunday, while we were visiting a friend who had recently made the decision to forego treatment of a deadly cancer, and live out her life, eyes wide open. Every year we have been witness to it: how the world…