A few times over the years, people have mentioned, in passing, that Mary Oliver was from Cleveland. I always meant to look that up, because it was something I did not know, and was unsure was correct, since I am arrogant enough to think I know all of the famous writers who have lived in Cleveland. But I forgot.
Yesterday I saw the news of her passing, but had not yet taken the time to read the obituaries
It was only today, at lunch, when someone mentioned to me Oliver’s Cleveland connection, that I remembered what I had forgotten. So I came home and googled “Mary Oliver Cleveland.” The first two hits were an article about her having won the Cleveland Arts Prize in 1979 and a lovely article by Karen Long about her talk here in 2010. According to Long, Oliver wrote what is arguably her most famous poem, Wild Geese, while she was teaching at Case Western Reserve University. She would win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984 while teaching here. She was born in Cleveland, and was raised in Maple Heights.
I cannot find any local coverage of Oliver’s passing yesterday in the Cleveland media. I did, however, find a poem by Oliver about reading the newspaper. It’s called Every Morning, and I’ve rudely screenshotted it all for you here, but go to Poetry Foundation to read it again.
I would love to learn more about Oliver’s Cleveland life, her upbringing in Maple Heights. She was private, so perhaps that is asking too much. Still, I would like to ackwnowledge her passing, and her importance, and her ties to Cleveland. I would like the city to shout about her death from rooftops, for there to be a literary moment of silence. I would like to Cleveland to honor her life and work. I will help you.
For now, I will be humbler given how little I knew until this afternoon, and will mark the moment, here, now, in which I learned.