A Wild Silky Thing - Mary Oliver on Writing Poetry

Some time back, (read; before the pandemic) I went to my writing group with a request. I had been (and still am) a member of this group for years, and I felt there was something we’d been neglecting. Can we, I suggested, perhaps spend less time on the craft of writing, and more on the art of writing? Members were unclear about what I meant by the difference. What followed was a result of my failure to communicate what I meant by it to them (which seemed obvious to me) - I became, as I tried to communicate it, more and more frustrated, eventually taking a year-long break from the group to process and re-set. I never was fully able to communicate what I meant about this difference to my group, but tonight, after working for a few hours - I frequently work in the late hours of the night, often into the wee hours of the morning - I picked up one of my books on poetry-writing, this time A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver, one of my favorite contemporary poets. I had read it before, but this time, as I began reading again, a particular section spoke directly to my heart, and answered the question I’d been unable to answer for my group: what is the difference between art and craft? Though Ms. Oliver was not specifically talking in those terms, she might as well have been. Speaking of what poets do as they approach learning to write poetry as well as they can, she says:

“....a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind.” Oh, my - if only I’d had those words back then! Ms. Oliver had said earlier that this ‘affair’ - this ‘something like the heart’ cannot be learned - we are born with it or without it, she says, though of this I am not sure. It is the practice of combining the “possible love affair” with the ‘learned skills’ that creates art. Those “learned skills of the conscious mind” are, to my way of thinking, the craft - the part that is learned and practiced and polished. Leonardo da Vinci once said “...where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art” - that “something like the heart” is the spirit that must be deep in a passionate affair with the learned skills for poetry to be written - for, in my opinion, any good writing to be written. We must, however, let it out, let it be in love with our skills to write poetry, to write (I believe) anything worthwhile. She says that this “spirit” da Vinci speaks of is “...that wild silky part of ourselves without which no poem can live…...it won’t involve itself with anything less than perfect seriousness….this is the first and most essential thing to understand. It comes before everything, even technique.” This is something I had experienced in graduate school studying creative writing - my advisor pushed everyone in our cohort to find that passion, find that fiery essential place within ourselves that had so many words, so much sound, and so much love to give to our writing that we could not acknowledge it or look at that part of ourselves without needing to bring it out in words. This work was the foundation of every critique she gave us, every student conference, every seminar discussion. Though we didn’t use Oliver’s words at the time, what we were all doing, day after day, was being lovers, engaging in a passionate affair between

something like our hearts - that wild silky part of ourselves - and our learned skills. We of course had classes and workshops on technique and form and reading lists to complete - but the real work, the essential work, was having, each of us, our own possible love affair.