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Depicts a map of Cape Cod with National Seashore shaded in green

In Blackwater Woods

“In Blackwater Woods” is a free verse poem written by Mary Oliver(1935-2019). The poem was first published in 1983 in her collection American Primitive, which won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize. The poem, like much of Oliver's work, uses imagery of nature to make a statement about human experience.

Structure and Content

"In Blackwater Woods" is a free verse poem with 9 stanzas. The first 8 stanzas all consist of 4 lines each, and the 9th stanza consists of five lines. Oliver favors short lines in this poem, mimicking the silence and blank space that must be allowed for when paying attention to the world or being introspective.

"In Blackwater Woods" contains imagery of a forest fire. It relates the burning of a forest to mortality and love.

Setting

Blackwater pond and woods is a recurring setting in Oliver’s work. It is based on a part of Province Lands in the Cape Cod National Seashore in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Province Lands is full of numerous freshwater ponds along an approxiamatey two mile long area. It was formed by eroding sand rather than glacial activity like the rest of Cape Cod, which has resulted in the formation of freshwater ponds and a forested, pine and deciduous ecosystem to grow.

Blackwater woods may refer to the area surrounding Blackwater pond, which can be found along the Cape Cod National Seashore Beech Forest Trail despite being unmarked on the Park’s map.

American Primitive

The title of the collection may refer to an art style known as American Primitive art, or Naïve art. This is a type of art created by someone with little or no formal training. Oliver herself attended college but did not earn a degree . Naive art also focuses on simplicity over subtlety and Oliver has been quoted as saying that Poetry "mustn't be fancy" but should instead be clear.

“In Blackwater Woods” comes third to last in this collection. In 1984 the collection won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Critical Reception

Much of Oliver's work was criticized for its "traditional" subject matter of nature and God, however her work was widely read and well known. Oliver's work resonated with Americans because it was able to look at systems of nature and derive truths about spiritual questions from them and present those truths in an accessible way. Her work has recently been reexamined and praised for its ability to examine the point of view of nonhuman subjects while still maintaining an awareness of the limitations of looking at those subjects from a human perspective.

"In Blackwater Woods" often has its last 10 lines quoted because of their particularly clear message about mortality and human experience. Despite the last lines being a direct statement about what one has to be able to do to "to live in this world", Oliver is known for promoting attention to the world and awareness of one's own actions but never urging others to act in any particular way. For this reason, her poetry is described as being both "democratic" and "cautiously optimistic"."In Blackwater Woods" is also considered to show Oliver allowing the reader to inhabit the perspective of the plants and animals that make up the natural world described.

Book: The West Side of Any Mountain: Place, Space, and Ecopoetry by J Scott Bryson

-       Mary Oliver is Chapter Four: Both Sides of the Beautiful Water

-       The excerpt “To live in this world… to end of poem” is used from “In Blackwater Woods”

(pg 76) “What Oliver presents in her deceptively simple poems, resulting from her walking and looking, is a complex perspective on the relationship between the environmentally aware artist and her nonhuman subjects.”

(pg77) Argues that Oliver is able to shift from the world/perspective of the subject back to the world/perspective of the viewer without fully inhabiting the subject but also without compromising the distinctiveness of the viewer.

(pg 78) “Oliver’s poetry proceeds out of a phenomenological worldview centered in the body’s fundamental relatedness to the rest of nature. As such, it rests on a place-centered poetics that allows her momentarily to enter the consciousness of her natural subjects. As a result of her awareness of this bodily connection, Oliver frequently and intentionally employs the pathetic fallacy. But she does so in a highly self-conscious manner that signifies her awareness of her inability actually to speak for nature, since she is merely the ‘imaginer.’”

(pg 79) “Throughout her poetry, Oliver asserts that her own preoccupation with the future, and with philosophical questions concerning meaning and purpose, prevent her from fully experiencing the world around her, unlike other natural beings.”

(pg 81) “Oliver’s response to this impasse of both wanting to bear witness and recognizing the difficulty of doing so sets her apart from past thinkers – and many other ecopoets and nature writers as well – who have addressed this dilemma.Oliver’s question, like those of Berry and Harjo and numerous others, is how to create place while also accepting and appreciating space; and like the poetry of her fellow ecopoets, most of Oliver’s work can be read as an attempt to address this separation by realizing a relationship between herself and the natural world (hence to make place), while also remaining intellectually honest (and thus space-conscious) conecerning the obstacles that impede that relationship.”

(pg 82) Discusses Oliver’s poetry as “phenomenological” in David Abram’s definition “phenomenology, as articulated by Husserl in the early twentieth century, ‘would turn toward ‘the things themselves,’ toward the world as it is experienced in its felt immediacy. Unlike the mathematics-based sciences, phenomenology would seek not to explain the world, but to describe as closely as possible the way the world makes itself evident to awareness, the way things first arise in our direct, sensorial experience’(35).”

(pg 97) “This pervasive intermingling of seemingly mutually exclusive perspectives lends great power to Oliver’s work. As she says of herself, ‘This is my skill – I am capable of pondering the most detailed knowledge, and the most fastened-up, impenetrable mystery, at the same time’ (WW16). Her ‘skill’ is in making place by ‘creating an intimacy’ that links her with those around her, while simultaneously affirming and embracing space in her acknowledgement of the ‘logical impossibility’ of an absolute and unbroken intimacy.”

Horne, Dee Alyson. Mary Oliver's Grass Roots Poetry. Peter Lang, 2019.

(pg 2) "From her close observations of nature, she perceives all: humans and nonhumans, animate and inanimate, as interrelated."

(pg 2) American Primitive won the pulitzer in 1984

(pg 4) "[...] she embraces paradox and tensions between literal and symbolic language. Her eco-aesthetic of interrelationship engenders an eco-ethic of love, care and respect. [...] Her eco-poetics is paradocxical and complex in so far as it is both pragmatic and, in so far as it has yet to be realized fully, idealistic."

(pg 5) Oliver both embraces and challenges anthropocentrism in varying contexts

(pg 6) "She re-contextualizes anthropocentrism showing how relations are always shifting and in a process of becoming. Encounters with the other, whether that is another person, another animal or an inanimate object, is not alienating, but becomes an opportunity for expanding one's perspective and affiliation with others."

(pg 9) "Although Oliver never mentions the Anthropocene directly, she alludes to human impacts on the planet, global warming and climate change in many of her poems."

(pg 12) "Oliver also values speaking up and being engaged but she is careful not to dictate what others should and should not do. She takes responsibility for her own choices and actions. Rejecting apathy, she cultivates attentiveness. [...] Her poetry is grass roots because, even as she is a poet of her times, Oliver also has a vision that is democratic and cautiously optimistic."

(pg 27) "Oliver identifies three elements that are central to poetry: 'the mystery of the universe, spiritual curiosity, the energy of language'"

(pg 34) "Oliver's interest in questions rather than answers reflect a spirit of inquiry." Oliver has said that this is what sets her apart from Romantic and Transcendentalist poets, despite the fact that some critics attempt to group her with them. While poets like Emerson focused on spiritual answers, Oliver states that she is instead trying to find "at least the right spiritual questions".

(pg 36) "Bonds describes how Oliver is 'conceiving nature's language as process or utterance rather than a system of signs, as parole rather than langue' (4). Even though we are part of nature, we are a part from it in so far as much eludes human comprehension and is beyond translation. [...] How do we elude consciousness dominated by human constructions? The short answer is we don't. The longer answer is that the poet attempts to find ways to re-contextualize language and relationships, knowing full well that such a task will always have limitations and while it may accurately convey the poet's intuition it is not an accurate description."

(pg 37) "Her eco-poetics of interrelatedness focuses on the perceiver and the perceiver's relationship with the perceived interrelationship and how the interaction alters the perceiver (and by implication the perceived, but the speaker does not presume to speak for the other). Oliver wrestles with the dilemma of nature itself: how to write what the poet perceives without translation? Since it is not possible to escape translation of perception and our constructions, only to be more aware of them, Oliver attempts to write with as little translation as possible and to have self-aware speakers in her poems."

(pg 38) "It is in her description of the relationship between beauty and the sublime that Oliver distinguishes herself [from Romantic poets] and reveals an integrative vision."

(pg 41-42) Oliver discusses the idea that everything has a soul and that death is a part of life.

Gregerson, Linda. Poetry, vol. 145, no. 1, 1984, pp. 38–39. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20600060.

- A review of Mary Oliver's collection American Primitive

(pg 38) "The short line Oliver favors- predominately one of two to three feet - serves not so much to govern p and musical stress as to control the pacing of apprehension establish a necessary margin of silence, built in a clearing; the white space mimics that repose which enables the self to look outside itself."

DUENWALD, MARY. “The Bard of Provincetown.” New York Times, vol. 158, no. 54727, 5 July 2009, p. 1. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,url,cookie,uid&db=a9h&AN=42852662&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

"this small patch of earth, a two-mile-long smattering of a dozen or so freshwater ponds on the northwest tip of Cape Cod, is where Mary Oliver, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who has a devoted audience, has set most of her poetry since she arrived in Provincetown in the 1960s."

"[Province Lands, a national park,] is not the Cape Cod of beaches and sailboats, shops and art galleries, but rather a small, shady and cool wilderness quietly teeming with life -- a geological and biological wonder that stands in relative obscurity on the Cape."

"This part of the Cape is relatively new land. It is made not of glacial moraine, as the rest of Cape Cod is, but of sand that eroded from cliffs farther south and was shaped into parabolic dunes by the Atlantic winds and currents. As this sand settled, ponds were formed in depressions in the dunes, and a rich deciduous forest mixed with stands of pine grew up from the sandy soil."

"Nor had they heard of her beloved Blackwater Pond, which is not even marked on the Cape Cod National Seashore map.

This is especially odd, given that Blackwater is the only one of the ponds in the area that is encircled by a well-groomed and marked trail, the Beech Forest Trail."

"I sat beside the water under a bunch of pines and opened Ms. Oliver's ''American Primitive'' to reread ''In Blackwater Woods'' and imagine this landscape in other seasons, when ''the trees/are turning/their own bodies/into pillars/of light'' and ''cattails/are bursting and floating away,'' part of the cycle of life here that Ms. Oliver has watched so many times. Her appeal to her audience seems especially clear here -- her sharp eye, her tugs of emotion as she relates the outer world to a deeper interior experience"

Wright, Carolyne. Prairie Schooner, vol. 59, no. 3, 1985, pp. 108–112. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40631610.

"and there are instances in which she employsdirect statement or the didactic mode in a way that her readers can both identify with as emotive pronouncement, and assent to as workable poetry:

To live in this world

you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. ("In Blackwater Woods")"

Salama, Hatem Salama Saleh. “Dissolution into the Natural World: An Ecocritical Study of Mary Oliver’s American Primitive.” Annals of the Faculty of Arts, vol. 41, Jan. 2013, pp. 473–501. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,url,cookie,uid&db=a9h&AN=124797251&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

(pg 699) "Oliver‘s engagement with nature reaches the extent that herpoetry becomes a kind of strife toward establishing a new poetic tradition privileging the beautifully natural over the painfully human. This attitude indicates that identity matters less to Oliver and that immersion in the natural world is her deep interest. "

(pg 700) "Central to her ecological achievement is her Pulitzer- prize-winning collection American Primitive. Each poem in the collection is a shot of the poet's unfailing dissolution into the natural world, an aspect that weaves together these different shots into atenacious fabric offering ―many bodies for us to inhabit; we canbecome, by turns, bear, fish, whale, swamp, and Pan. We can run with the fox, fly with the owl, dig with the mole, and finally, losing alloutward form, dissolve into the totality of nature‖ (Graham 352 ). These ―many bodies‖ impose on the poet a continuing change ofsetting, a challenge emphasizing Oliver‘s descriptive power andmastery of poetic technique."

Graham, Vicki. “`Into the Body of Another’: Mary Oliver and the Poetics of Becoming Other.” Papers on Language & Literature, vol. 30, no. 4, Fall 1994, p. 352. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,url,cookie,uid&db=a9h&AN=9501243467&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

(pg 353) "But for Oliver, immersion in nature is not death: language is not destroyed and the writer is not silenced. To merge with the non-human is to acknowledge the self's mutability and multiplicity, not to lose subjectivity. But few feminists have wholeheartedly appreciated Oliver's work, and though some critics have read her poems as revolutionary reconstructions of the female subject, others remain skeptical "that identification with nature can empower women" (Bonds 1).[2]"

(pg 355) "In Oliver's American Primitive, evoking and then becoming another depends on direct, sensuous contact with the other, on using the body rather than the mind to apprehend it. Over and over the speaker of Oliver's poems reminds herself to look, to touch, to taste, to see, and to smell. Only by yielding to her senses can she get close to the "real"--wild plums, egrets, the first light of morning. Contact leads to contagion; infected by what she has touched or tasted, she begins to copy it spontaneously, "miming [it] into being" through ecstatic identification. "

(pg 356) "For Oliver, becoming another begins with longing, a longing often tinged with sorrow, as though Oliver recognized and accepted the difficulties involved. American Primitive is permeated with verbs of desire; the speakers of the poems "want," "dream of," "strive," "long," and "cry for" contact with the natural world, but all too often that contact is blocked."

(pg 358) "Letting her body rather than her mind guide her gives Oliver the contact with the natural world that she craves, but poems such as "The Plum Trees" do not examine the damaging effects of oppositional thinking. Split into a rigid duality, the self is not porous; it cannot take the other into itself nor can it flow outside its own boundaries. Privileging the body reinforces oppositional thinking and blocks rather than enables immersion in the other."

(pg 359) "Occasionally, however, the natural world startles Oliver into forgetting that mind and body are split, and for a moment they move together."

(pg 366-367) "But this loss of self is never permanent. Oliver becomes, in turn, a bear, a whale, a fish, but, as each poem and each subsequent transformation suggests, she returns again to human consciousness and must repeat the process of becoming another over and over. Rooted in the binary oppositions that structure Western thinking, Oliver can never fully escape the teaching of her culture that the mind is divided from the body and identity depends on keeping intact the boundaries between the self and others. Each of the selves Oliver becomes in this collection is self-contained and separate. A bear, like a human, has its own boundaries, and becoming bear as Oliver understands this process involves moving back and forth across the boundaries between herself and the bear rather than dissolving the boundaries themselves."

(pg 367-368) "Giving up human subjectivity would mean, at least as Oliver perceives it, giving up the ability to mime herself into the body of another. It would also mean giving up self-consciousness, knowing who and what she is, as well as the ability to remember and write about the experience. Oliver's poems suggest that we need language and self-consciousness in order to experience stepping outside of language and the self. Over and over, Oliver lets herself into the whale, the fish, the bear, the Other, and over and over she jumps out in time, clinging to her humanity, to her individuality, and to her sense of the self as a unified subject with distinct boundaries.

Oliver's acceptance of this image of the self shapes her perception of what it means to become another"

(pg 371) "Drawn though she is to the possibility of losing herself in the body of another, Oliver comes to her writing with her cultural assumptions about the self and individuality intact, assumptions that are highly valued and fostered, particularly in American culture. Thinking oppositionally, Oliver sees the boundaries between human and non-human as something that can be crossed but not erased. She perceives nature always as an other which she elevates over the human. The chief value of "entering the body of another" lies, for Oliver, in the temporary loss of human consciousness. She wants to cast off what writers like Silko and Allen see as part of creation, something that cannot be cast off without destroying the balance of the whole."