Tweetspeak Poetry

  • Home
  • FREE prompts
  • Earth Song
  • Every Day Poems—Subscribe! ✨
  • Teaching Tools
  • Books, Etc.
  • Patron Love

Take Your Poet to Work Day: Mary Oliver

By Will Willingham 2 Comments

Mary Oliver Take Your Poet to Work Day

Summer is one of the happiest seasons at Tweetspeak Poetry, because it is the season of Take Your Poet to Work Day (or, you know, to the beach). It’s one thing to start every day with a poem (we recommend it). But how great would it be to start your day with a poet? On Take Your Poet to Work Day, we encourage people around the world to take their favorite poet to work for the day.

Take Your Poet to Work Day is coming July 17, 2019

To help you play and celebrate with us, we’re releasing poets each week in a compact, convenient format you can tuck in your pocket, tool belt, or lunchbox.

We started our celebration five years ago with Sara Teasdale,  Pablo Neruda,  T. S. Eliot, Rumi, Edgar Allan Poe,  and the reclusive Emily Dickinson (for folks who work at home).

We even released a full collection,  The Haiku Masters: Matsuo Basho, Yosa Buson, and Kobayashi Issa.

In 2014, we added Langston Hughes,  Adrienne Rich,  John Keats,  William Butler Yeats,  Christina Rossetti and the beloved 20th-century American poet, Sylvia Plath.

In 2015, we introduced the Bard of Avon William Shakespeare,  beloved poet Maya Angelou, and iconic American poet Robert Frost,  Russian poet Anna Akhmatova,  Polish poet Wisława Szymborska,  and America’s poet, Walt Whitman.

In 2016, English Romantic poet William Wordsworth,  joined in, along with Elizabeth Barrett Browning,  Irish poet Seamus Heaney,  and English poet and novelist Emily Brontë,  Australian poet and activist Judith Wright, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Because you can never have too many poets in your lunch box (or your desk drawer), we also do a school-year celebration in April—Take Your Poet to School Week—with some favorites for the younger (and younger-at-heart) poetry readers: Shel Silverstein, Ogden Nash, Robert Louis Stevenson and the always delightful Mother Goose.

Last year, in 2018, we introduced Jorge Luis Borges, Rosalía de Castro,  Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Rosario Castellanos.

This year, we feature some of our recently lost American national treasures, like C.D. Wright, Tony Hoagland, and today’s new release, Mary Oliver.

Take Your Poet to Work: Mary Oliver

Mary Jane Oliver was born September 10, 1935, in Ohio. Though she suffered abuse in childhood, she found solace on long walks in nature, a habit she would continue—along with writing poetry—throughout her life and which would always inspire her.

Oliver went to Ohio State University & Vassar, but didn’t receive a degree. When she was 17 she went to the home of the late Edna St. Vincent Millay and became friends with the poet’s sister Norma. They spent the next six to seven years organizing Millay’s papers.

She taught at Case Western Reserve University, was Poet In Residence at Bucknell University, and Margaret Banister Writer in Residence at Sweet Briar College, before holding the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College. Oliver wrote academically and had already won a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship by the time she started publishing her poems. She would go on to win other awards, including the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Lannan Literary Award for lifetime achievement, for her poetry. Oliver said, “I was very careful never to take an interesting job. … I took lots of jobs. But if you have an interesting job you get interested in it.”

The morning her Pulitzer was announced, Oliver was walking through the town dump, trying to find shingles to fix her roof. A friend joked, “Looking for your old manuscripts?”

Her style was mostly lyrical nature poems, but she dealt with classical myth in The River Styx and The Night Traveler. She also wrote about poetry in multiple volumes including A Poetry Handbook and Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse. “I never have felt yet that I’ve done it right,” Oliver said. “This is the marvelous thing about language. It can always be done better.”

In the late 1950s, she met photographer Molly Malone Cook, her future partner. “I took one look [at Cook],” she said, “and fell, hook and tumble.” They would end up moving to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where they would live until after Cook’s death.

Oliver was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2012, but recovered, and eventually died of lymphoma on January 17, 2019, at her home in Florida, at the age of 83.

“Walks work for me,” she said. “I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious. It’s a joke here in town: I take a walk and I’m found standing still somewhere.”

The Fish

The first fish
I ever caught
would not lie down
quiet in the pail
but flailed and sucked
at the burning
amazement of the air
and died
in the slow pouring off
of rainbows. Later
I opened his body and separated
the flesh from the bones
and ate him. Now the sea
is in me: I am the fish, the fish
glitters in me; we are
risen, tangled together, certain to fall
back to the sea. Out of pain,
and pain, and more pain
we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished
by the mystery.

—Mary Oliver

Get your own Mary Oliver — Take Your Poet to Work Printable that you can print, color, and cut out for the big day.

Illustrations by Will Willingham.

  • Author
  • Recent Posts
Will Willingham
Will Willingham
Director of Many Things; Senior Editor, Designer and Illustrator at Tweetspeak Poetry
I used to be a claims adjuster, helping people and insurance companies make sense of loss. Now, I train other folks with ladders and tape measures to go and do likewise. Sometimes, when I’m not scaling small buildings or crunching numbers with my bare hands, I read Keats upside down. My first novel is Adjustments.
Will Willingham
Latest posts by Will Willingham (see all)
  • Earth Song Poem Featured on The Slowdown!—Birds in Home Depot - February 7, 2023
  • The Rapping in the Attic—Happy Holidays Fun Video! - December 21, 2022
  • Video: Earth Song: A Nature Poems Experience—Enchanting! - December 6, 2022

Filed Under: Blog, Mary Oliver, Take Your Poet to Work Day

Try Every Day Poems...

About Will Willingham

I used to be a claims adjuster, helping people and insurance companies make sense of loss. Now, I train other folks with ladders and tape measures to go and do likewise. Sometimes, when I’m not scaling small buildings or crunching numbers with my bare hands, I read Keats upside down. My first novel is Adjustments.

Comments

  1. Teri Petz says

    February 3, 2021 at 12:04 pm

    What a great idea Will! I like the format of having the poets bio and a poem as well along with their picture.

    Reply
    • L.L. Barkat says

      February 3, 2021 at 3:15 pm

      Welcome, Teri. We’re so glad you like the format! 🙂

      Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Take How to Read a Poem

Get the Introduction, the Billy Collins poem, and Chapter 1

get the sample now

Welcome to Tweetspeak

New to Tweetspeak Poetry? Start here, in The Mischief Café. You're a regular? Check out our May Menu

Patron Love

❤️

Welcome a little patron love, when you help keep the world poetic.

The Graphic Novel

"Stunning, heartbreaking, and relevant illustrations"

Callie Feyen, teacher

read a summary of The Yellow Wallpaper

meet The Yellow Wallpaper characters

How to Write Poetry

Your Comments

  • Glynn on World War II Had Its Poets, Too
  • Sandra Fox Murphy on World War II Had Its Poets, Too
  • Glynn on Poets and Poems: Kelly Belmonte and “The Mother of All Words”
  • Bethany R. on Poets and Poems: Kelly Belmonte and “The Mother of All Words”

Featured In

We're happy to have been featured in...

The Huffington Post

The Paris Review

The New York Observer

Tumblr Book News

Stay in Touch With Us

Categories

Learn to Write Form Poems

How to Write an Acrostic

How to Write a Ballad

How to Write a Catalog Poem

How to Write a Ghazal

How to Write a Haiku

How to Write an Ode

How to Write a Pantoum

How to Write a Rondeau

How to Write a Sestina

How to Write a Sonnet

How to Write a Villanelle

5 FREE POETRY PROMPTS

Get 5 FREE inbox poetry prompts from the popular book How to Write a Poem

Shakespeare Resources

Poetry Classroom: Sonnet 18

Common Core Picture Poems: Sonnet 73

Sonnet 104 Annotated

Sonnet 116 Annotated

Character Analysis: Romeo and Juliet

Character Analysis: Was Hamlet Sane or Insane?

Why Does Hamlet Wait to Kill the King?

10 Fun Shakespeare Resources

About Shakespeare: Poet and Playwright

Top 10 Shakespeare Sonnets

See all 154 Shakespeare sonnets in our Shakespeare Library!

Explore Work From Black Poets

About Us

  • • A Blessing for Writers
  • • Our Story
  • • Meet Our Team
  • • Literary Citizenship
  • • Poet Laura
  • • Poetry for Life: The 5 Vital Approaches
  • • T. S. Poetry Press – All Books
  • • Contact Us

Write With Us

  • • 5 FREE Poetry Prompts-Inbox Delivery
  • • 30 Days to Richer Writing Workshop
  • • Poetry Prompts
  • • Submissions
  • • The Write to Poetry

Read With Us

  • • All Our Books
  • • Book Club
  • • Every Day Poems—Subscribe! ✨
  • • Literacy Extras
  • • Poems to Listen By: Audio Series
  • • Poet-a-Day
  • • Poets and Poems
  • • 50 States Projects
  • • Charlotte Perkins Gilman Poems Library
  • • Edgar Allan Poe Poems Arts & Experience Library
  • • William Blake Poems Arts & Experience Library
  • • William Shakespeare Sonnet Library

Celebrate With Us

  • • Poem on Your Pillow Day
  • • Poetic Earth Month
  • • Poet in a Cupcake Day
  • • Poetry at Work Day
  • • Random Acts of Poetry Day
  • • Take Your Poet to School Week
  • • Take Your Poet to Work Day

Gift Ideas

  • • Every Day Poems
  • • Our Shop
  • • Everybody Loves a Book!

Connect

  • • Donate
  • • Blog Buttons
  • • By Heart
  • • Shop for Tweetspeak Fun Stuff

Copyright © 2025 Tweetspeak Poetry · FAQ, Disclosure & Privacy Policy