Arts & Lectures: Mary Oliver

Maybe the most famous poet in the country, I later read in the newspaper. Is that true?

The talk was sold out, but I'd bought tickets months ago and didn't know. I picked her lecture because people, upon finding out I like poetry, mention her as one of their favorites. Or, they mention her because she has encapsulated some wisdom they wish to convey and it is easier to conjure her verse than to try to find their own packaging for the meaning. Myself, I may have read some of her poems here and there, but I don't own a single book, have never read through a single book of her poetry. In fact, I realized, at the lecture, that I often confuse her poetry with the poetry of Pattiann Rogers, another of the Whitman-esque. I kept waiting for "The Hummingbird," one of my favorites, only to realize it wasn't a Mary Oliver poem at all.

So, there you go.

A thousand grey-haired women. Two thousand lenses in colorful geometries astride nose ends. Women my mother could have looked like. (Will I eventually look like them?) Their hair is mostly short, some leave it long and stack it up. They wear sensible shoes and comfortable clothes and spruce it up with ethnic scarves.

This time I thought about these women in their liberal youth. I thought about this event in its bookstore beginnings. And I thought about how the baby boomers institutionalized their subcultures, made permanent the things they enjoyed with the wealth they found so that, now, if you go to an established cultural event like the Arts & Lectures series you feel the same cultural detachment, the same sterility of all mainstream things. They lack the rough edges that create a feeling of community—no environmental vagaries, no surprises, no colorful characters—all is a clockwork, without disparity, challenge, or controversy.

I have no animosity toward the baby boomer generation.They are a product of the mandate to survive the previous generation, just as it is ours to survive them. I don't think we are better than they are or that they are better than their parents. I am just observing how a generation acted to secure the things it loved, whether it be the Arts & Lectures or some other thing—Paul Allen's financial support of KEXP (formerly KCMU) and the establishment of a Jimi Hendrix museum in the guise of the EMP, for example. The thing I wonder is if the result is satisfying. When you start a thing, try to build it and make it the best it can be, you can't imagine the fullness of its outcome. Did they want their coffee-shop readings to fill symphony halls? Their co-ops to become strip malls? It doesn't seem likely. But, does it feel as dead to them as it does to me? (And yet, watch us react with histrionics, dense layers of deviance and complexity, just to avoid appearing established.)

It is interesting to me how our drive for survival manifests in this complex, first world. For every little thing I can think of—cultural events, household chores, work tasks—we strive to remove the toil and to improve the quality of the experience. But doing so seems to deprive some core neurological behavior of its function so that the instinct runs amok in the boredom, in constant search of novelty and also satedness. We're like the Greek gods, the metaphorical play of the bored and privileged of that long-ago time. How old this boredom of ease is, downright immortal.