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A Poet, A Teacher: Standing Still With Mary Oliver, Melissa Therese Benedek
A Poet, A Teacher: Standing Still With Mary Oliver, Melissa Therese Benedek
Senior Projects Spring 2021
The poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019) once wrote, “Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report.” How does Oliver teach the practice of paying attention to the natural world? This project explores observation as a form of attention in Oliver’s work and how it is implicit in her writing practice. The relationship between attention and feeling manifests in her poetry. Observations are both the foundation and definition of Oliver’s concrete images and incommunicable encounters with nonhumans in the natural world. For Oliver, the goal of attention is not to give a scientific account of details about specific animals …