Upstream: Selected Essays

Oliver describes growing up in Ohio in the 1950s. She felt different from everyone around her. Most of her friends were the authors of the books she read. When she was not reading, she was in nature. Although she was often in trouble at school for truancy, her parents never stopped her from skipping school to spend her hours in the woods. Oliver recognizes that her departure from mainstream culture was inevitable for these reasons.

Walt Whitman was highly influential on the young poet. Oliver describes him as her brother. Whitman taught her about the mechanics of poetry. More importantly, he taught her that there was something about the world that was hers to discover: “In those years, truth was elusive—as was my own faith that I could recognize and contain it” (11). Poetry became the temple where Oliver could go to find and express truth. She suggests that poetry is about feeling first and the intellect second.

In this essay, Oliver shares several vignettes centered on foxes. In the first, she describes walking along a path with her elderly dog in winter. They spot a fox walking across a frozen pond, and Oliver’s dog runs away to chase the fox. The two creatures slip and slide across the pond, and the dog never catches up to the fox before the wild animal disappears into the weeds. In another, several young foxes leave playful tracks in the snow. Oliver imagines she can hear them running at night. In another, Oliver describes the safety of a mother fox in her den. The poet compares foxes to nursing cats, sharing a story about a time when she tasted the milk of her own pet cat. In Oliver’s vignettes, the foxes grow older; the challenge is staying alive.

She juxtaposes two stories of foxes by embedding the second within the first. In the first, she tells of a family who captured a fox and kept it on a lead. All day long, the creature ran back and forth. In the second, Oliver describes watching a fox play in a field of cranberries, leaping and pouncing on a butterfly.

Oliver explains that children are powerless: They are forced to live in worlds that are created for them. The poet’s own childhood was difficult. Her father once left her at an ice rink. Later, he said that he forgot his daughter existed. Nature and poetry gave her places to escape. Nature taught her about beauty and mystery, while literature taught her empathy: “And this is what I learned: that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness—the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books—can re-dignify the worst-stung heart” (14-15). For Oliver, literature functioned as an open door to new ways of thinking and noticing the world.

These lessons translated into how she interacted with the natural world. Oliver spent an hour walking on all fours in the woods, trying to understand the space from a perspective other than her own. She asserts that life needs whimsy. While poems and life have form, it is the creative expression within the form that renders something unique.

Oliver outlines two conditions for creative work. One of these conditions is solitude. Outside interruptions, like a phone ringing or someone knocking on the door, can inhibit the growth of an idea. However, interruptions frequently come from within rather than external sources.

Oliver sees herself as having three selves. The first is the child one was. Although people leave childhood behind, their lives are shaped by the experiences they have when they are young. The second is the social self. It loves time and worships obligation. She uses the metaphor of a pilot to illustrate this idea. One does not want a pilot driving a plane who is living in the metaphysical world; one wants a professional who is grounded in reality.

However, writing demands another self: “In creative work—creative work of all kinds—those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the ordinary” (27). Oliver calls this the third self, the self that is hungry for eternity. This is the creative self, but creativity is impossible to control or regulate.

Oliver describes the process of creative work as submitting to creativity. One way to do this is by establishing a writing schedule, although she emphasizes the importance of remaining open at all times. She describes this condition for creative work as “loyalty,” remaining loyal to the practice of creativity.