Join Mary Oliver biographer Lindsay Whalen for a participatory seminar exploring Oliver’s poetry across the four seasons. Mary Oliver published her debut collection, No Voyage, in 1963, at the age of twenty-eight. She died in January 2019, a year after the publication of her final selected volume, Devotions (Penguin Books, 2020). Over the course of a prolific career that spanned more than five decades, Oliver demonstrated a lifetime commitment to the natural world and its rhythms: “I could not be a poet without the natural world,” she wrote. “Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.”

This seminar will establish the origins of Oliver’s seasonal themes and explore their development across her many books, moving beyond Oliver’s best known poems to reveal nuance and variation in the work she called “love and death in the shape of trees.”

Class meets from 1:00–2:00 p.m. ET on Tuesdays, January 20, January 27, February 3, and February 10.

Each session will cover three to four poems. Readings not found in Oliver’s Devotions can be found under “Seminar Materials.”

Session 1: “Winter Hours”

Session 2: “Spring Azures”

Session 3: “The Summer Day”

Session 4: “Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness” 

This live, virtual course is structured to encourage active participation. Registrants will receive Zoom links a week before each session, a day prior to each session, and the morning of each session. All recordings will be made available within forty-eight hours of a session. All recordings and class materials will remain available for thirty days after the final session 

Scholarship applications must be submitted by Friday, January 16, at 5 p.m. ET. 

For information on how to register, how to receive the member discount, how to apply for a scholarship, how to access recordings and course materials, and more, please visit our FAQ page.