Like many, Mary Oliver wasn’t originally from here—but she was a Cape Cod poet. Born to what she called a “dysfunctional” family in Ohio, in adult life she joyfully became Molly Malone Cook’s lifelong partner in Provincetown, and a poet of our dunes and beaches and woods.

             Choosing not to follow the confessional approach of her contemporaries Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, Mary Oliver believed a poem should “have birds in it” and trees, and water, and was a poet most at ease on all fours looking at “the grasses, the first bursting growth of trees, declivities, lumps, slopes, rivulets, gashes, open spaces.” Living on this sometimes isolated spit of land, she believed a poem should speak—and be good company. There are poets who adore her (and a few who don’t have much use for her), but rarely is a poet as loved as she was, and still is. Even though she is no longer with us, in our times of need her poems continue to be good company.

            This year, celebrate National Poetry Month by gathering to explore Mary Oliver’s life and work—including some poems you may not have known. She was our poet.        

            Our speaker will be rose auslander, a Cape Cod poet who is addicted to water and poetry (not necessarily in that order). Her book Wild Water Child won the 2016 Bass River Press Poetry Contest; her chapbooks include Folding Water, Hints, and The Dolphin in the Gowanus; and look for her poems in the Berkeley Poetry Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Atlanta Review, Baltimore Review, New Ohio Review, New American Writing, LEON, Rhino, Roanoke Review, Tinderbox, and Tupelo Quarterly, among others. She earned her MFA in Poetry at Warren Wilson.