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The acclaimed and wildly popular poet Mary Oliver died yesterday.
Mary Oliver wrote the poet James Wright for the first time in 1963.
She was 28 years old and unknown, and she had never met Wright.
Her first book,No Voyage and Other Poems, had been accepted by J.M.
Dent & Sons, and was published in September to little notice.
I am radiant with happiness because James Wright exists.
So, too, the instinct to look for a friend between the pages of a book.
Whitman was the brother I did not have.
It would no longer be possible for us to see each other.
The reason had nothing to do with me, she said, but that was difficult to believe.
I spent the next four days in Florida, hoping my luck would change.
Mary knew something about waiting.
It took James Wright almost two years to respond to her first letter.
By then Mary had returned from London, and settled in Provincetown.
Finding an American publisher forNo Voyagewas a struggle, but the book was released by Houghton Mifflin in 1965.
What I was interested in is your writing, she said.
Marys correspondence with James Wright would continue until his death, in 1980.
They would never meet in life, but Mary would dedicate her collectionAmerican Primitiveto him, in memory.
It won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
