By Kilian Melloy

Sasha Waters dials in from Richmond, Virginia, to discuss her new documentary Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World. The title comes from an interview Oliver gave late in her life, speaking with Krista Tippet on the On Being podcast in 2015, a few years before Oliver’s death in 2019 at the age of 83.

Oliver grew up in Ohio, enamored with “nature” poets like Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau. Writing poetry herself from an early age, she sent a letter to Norma St. Vincent Millay, the sister of Edna St. Vincent Millay and asked to visit Millay’s farm, Steepletop, in upstate New York. That visit became six years of intermittent residency during which she helped Norma organize Edna’s papers. It was during that time that she met Molly Malone Cook, a photographer with the Village Voice; the two became life partners in a relationship that lasted until Cook passed away in 2005. After stints in college (including Vassar) and time living in Greenwich Village, Oliver ended up settled in Provincetown with Cook, where the two did work for novelist Norman Mailer and established a friendship with filmmaker John Waters.

Waters features in the new documentary, offering poignant (and sometime piquant) insider commentary on Oliver and Malone. Mailer’s voice, too, is heard, in an archival recording. A gallery of poets — some of them Oliver’s contemporaries — share their own stories and insights, and a class of middle schoolers, now grown up, relate passages from the letters their entire class sent to Oliver, who, after decades of dedication to her craft, became one of America’s most celebrated and beloved poets. Steven Colbert attempts to recite “The Summer’s Day” for Waters’ camera and chokes up; Steve Buscemi and Helena Bonham Carter give readings of other favorite selections from Oliver’s canon.

Most fascinating is how the doc recounts the major chapters in Oliver’s life while illustrating biographical and career aspects with Oliver’s own verse. Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World is Waters’ sixth documentary feature (though she also has many short docs to her credit as well), but her best-known work before this might be Steve Winograd: Everything is Photographable, about the esteemed photographer. Waters chatted about how that film and this new one are a good pairing, what it was like hearing so many perspectives on Mary Oliver’s life and work, and how Oliver’s latter years were a contrast to her earlier life.

QulturVultur: Were you already a Mary Oliver fan when you approached making this documentary?

Sasha Waters: I was a huge Mary Oliver fan, but there is so much work I became even more of a fan as I worked on the film. There’s a poem called “Bone Poem,” which is a poem about an owl on the hunt, it’s a short poem. I had read this poem before; I was neutral on it, and then the poet Frank Gaspar, who we interview in the film, read this poem and started talking about it, started talking about what it was doing in the language and what Mary was doing in the construction of the poem. That’s the kind of thing that’s a little too literary or inside baseball to put in a film that’s for a general audience, but I love that experience of getting closer to a poem and understanding it. I grew to appreciate the work even more through the process of making the film.

QulturVultur: What was it like to sit down with the poets you interviewed, and with Stephen Colbert and other celebrities, and to talk with them about Mary Oliver’s work?

Sasha Waters: It was a wonderful experience. With Stephen Colbert, we filmed at the Ed Sullivan Theater, which was really special, and we mainly were there to have him do these readings but he was so generous and gracious and gave us this time and says such wonderful moving things in the film.

I think there is something about the spirit of Mary Oliver that opened people up in the conversations. There’s this kind of ambient pressure in the art world or in [the making of a] documentary to have celebrity presence, because it does bring attention, but I think the people who are the celebrities who are included in the film are genuinely fans of Mary Oliver. They have this connection to the work, so it’s not superficial, like, “We’re just including them because they’re celebrities.” I think that comes across that they really do feel connected to the work.

QulturVultur: Did Colbert ever get through a reading of “The Summer Day?”

Sasha Waters: Yes. He does break down, but he does get through it. Jason Reynolds also was a huge fan of “The Summer Day,” and he read it from the book, and we wanted to be able to include part of his reading as well, so that’s why we cut to him [from one of Colbert’s readings], because he also has these wonderful, moving things to say about it.

QulturVultur: John Waters was particularly interesting. When he said certain things — like when he refers to Mary Oliver as being “in the woods like a crazy person, talking to animals” — did you think that was a part of the affectionate jousting between the two of them?

Sasha Waters: Yes. They did have this relationship that I think helps to puncture the public view of her as, like, Saint Mary of the Woods, where people think that she is, like John says in the film, running through the woods like in a deodorant commercial, just this kind of almost fairy tale-like figure. She’s human and she’s flawed, and she’s smoking and she’s drinking, and she’s gossiping about her neighbors.

QulturVultur: The response from the literary world to Oliver’s work was sometimes not so positive. Did you get a sense of why that might have been the case, especially since so many of the poets you interviewed were talking about her work in such glowing terms?

Sasha Waters: I think with any art form there are trends and approaches that are ascendant at one time, and then maybe fall out of favor. I think, broadly speaking, the kind of poetry she was writing was unfashionable, [and] not really taught. But I do think there were poets who were always teaching her work. Mark Doty, for example, who is a queer poet, who taught at NYU, at the University of Iowa, at Sarah Lawrence at Columbia, he always taught her work, and he was a teacher of Gabrielle Cavalcare, who is also in the film. So, there was this way in which the work was being transmitted, I think, particularly in queer poetry communities…. but I think that’s a separate lineage than whoever is reviewing poetry books for The New York Times or The New Yorker.

QulturVultur: It’s interesting, insofar as she idolized poets and writers who, like her, found meaning in nature to apply directly to the experience of life. Many traditional forms of poetry draw directly on nature, but she didn’t like being pigeonholed as a nature poet.

Sasha Waters: Well, she’s also a queer woman. She is living in Provincetown, she’s not in New York; she’s not giving reading, she’s not hobnobbing, she’s not a careerist. She’s kind of self-isolating from the literary world, and I think that that also has something to do with it.

QulturVultur: Did you get a sense of what it was about Provincetown that would be so attractive to poets and writers?

Sasha Waters: I went to Provincetown six or seven times. I did a lot of filming with my 16-millimeter camera. I made friends there among people who live there year-round, which was special. It was quite daunting to be there in February and to think about what it must be like to live there in the winter, as Mary and Molly did…. but even in the off season there is a sense of community that if you go to the Stop and Shop or you go to the hardware store, you will run into people who are your friends and neighbors. Maybe some of them are writers; maybe there’s Norman Mailer, but maybe it’s the plumber or a gardener who lives there year-round. There is this sense of fellowship and equanimity among everyone who lives there. That would be really appealing, I think, for a writer.

QulturVultur: Later in her life, Mary Oliver came out and talked about her childhood sexual abuse history. Even before that she had written about burying trauma, but I wonder to what extent that informed her life and her career as a poet.

Sasha Waters: The poet Donika Kelly says it so beautifully in the film when she says it’s going to come calling, this thing that you’ve buried. Nothing stays buried forever. She started grappling with this truth when she was in her forties. You see it in the poems in Dream Work, and I think in American Primitive, those ’80s books and early ’90s books and poems. She is grappling with trauma in “The Journey,” in a poem like “Rage,” in a poem about her father that’s in the film, called “A Visitor.” Thinking about that in the film was a challenge, because it’s there in the poetry, but she doesn’t talk about it until her seventies, so we didn’t want to have it emerge until later in the film, when she’s finally ready to open up about it.

This interview has been edited for length, flow, and clarity.

Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World opensJuly 3 at IFC Center in NYC and July 11 at Laemmle Theaters in LA before expanding to select theaters nationwide. It will be broadcast on PBS on August 25 as part of the American Masters series.