Oxygen

While not as explicit about being a lesbian as her peers, Mary Oliver still drew from and contributed to the LGBTQ+ American poetic tradition.

Scholars have given the LGBTQ+ American poetic tradition multiple names, such as gay poetry and queer poetics, and even more definitions. Some state it as any poem written by LGBTQ+ authors.

In this case, Oliver’s most apparent connections to the tradition are her influences. She cited Walt Whitman and Edna St. Vincent Millay as early inspirations for her work. Both Whitman and Millay had romantic relationships with people of the same gender and expressed same-sex desire in their work. Oliver spent time living at Millay’s home and organizing her papers.

Others define gay poetry as a specific subversive aesthetic that anyone of any identity can write. However, another group views it as more elusive and fluid. Despite these contradictions, many definitions share the vital detail that the author’s experiences as a queer individual influence their worldview, relationships, and self.

“Queerness isn’t just about queer sex: it is a fundamentally individual way of looking at the world,” writes memoirist Jeanna Kadlec. “To queer is to break down—to destroy—the structures that would limit or bar or imprison us, and to rethink or even replace them” (See: Further Reading & Resources).

As a result, much of queer poetry canon connect through shared overlapping themes, preoccupations, and motifs. “Oxygen” features two of the most common tropes: bodies and silence

The concept of the body plays an important role in LGBTQ+ history. Bodies allow people to express love, desire, gender identity, and self-determination. Bodies are also one-way LGBTQ+ people defy a heteronormative society’s rules.

Societies often discriminate against LGBTQ+ people through restrictive laws, negative or invisible representation in media and education, the threat of physical violence, and promoting shame around the body. For LGBTQ+ women, sexist beauty standards compound issues around their bodies. In American society, “women are instructed to detect, and find unacceptable, even repellent, any imperfections in their bodies and to feel shame about the visible signs of aging” (Medetti, Stefania. “We Are Aging in a Culture of Shame.” The Age Buster, May 19, 2021).

Because of these issues, LGBTQ+ women writers often rebel against these standards by making the body strange. Doppelgangers, shapeshifting bodies, and blurred identities abound in queer writing. Oliver engages with this trope in her poem, not only centering the narrative on a sick body, but merging the two bodies of the lovers beyond any discernable borders, writing:

It is

your life, which is so close

to my own that I would not know

where to drop the knife of

separation. And what does this have to do

with love, except

everything (Lines 13-19)?

In some cases, the strangeness is loving or accepting one’s body as it is now. “This is the queer erotic: the validation of our bodies as worthy of attention, of desire, of sex,” explains Kadlec. The queer erotic gives readers “permission to inhabit their body: to be present in it, to know and own what they want without shame” (See: Further Reading & Resources).

Oliver’s work openly portrays the body. In “Oxygen,” the speaker talks about her lover’s body frankly and without disgust or disappointment. She neutrally reveals that her lover’s right shoulder aches, and that she patiently breathes. Rather than idealize (or hide) the lover’s physical appearance, the speaker finds the lover’s breathing “beautiful” (Line 13). The speaker celebrates their lover’s life and presence while acknowledging and accepting the reality of the lover’s illness.

Oliver also radically broke the silence around LGBTQ+ people’s lives through her earnest talk about bodies. Writer Miranda Schmidt recalls how many of the queer stories she read growing up were about "the necessity of hiding it" (Schmidt, Miranda. "Reading My Way into a Queer Literary Lineage." Catapult. June 20, 2019), while Oliver brought it "to the surface" (Schmidt). Oliver was one of many lesbian poets during the 1970s and 1980s who helped bring the experiences of lesbian women into the national dialogue. Much of her poetry came from her love for her partner, Molly Malone Cook, and how that shaped her understanding of the world.