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Yet one of the many strong values of Frameline is how over the years it has allowed us to recognize that our sense of feeling alone as LGBTQ+ people is mistaken and that we are company to a lineage of remarkable individuals who have paved the way for our individuation and who continue to shape personal freedom and dignity towards an ever expanding horizon. As Gabrielle Calvocoressi states in the film: “When we talk about queer family, one of the things about family is that you just have someone to emulate.”
Was the fact that Mary Oliver was a lesbian essential to her craft? Was it incidental? Or a combination of both? Sasha Waters’ exquisite documentary Mary Oliver: Saved By the Beauty of the World (2026) explores the connective tissue between orientation and practice and trains a respectful and emulative eye on one of the most remarkable women of letters in American literature.
With thorough grace, Saved By the Beauty Of the World traces Oliver’s development from her early apprenticeship to Edna St. Vincent Millay’s youngest sister straight out of high school to her astounding popularity in the later years of her life, packing auditoriums, and beloved by audiences throughout the country who recognized in her words the center of their emotional being.
From its earliest scenes where Stephen Colbert is too overwhelmed to read one of her poems, witness after witness account for the tremendous power Oliver’s words have had upon them. Because poetry resides in the rhythm and sound of words, as much as in the flow of text, Waters solicits readings from Colbert, Helena Bonham Carter, Steve Buscemi, Lucy Dacus, Nick Flynn, Donnika Kelly, Jason Reynolds, Jesse Welles and Oprah Winfrey to prove the tenet that sound creates form; poetry shapes emotion. I first heard Oliver given voice by bard Robert Bly many years ago who read Oliver’s “Wild Geese” while strumming his bouzouki. It was a revelatory experience where her words flowed into my body like water into a sponge. And I took her words to heart. I allowed myself to love what was natural for me to love. Was she speaking to a LGBTQ+ experience? Or more broadly to a human experience in which the LGBTQ+ experience could rest and root, find its face, find its shape? “Just to be a poet in America,” Mark Doty muses in the film, “is already queer enough.”
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Responding to “Wild Geese”, Stephen Colbert explains that the beauty of the world is an accusation that you are denying your own beauty by being good. Perhaps this has been the flame of rebellion that has characterized my own gayness?
Punctuated by resonant interstitials of nature (foxes, roses, coyotes, autumnal landscapes, deer standing stoic in sleet, geese in flight, Monarch butterflies, white owls and black sheep, blooming wood, hawks, blue wisteria, birds feeding their nested young, bees pollinating, seagulls flocking above waves, conifer forests, bubbling brooks, beach grass, snow drifts, black branches limned with white snow, pinecones, clams, tortoises, beavers building dams, bears devouring salmon mid-stream, falling stars streaking across the wheel of constellations, inhabited spiderwebs, kittens tumbling out of a basket, sunrise, moonrise, sunset, a bright full moon scudded with dark clouds, squirrels, long-legged water storks, fish at the surface of ponds, quaking golden aspen, columbines, ripe lemons, beetles, pussywillows, hatchlings, rain, murmurations at dusk, dogs, lilypads: all emphasizing Oliver’s belief that our enjoyment of the world is not only personal but inherently political.
Sasha Waters’ masterful assemblage of stock footage likewise inflects the cultural scenes that influenced Oliver as a young woman and frequently provides levity to offset the depths of Oliver’s poems. I find it an incandescent touch when—during scenes where the death of Oliver’s partner Molly “M” Cook is mentioned—Waters inserts footage in reverse: cars driving backwards, marching bands marching backwards, a woman on a bicycle cycling backwards on a tightwire, as if to insinuate the attempted reclamations of memory.
Oliver’s lifelong commitment to Molly “M” Cook provides the inspirational frame by which Oliver was granted allowance to discover her own voice. Molly taught Oliver that “attention without feeling is only a report” and that, more appropriately, by giving a lot of attention to the world, you learn to love the world. This became the attentive force of Oliver’s nature poetry.
Of the rich ensemble of talking heads providing ballast to the film so that it simply does not drift away into the ether, I was most surprised and bemused by the presence of John Waters who became Oliver’s friend in Provincetown, Massachusetts. With calculated wit and charming irreverence, Waters riddles the portrait of Oliver with saucy observations that serve to humanize the poet and save her from the thin air of the pedestal.
Many have written about the co-mingling of film and poetry, but I honor Sasha Waters’ Mary Oliver: Saved By the Beauty of the World as one of the most informative and illuminative melding of those two art forms that this reviewer has experienced in some time. Not to be missed if you care anything about the world.
