Michael Hockwater's List: ENG 312

• Olds is known for writing intensely personal, emotionally scathing poetry which graphically depicts family life as well as global political events. “Sharon Olds is enormously self-aware,” wrote David Leavitt in the Voice Literary Supplement. “Her poetry is remarkable for its candor, its eroticism, and its power to move.”
• Olds’s poetry is known for its accessible and direct free verse style. Often first-person narratives, her poetic voice is known for both its precision and versatility. The colorful events of the poems are always rendered in sharply realized images that cut quickly from the gory to the beautiful and back again.
• Her work is viewed in the tradition of Walt Whitman as a celebration of the body, in all its pleasures and pains, and it particularly resonates with women readers. As Dwight Garner put it in a Salon piece, “Domesticity, death, erotic love—the stark simplicity of Sharon Olds’s subjects, and of her plain-spoken language, can sometimes make her seem like the brooding Earth Mother of American poetry.”
• Born in 1942 in San Francisco, Olds grew up in Berkeley, California where she was raised, she has said, as a “hellfire Calvinist.” She attended Stanford University and earned her Ph.D. at Columbia in 1972. She was thirty-seven when she published her first book of poems, Satan Says (1980).

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• Michael Laskey: What is your earliest poetry memory?

    

  Sharon Olds: When I was eight, we were asked to write a poem, and after I handed mine in the teacher called me to her desk—which was not an unusual experience for me. She said, "Did you write this poem?" And I said, "Yes." She said, "You wrote it?" I said, "Yes, you can tell," pointing to my   handwriting. And the poem went something like:

    

  Neither wind nor rain nor gloom nor dark of night can stay these something somethings from the swift   completion of their appointed rounds.

    

  It's what it says on the post office. It's a love poem to the postal delivery people.

    

  Laskey: Who wrote it?

    

  Olds: I don't know. I'll find out. That was when I learned that to write a poem, you had to make it up. You couldn't just write down what someone else   had made up. That's the first memory that popped into my mind.
• I would say my early influences for good writing were the Psalms, and for bad writing were the Hymns. Four beats, the quatrains, that form. In   high school: Auden, E. E. Cummings, and Whitman. And Shakespeare,   always.

• I loved writing. I loved writing, and I wrote stories and poems. But then when I moved to New York, I realized that I wasn't comfortable   making stuff up. I had had it with angels and demons who (if your faith was strong enough) you believed were in the room with you. I'd had enough of   fiction.

    

  You know when you have something that you long to say to someone, and you could never say it to them, to their face? Then here's a place where you   could speak.
• I've always written in lines, and I didn't know until I was fifty-five that my craft was the craft of the Hymns I had grown up singing. I was writing in a way that felt comfortable to me, except that I had to ride over the end of the line.

• I went through a period of trying to think of a pseudonym, so they could get out in the world and try their chances. Then I realized I wanted to go out  with them. I got less worried about censoring myself and I realized I just don't write first drafts that are good enough. I began to slow down.

    

  You would've seen a first draft, a BIC pen, ShopRite notebook, wide-ruled. I started writing and crossing out, then bringing it back down, getting the  right word, a delicate balance, going fast enough that I don't lose the "hmm," not letting the wrong word stand. Because then  its music will be calling out for other words that match it.

• What we can do is be companions to each other, so that we know what each other has been doing. That's a line I remember from somewhere. It   has to do with sexual love. But we know that we've been writing.

    

  Writers get together. We know what we've been doing. We know we're like each other in some way. So these kids, 20-35, form a community. We can give each   other that. And then we just start the dialogue—them with each other, me with them.

    

  First, we start by trying to identify what the poem is like. If it's doing, not what we want it to do, but what it seems to want to do. And then later,  weeks later, we start offering suggestions. So that we're trying to really get at how different we are, how everyone has a different voice and life.

    

  Then they can teach in outreach programs, some of them, at New York University. There's that. That's big.
• Goldwater workshop
• I did start one at Goldwater Hospital. But then there are others—for children, for high school students. The children on the  oncology ward—who are kids! and who are great—write with our graduate writing students.
• I write in my diary. There are many nature descriptions. There's a lot of stuff in it, about the life of my soul and heart. I draw in it.

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• In terms of this book being difficult, I really enjoy writing. I can’t sit down and just write a poem. I have to wait for it to come to me, and I’m grateful when it does, and I do the best I can with it. But it’s a pleasure – particularly the poems in this book – to take something painful and real and educational and try to make some kind of pleasure out of it – musical pleasure, or imagery pleasure, for myself, for the reader. That is fun.

• I don’t know that metaphor helps understanding as much as it is a release into a different realm of one’s understanding.

   

  Metaphors come to me – similes most of all. This is even if I’m just writing an ordinary poem – I mean a poem that isn’t about death or love. When I focus on an idea or a thing, similes arise in my mind. They feel to me as if they come out of the end of my pen. I have no power to bring them on – except by sitting down and writing, but then it’s up to them. It really does feel to me as though they’re coming out of the pen as a result of this attention.

   

  I can’t quite see them as an enhancement in an educational way or even in a way about wisdom. I think there’s a way that my brain wants to play while it’s working and wants to escape the present but then it escapes by running off and playing. And then it brings back what it has found in play, which has some kind of beauty to it – intellectual, visual very often with me. Without that I wouldn’t be a poet.

• The outreach programs at NYU are among my passions. Our graduate creative writing program is not just a program for people to come together and meet each other but also to reach out into the community. The oldest program now is 27, 28 years old. It’s for severely physically challenged people at a local hospital. Another is a 900-bed state hospital. That writing project is taught by fiction and poetry students in the NYU program.

   

  Most recently we’ve done a similar program for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s in its third year.

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• In America she divides opinion: Michael Ondaatje called her poetry "pure fire in the hands"; the critic Helen Vendler called it pornographic.

  "A poet of sex and the psyche, Sharon Olds is infamous for her subject matter alone," says the former US poet laureate, Billy Collins. "But her closer readers know her as a poet of constant linguistic surprise." Olds's celebration of sensuality, her work's unembarrassed candour, is exactly what Robin Robertson, her editor at Cape, admires: ". . . its direct, robust physicality, its corresponding rejection of rigid religious moral doctrines - the very qualities that enrage her critics." Olds, he adds, was one of the first to write honest poems about women from a woman's viewpoint. Three years ago she also proved that poets could still be political when she rejected Laura Bush's invitation to the National Book Festival in Washington on the grounds, she said in an open letter, that it would be condoning the Iraq war and "the current regime of blood, wounds and fire".
• It was there, on the steps of Low Library, that she made her vow. "This is before these horrible Satan murders and Satanic cults, and I don't know why Satan - perhaps because the childhood god I had believed in was punitive, harsh, not a forgiving presence," she says. "Or because one's own personal will, what one wants in one's own life, was considered wicked. So what I said was something like: 'Give me my own poems and I'll give up everything that I've learned.' Of course I hadn't learned that much, because I wasn't that good a student. I said: 'It doesn't have to be any good, just as long as it's mine - I mean as long as it sounds like an ordinary person.' "
• Can she see the words in her head? "It's a little more hearing - it's almost as if I hear them just before they come out the end of the pen. I don't hear them, but it's as if they're in a chamber just outside my hearing. I don't usually try to write a poem unless that's happening. The poems come to me, I don't go to them. As soon as I see that what I'm mulling - a line or a sentence is repeating itself in my mind, like an obsessive thought, or a kind of conceit or concept - as soon as I see that it's a poem, I go and write it. And there's a lot of crossing out, I write the first draft in maybe half an hour, 45 minutes - these are all pretty short poems. When I feel that I've made a false move, I try to cross it out back up to where it's okay. And then try to bring it down again, OK, all the way to the end."
• She believes the art of poetry is "putting something down in its own particular form on paper which another person, alone, will read. I think for me the impulse to write has to do with making something, with capturing, recording, preserving, honouring, saving - or not turning away from, if it's a ghastly human thing one is driven to write about." And what does it offer the reader? She laughs. "Well . . . companionship. And pleasure: musical pleasure, in hearing it - and, to the inner ear, in reading it on the page. And recognition: 'Someone else has felt what I've felt.' And surprise: 'I never thought of that.' Reading poems can give us information about emotional states, or subjects, give us virtual experience which may be very different from our own. Yes! Maybe this is it! I think that the arts are for showing us ourselves - including what's dangerous about us - holding a mirror up to nature."

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• Can you write a poem in half an hour? 

  Forty-five minutes is much better [laughs]. Many, many poets whose work I love, they take longer than I do to write a first draft. In a way, it doesn't matter how long it takes, if we can each just find the right way to do it. Everyone is so different. I sometimes wish I wrote in a different way. You know, that feeling of: So-and-so writes slowly, if only I wrote slowly. But it's just the way I work. I feel a very strong wish, when a poem does come to me, to write it and get to the end of it. 

• So you don't sit down every morning at 9 a.m. and say: Now I'm going to write a poem. 

  No. I don't know if there are many poets who do that. I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it's a poem, it's almost written in my head somewhere. It's as if there's someone inside of me who perceives order and beauty -- and disorder. And who wants to make little copies. Who wants to put together something that will bear some relationship to the vision or memory or experience or story or idea or dream or whatever. Whatever starts things out.

• What did you mean when you once said that your poetry comes out of your lungs? 

  [Laughs] Well, you know, it's curious where different people think their mind is. I guess a lot of people believe that their mind is in their brain, in their head. To me, the mind seems to be spread out in the whole body -- the senses are part of the brain. I guess they're not where the thinking is done. But poetry is so physical, the music of it and the movement of thought. Maybe we can use a metaphor for it, out of dance. I think for many years I was aware of the need, in dance and in life, to breathe deeply and to take in more air than we usually take in. I find a tendency in myself not to breathe very much. And certainly I have noticed, over the years, when dancing or when running, that ideas will come to my mind with the oxygen. Suddenly you're remembering something that you haven't thought of for years.
• And I don't write books. I just write poems. And then I put together books. Many poets write books. They'll tell you: Well, I've got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me. But I think in another way I am like these poets: we like to get in the art's way as little as possible.
• I write the way I perceive, I guess. It's not really simple, I don't think, but it's about ordinary things -- feeling about things, about people. I'm not an intellectual, I'm not an abstract thinker. And I'm interested in ordinary life. So I think that our writing reflects us.

• Well, I was wondering what you meant about not getting in art's way. 

  There are some things that have to do with art that we can't control. This creature of the poem may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force. That's what I'm thinking about when I'm trying to get out of art's way. Not trying to look good, if a poem's about me. Not trying to look bad. Not asking a poem to carry a lot of rocks in its pockets. But just being an ordinary observer and liver and feeler and letting the experience get through you onto the notebook with the pen, through the arm, out of the body, onto the page, without distortion. And there are so many ways I could distort. If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it's really not right for that poem, but I wanted it, that would be distorting. It's kind of like ego in a way, egotism or narcissism. Where the self is too active.

• As accessible as your poetry can seem to be, there also seems to be an almost brutally direct emotional quality sometimes. There are some tough images. 

  I think that I am slowly improving in my ability to not be too melodramatic, to help the images have the right tenor. My first book came out when I was 37, so when I was finally able to speak as a writer my wish to not be silent was, in my early work, extreme. It's like someone, in baseball, who thinks that the ball is being thrown by a very strong arm from the outfield, and so she can't just land on home, she has to try to run way past it, practically into the dugout. Reading some of my earlier work, I get that sense of the need for too big a head of steam to be built up. It seems extreme to me at times, some of the imagery. That's part of why I'm not so sorry I'm a little behind in putting books together, because some of those rather crude images I can now maybe correct. It also might be that maybe I've used an image that is too mild, and I'll correct in the other direction. I don't want to imply that it's always going the other way. But my tendency was to be a little over the mark. And so I just really love now the possibility of getting it right.

• Can you imagine your life if you hadn't become a writer? Do you feel lucky? 

  No, I certainly can't imagine my life not being a writer. Lucky? Um-hmm. It's hard to believe -- it's like this is a dream. I need to write, and I need to write a lot. And I've been very lucky to be able to make the time, have the time given me, depending on what stage of my life I'm thinking of. Yes, luck. Luck. "Sometimes a crumb falls/ From the tables of joy,/ Sometimes a bone/ Is flung./ To some people/ Love is given,/ To others/ Only heaven." That's Langston Hughes' poem "Luck." It's one of the poems on the subways.

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• Stag's Leap, a “book of unflinching poems on the author's divorce that examine love, sorrow, and the limits of self-knowledge."
• "I was out on the porch, holding the phone, and in some way the words I heard didn't make sense to me, and the light in the yard got both brighter and a little cloudy," Olds said via e-mail. "I think I was in shock. It was beyond unexpected. There are things we think won't happen to us -- that are outside our picture of ourselves."
• "I think not writing is a lot more painful than writing,"

• Though some readers have suggested that the poems are too soft on the figure of the husband -- that there's not enough judgment or anger -- Olds herself is content with the balance she struck.

    

  "I had to tune each poem, and tune the book, to get the balance of its qualities feeling right to me -- the idealizing, the anger, the self-pity," she said. "I didn't have ideas I wanted to illustrate; I hoped each poem could find its own way from its beginning to end -- that I could 'stay out of its way.' I guess I'm pretty happy with the balance of the book ... But of course it's going to be a different book in each reader's hands!"

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• As a professor of creative writing in the graduate school of a major university, I have had the chance to be a part of some magnificent outreach writing workshops in which our students have become teachers. Over the years, they have taught in a variety of settings: a women's prison, several New York City public high schools, an oncology ward for children. Our initial program, at a 900-bed state hospital for the severely physically challenged, has been running now for twenty years, creating along the way lasting friendships between young MFA candidates and their students--long-term residents at the hospital who, in their humor, courage and wisdom, become our teachers.
• When you have witnessed someone nonspeaking and almost nonmoving spell out, with a toe, on a big plastic alphabet chart, letter by letter, his new poem, you have experienced, close up, the passion and essentialness of writing. When you have held up a small cardboard alphabet card for a writer who is completely nonspeaking and nonmoving (except for the eyes), and pointed first to the A, then the B, then C, then D, until you get to the first letter of the first word of the first line of the poem she has been composing in her head all week, and she lifts her eyes when that letter is touched to say yes, you feel with a fresh immediacy the human drive for creation, self-expression, accuracy, honesty and wit--and the importance of writing, which celebrates the value of each person's unique story and song.

• I knew that if I sat down to eat with you, it would feel to me as if I were condoning what I see to be the wild, highhanded actions of the Bush Administration.

   

  What kept coming to the fore of my mind was that I would be taking food from the hand of the First Lady who represents the Administration that unleashed this war and that wills its continuation, even to the extent of permitting "extraordinary rendition": flying people to other countries where they will be tortured for us.

   

  So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.

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• “I love writing about love,”
• Love in all its shadings—joyous, erotic, even comedic—has always been a favorite theme for Olds
• She remains one of the nation’s finest living poets, her work as propulsive and full-blooded—the critic Helen Vendler once called it “pornographic”
• “I was never good at being angry,” says Olds, who wrote hundreds of poems over the course of that year, 49 of which are included in the collection; out of deference to her children (a son and daughter, both grown), she waited a decade to publish them.
• it’s clear that her future work will reflect a re-engagement in the world, both political—in 2005, she famously declined Laura Bush’s invitation to a book festival in an elegantly potent letter published in The Nation—and personal. She now splits her time between New York, where she has taught poetry at NYU for three decades and founded several outreach programs, and New Hampshire’s Wild Goose Pond, where her boyfriend lives.

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• She loved poetry and among her favorite poets were Shakespeare, Dickinson, Whitman, and Millay.
• Her dissertation was on Emerson’s prosody, the study of metrical structures of verse. She liked Emerson because he did not always follow the conventional rules of poetry.
• Olds writes poetry about family life and about experiences and events that shape the world around us.
• She is a confessional poet who, according to Dinitia Smith of the New York Times, “made the minutiae of a women’s everyday life as valid a subjec
• Olds felt that she did not find her voice until she began writing about intense, personal experiences such as childbirth, mothering, and the death of her father from cancer. Enjambing, carrying over sentences from one line to the next instead of completing them at the end of the line, is a key element of her poetic style. She has also given up rhyming the words at the end of sentences and uses sentences with no commas, periods or dashes at the end of lines.
• The Father(1992) is a collection of poems describing the memories of growing up with a distant and alcoholic father and her struggle to forgive and love him.

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• When her husband of 30 years left her for another woman, Sharon Olds wrote poems as a way of coping with the heartbreak.
  

  But more than a decade later, she has had the last laugh after the poems she penned won the TS Eliot Prize.

• As a child, she says, she was by nature "a pagan and a pantheist", but one who had been "taught the theory of the elect" and imbibed the view that she was "a bad being". She channelled the creative energy her parents tried to crush into making things: "paper dolls" and "baskets of coloured paper", little dioramas and, of course, poems. "I was in a church where there was both great literary art and bad literary art," she explains, "the great art being psalms and the bad art being hymns. The four-beat," she adds, "was something that was just part of my consciousness from before I was born."

   

  A Calvinistic childhood is not something you leave behind without a struggle."I think I was about 15 when I con- ceived of myself as an atheist," she reveals, "but I think it was only very recently that I can really tell that there's nobody there with a copybook making marks against your name." Her disavowal of God was, she confides, "also a prayer to lessen belief" because "the psyche keeps believing". Certainly, her work is shot through with the passionate intensity that often supplants religious fervour and the shadow of "an angry giant boy watching everything to see who he can burn up".