Sharon Olds
Sharon Olds Poems
Sometimes I can almost see, around our heads,
Like gnats around a streetlight in summer,
The children we could have,
The glimmer of them.
...
When Mother divorced you, we were glad. She took it and
took it in silence, all those years and then
kicked you out, suddenly, and her
kids loved it. Then you were fired, and we
...
We decided to have the abortion, became
killers together. The period that came
changed nothing. They were dead, that young couple
who had been for life.
...
Then dirt scared me, because of the dirt
he had put on her face. And her training bra
scared me—the newspapers, morning and evening,
kept saying it, training bra,
...
A week later, I said to a friend: I don't
think I could ever write about it.
Maybe in a year I could write something.
There is something in me maybe someday
...
When I got to his marker, I sat on it,
like sitting on the edge of someone's bed
and I rubbed the smooth, speckled granite.
I took some tears from my jaw and neck
...
She was four, he was one, it was raining, we had colds,
we had been in the apartment two weeks straight,
I grabbed her to keep her from shoving him over on his
face, again, and when I had her wrist
...
When the Dean said we could not cross campus
until the students gave up the buildings,
we lay down, in the street,
we said the cops will enter this gate
...
But I love the I, steel I-beam
that my father sold. They poured the pig iron
into the mold, and it fed out slowly,
a bending jelly in the bath, and it hardened,
...
To say that she came into me,
from another world, is not true.
Nothing comes into the universe
and nothing leaves it.
...
I have heard about the civilized,
the marriages run on talk, elegant and honest, rational. But you and I are
savages. You come in with a bag,
hold it out to me in silence.
...
When I eat crab, slide the rosy
rubbery claw across my tongue
I think of my mother. She'd drive down
to the edge of the Bay, tiny woman in a
...
On the then-below-zero day, it was on,
near the patients' chair, the old heater
kept by the analyst's couch, at the end,
like the infant's headstone that was added near the foot
...
Everything has been taken that anyone
thought worth taking. The stairs are tilted,
scattered with sycamore leaves curled
like ammonites in inland rock.
...
In the taxi alone, home from the airport,
I could not believe you were gone. My palm kept
creeping over the smooth plastic
to find your strong meaty little hand and
...
I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
...
Three months after he lies dead, that
long yellow narrow body,
not like Christ but like one of his saints,
the naked ones in the paintings whose bodies are
...
Three years after my father's death
he goes back to work. Unemployed
for twenty-five years, he's very glad
to be taken on again, shows up
...
The first ones were attached to my dress
at the waist, one on either side,
right at the point where hands could clasp you and
pick you up, as if you were a hot
...
I could not tell I had jumped off that bus,
that bus in motion, with my child in my arms,
because I did not know it. I believed my own story:
I had fallen, or the bus had started up
...
Sharon Olds Biography
Life Sharon Olds was born in 1942 in San Francisco. She was raised as a “hellfire Calvinist”, as she describes it. She says she was by nature "a pagan and a pantheist" and notes "I was in a church where there was both great literary art and bad literary art, the great art being psalms and the bad art being hymns. The four-beat was something that was just part of my consciousness from before I was born." She adds "I think I was about 15 when I conceived of myself as an atheist, 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." After graduating from Stanford University she moved east to earn a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University on the prosody of Emerson's poems. Olds has been the recipient of many awards including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the San Francisco Poetry Center Award. She currently teaches creative writing at New York University. In 2005, First Lady Laura Bush invited Olds to the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. Olds responded, declining the invitation in an open letter published in the October 10th, 2005 issue of The Nation. The letter closes: "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". Poetry Following her Phd on Emerson's prosody, Olds let go of an attachment to what she thought she 'knew about' poetic convention. Freed up, she began to write about her family, abuse, sex, focusing on the work not the audience. Olds has commented that she is more informed by the work of poets such as Galway Kinnell, Muriel Rukeyser and Gwendolyn Brooks than by confessional poets like Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath. Plath, she comments "was a great genius, with an IQ of at least double mine" and while these women charted well the way of women in the world she says "their steps were not steps I wanted to put my feet in." Old's first collection Satan Says sets up the sexual and bodily candour that would run through much of her work. In "The Sisters of Sexual Treasure" she writes, As soon as my sister and I got out of our mother's house, all we wanted to do was fuck, obliterate her tiny sparrow body and narrow grasshopper legs. Olds' book The Wellspring (1996), shares with her previous work the use of raw language and startling images to convey truths about domestic and political violence and family relationships. A reviewer for The New York Times hailed her poetry for its vision: "Like Whitman, Ms. Olds sings the body in celebration of a power stronger than political oppression." Alicia Ostriker noted Olds traces the "erotics of family love and pain." Ostriker continues: "In later collections, [Olds] writes of an abusive childhood, in which miserably married parents bully and punish and silence her. She writes, too, of her mother's apology 'after 37 years', a moment when 'The sky seemed to be splintering, like a window/ someone is bursting into or out of" " Olds’ work is anthologized in over 100 collections, ranging from literary/poetry textbooks to special collections. Her poetry has been translated into seven languages for international publications. She was the New York State Poet Laureate for 1998-2000. Critique Author Michael Ondaatje says of her work "Sharon Olds's poems are pure fire in the hands, risky, on the verge of falling, and in the end leaping up. I love the roughness and humor and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss. The New York times noted in 2009 " Olds selects intense moments from her family romance — usually ones involving violence or sexuality or both — and then stretches them in opposite directions, rendering them in such obsessive detail that they seem utterly unique to her personal experience, while at the same time using metaphor to insist on their universality. Charles Bainbridge stated in the Guardian, "She has always confronted the personal details of her life with remarkable directness and honesty, but the key to her success is the way this material is lit up by a range of finely judged shifts in scale and perspective. Her poems are vivid morality plays, wrestling with ideas of right and wrong, full of symbolic echoes and possibilities. Charles Bainbridge (11 February 2006). In 2010, critic Anis Shivani commented: Stylistically invariant since 1980, she writes about the female body in a deterministic, shamanistic, medieval manner. Infantilization packaged in pseudo-confession is her specialty... Her poetry defines feminism turned upon itself, chewing up its own hot and bothered cadaver, exposed since the 1970s. Female poets in workshops around the country idolize her, collaborate in the masochism, because they say she freed them to talk about taboo subjects, she "empowered" them... Has given confessionalism such a bad name it can't possibly recover. Honors and awards 1980 Satan Says inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. 1984 The Dead and the Living Lamont Poetry Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. 1992 The Father, shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and was a finalist for The National Book Critics Circle Award. 2009 One secret Thing, shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize)
The Best Poem Of Sharon Olds
The Unborn
Sometimes I can almost see, around our heads,
Like gnats around a streetlight in summer,
The children we could have,
The glimmer of them.
Sometimes I feel them waiting, dozing
In some antechamber - servants, half-
Listening for the bell.
Sometimes I see them lying like love letters
In the Dead Letter Office
And sometimes, like tonight, by some black
Second sight I can feel just one of them
Standing on the edge of a cliff by the sea
In the dark, stretching its arms out
Desperately to me.
Sharon Olds Comments
Sharon Olds is absolutely brilliant, her letter to Laura Bush was poetry itself, and honest and I am so glad she refused to break bread with them. I wonder who publishes her poems here, I would like to see the poem Language of the Brag.
I have heard a lot about Sharon Olds lately - I would like to listen to her speak or to read - her poem 1954 evoked so many feelings in me - I really loved it - and would like to read more as I could understand her better.
Oh, THANK YOU, thank you for not attending the affair w Laura Bush as an example of discontent with the war in Iraq! ! ! This whole thing is NOT the America I love and have always respected.
I am making a good pay from home 1900 Buckets/week, that is brilliant, beneath a year ago i used to be unemployed amid a monstrous economy. I pass on God consistently i used to be invested these bearings, and at present, I should pay it forward and impart it to everyone, Here is I started to....++1++
please write to me, we live in the same place. more or less,
What are the literary devices in this poem, and some examples of them? Please help.
This woman haunts me and I have never met her! But here are four of her book titles: The Unswept Room, The Dead and the Living, Satan Says, Blood, Tin, Straw She is frankly an indictment of the Poemhunter site because there is no word of which she is afraid. We had her Sex without Love on our front page (Poemhunter) and this has been lost. She has taught me to be a little less afraid and a little more honest in my writing. Well worth an investment of any sort. Bill Grace in San Antonio, Texas
Sharon Olds Quotes
... to a poet, the human community is like the community of birds to a bird, singing to each other. Love is one of the reasons we are singing to one another, love of language itself, love of sound, love of singing itself, and love of the other birds.
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11/24/2024 2:21:11 PM # 1.0.0
I appreciate Ms. Olds' right to have an opinion, but she should do some research: it is not 'Bush's war', it was approved by Congress; the facts behind the decision were documented by virtually every country in the world; WMD were found, by the way. She obviously sees the good in people, but needs to also see the 'bad' in people.... those who are trying to kill us. I know she did not want 9/11, but what does she suggest to stop it from happening again? Does she prefer to see Americans die rather than torture a terrorist who kills women and children. She needs to come down out of her ivory tower.