Sharon Olds

Sharon Olds (born November 19, 1942) is an American poet. Olds has been the recipient of many awards including the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the first San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980 She currently teaches creative writing at New York University.

Early life & education

Sharon Stuart Cobb was born on November 19, 1942 in San Francisco, California, but was brought up in Berkeley, California along with her siblings.. She was raised as a “hellfire Calvinist”, as she describes it. Her father, like his before him, was an alcoholic who was often abusive to his children. In Olds’ writing she often refers to the time(or possibly even times) when her father tied her to a chair. Olds’ mother was often either unable or too afraid to come to the aid of her children. The strict religious environment Olds was raised in had certain rules of censorship and restriction. Olds was not permitted to go to the movies and the family did not own a television. As for the literature granted in the household Olds once said she won a singing contest in church choir. “[The prize] was a book of child martyrs who had been killed for their belief and died very politely.” She liked fairy tales, and also read Nancy Drew and Life Magazine. As for her own religious views and her exposure to religious literary art 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."

For schooling, Olds was sent east, to Dana Hall School, an all girl’s school for grades 6 to 12 in Wellesley, Massachusetts that boasts an impressive list of alumnae. There she studied mostly English, History, and Creative Writing. Her favorite poets included William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, but it was Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems which she carried in her purse through tenth grade. For her bachelor’s degree Olds returned to California where she earned her BA at Stanford University in 1964. Following this Olds once again move cross country to New York, where she earned her Ph. D. in English in 1972 from Columbia University. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on “Emerson’s Prosody”, because she appreciated the way he defied convention.

I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

From “I Go Back to May 1937”
Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002 (2004)

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 10, 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".

Personal life

On March 23, 1968, she married Dr. David Douglas Olds in New York City and, in 1969, gave birth to the first of their two children. In 1997, after 32 years of marriage, they divorced, and Olds moved to New Hampshire, though she commutes to New York 3 days a week. There, she lives in the same Upper West Side apartment she has lived in for the past 40 years while working as a Professor at New York University. In New Hampshire she lives in Graylag Cabins in Pittsfield with her partner of seven years, Carl Wallman, a former cattle breeder.

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."

When Olds first sent her poetry to a literary magazine she received a reply saying,”This is a literary magazine. If you wish to write about this sort of subject, may we suggest the Ladies' Home Journal. The true subjects of poetry are ... male subjects, not your children.” Olds eventually published her first collection(Satan Says) in 1980, at the age of 37. 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.

The collection is divided into four sections: "Daughter", "Woman", "Mother", "Journeys". These titles echo the familial influence that is prevalent in much of Olds’ work.

The Dead and the Living was published in February 1984. This collection is divided into two sections, “Poems for the Dead” and “Poems for the Living”. The first section begins with poems about global injustices. These injustices include the Turkish Massacre of the Armenians during WWI, the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot, the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, and even the death of Marilyn Monroe. After this Olds returns the familiar subjects of childhood, love, marriage, and motherhood.

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.

Stag’s Leap, her most recent collection, was published in 2013. The poems were written in 1997, following the divorce from her husband of 32 years. The poems focus on her husband, and even sometimes his mistress. The collection won the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. She is the first American woman to win this award. It also won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

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."

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."

Women’s Movement

Olds did not participate in the Women’s Movement at first, but she says, “My first child was born in 1969. In 1968 the Women’s Movement in New York City—especially among a lot of women I knew—was very alive. I had these strong ambitions to enter the bourgeoisie if I could. I wasn’t a radical at all. But I do remember understanding that I had never questioned that men had all the important jobs. And that was shocking—well, I was twenty years old! I’d never thought, “Oh, where’s the woman bus driver?” So there’s another subject—which was what it felt like to be a woman in the world.”

Honors and awards

• 1978 Creative Artists Public Service Grant
• 1978 Madeline Sadin Award, New York Quarterly
• 1979 Younger Poets Award, Poetry Miscellany
• 1980 Satan Says inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award.
• 1981-1982 Guggenheim Fellowship, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
• 1982-1983 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship
• 1983 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.
• 1993-1996 Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers Award
• 1998-2000 New York State Poet Laureate
• 2002 Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• 2002 The Unswept Room, Nominee for National Book Award in the Poetry category
• 2003 Judge, Griffin Poetry Prize; for “distinguished poetic achievement at mid-career”
• 2004 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Awards
• 2004 Became member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 2006-2012 Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets
• 2009 One Secret Thing, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize
• 2012 T.S. Eliot Prize, Stag's Leap
• 2012 Stag’s Leap, named as one of “Oprah’s Favorite Reads of 2012”
• 2013 Pulitzer Prize, Stag's Leap
• 2014 Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry
• 2015 Elected to become a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (to be inducted mid-May 2015)

Bibliography

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Collections

• 1983 The Dead and the Living, Knopf ISBN 978-0394715636
• 1987 The Gold Cell, Knopf ISBN 978-0394747705
• 1987 The Matter of This World, Slow Dancer Press ISBN 978-0950747989
• 1991 The Sign of Saturn, Secker & Warburg ISBN 978-0436200298
• 1992 The Father, Secker & Warburg ISBN 978-0679740025
• 1996 The Wellspring, Knopf ISBN 978-0679765608
• 1999 Blood, Tin, Straw, Knopf ISBN 978-0375707353
• 2002 The Unswept Room, Tandem Library ISBN 978-0375709982
• 2004 Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002, Knopf ISBN 978-0375710766
• 2008 One Secret Thing, Random House ISBN 978-0375711770
• 2012 Stag's Leap, Knopf ISBN 978-0375712258

List of poems

Title	Year	First published	Reprinted/collected
Sheffield Mountain ode	2015

External links

• Official Website of Sharon Olds
• Audio recording (.mp3) of Sharon Olds reading from her work at the Key West Literary Seminar, January 2003
• "Advice to Young Poets: Sharon Olds in Conversation" from the 2009 Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Recorded by The Poetry Trust
• Poems by Sharon Olds at PoetryFoundation.org
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - Modern American Poetry's Sharon Olds section
• Reviews of Blood, Tin, Straw
• Olds' Poet Laureate site
• Interview recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on April 10, 2002. (Audio 1hr 30 mins)
• "Sharon Olds: 'I want a poem to be useful'", Kate Kellaway, The Observer, 5 January 2013