than the reality of divorce, the speaker can use the dolls as surrogate parents. She can “bang them together” and force them to unite, as she could not do in reality. The forcefulness of the “bang” suggests the depth of anger that the speaker feels as she tries to force her parents to feel a passion and a connection that was missing in their lives. This is an angry movement, revealing the speaker’s defiance and rejection of her past. In forcing these two paper dolls together, the speaker also attempts to forge a union that divorce has now rendered in two. By the end of the poem, the speaker acknowledges that she cannot prevent nor repair her parents’ lives, and so the poem ends on a note of resignation. The speaker cannot change their lives, but she can write of their lives. There is a melodramatic note evident in the last lines of the poem:

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.

There is an emotional extravagance to these lines, an exaggerated sense of conflict, followed by an equally exaggerated sense of resignation and acceptance. In an interview published in the Poetry Society of America Newsletter, Olds suggests that it is her religious upbringing that is responsible for the melodrama present in much of her work. She also credits biblical influences for the tone of selfrighteousness and the desperation of her characters, who are defined by extremes of good or bad. Those biblical influences also stand out in this poem. The man and the woman lack a complexity; they are “going to do bad things”; they are going to “suffer.” The woman is “hungry pretty blank” and “pitiful beautiful.” The man is “arrogant handsome blind” and “pitiful beautiful.” Real parents are more complex than this man and woman; but then, the speaker is holding paper dolls, which are one-dimensional. If the speaker can maintain this lack of depth, she is not forced to confront her parents, nor deal with the anger that momentarily has escaped as she bangs the two dolls together. Instead, Olds can fall back on biblical teaching to create characters who are either obedient or not, righteous or not, but such characters need not reveal any complexity. In the second of Olds’s poems, “Why My Mother Made Me,” the speaker moves forward in her examination of her parents’ marriage to the creation of the child, herself. She sees herself as fulfilling her mother’s need. As a child, she is what her mother wanted: “my father as a woman.” Once again, there is a sense of melodrama and desperation in these words. Later in the poem, the speaker describes her parents’ creation of her in words that are very different from the Bible’s instructions in Genesis 2:24 that a husband and wife “become one flesh.” While the words are different, the image is very much the same. The speaker describes how her mother,

pressed the clear soft
ball of herself like a stick of beaten cream
against his stained sour steel grater
until I came out the other side of his body.

The joining of the speaker’s parents is methodical, lacking passion. In many ways, this joining creates an image of function, not so very different than all those biblical men and women who “knew” one another, and so the next generation is created. After her birth, the speaker imagines that her mother gazes at her with the same pride that the “maker of a sword gazes at his face in the / steel of the blade.” This is not a depiction of motherly love, but one of pride and triumph. Once again, these words suggest the speaker’s sense of self-righteous judgment of her mother. There is no attempt at mediation or an effort to admit that her mother might be more complex than these words suggest. The speaker can only see practical reasons for her creation: her mother’s need to recreate someone in her father’s image, the opportunity for the mother to recreate herself as she wished to be, or the pride of ownership that being a parent conveys. The speaker does not ask, “Where is the love?” Although unspoken, the question still hangs at the end of the poem. Virtually every book in the Bible defines God’s love for his creation. It is a godly pattern that parents are expected to imitate for their own children. Olds knows this from her own childhood, and the speaker, who is Olds’s creation, knows of this expectation as well. So, the poem ends without an affirmation of the mother’s love for her infant. It cannot be otherwise. To affirm the mother’s love would be to negate the anger that the speaker feels. The only way to maintain her anger is to increase the sense of righteousness and melodrama in the poem. Love would disperse those elements and leave the poem without a focus. This lack of love again emerges in the third poem under consideration, “After 37 Years My Mother Apologizes for My Childhood.” Love is the one important element missing from this poem, in which the speaker’s mother finally apologizes to the speaker for having subjected her to the father’s drunken violence. The speaker acknowledges her mother’s physical efforts to force an image of sincerity into her apology:

your
tiny face glittered as if with
shattered crystal, with true regret, the
regret of the body.

The final line, “the / regret of the body,” suggests that while her mother is using her body to create an image of sincerity, the speaker recognizes that this is only performance. The regret is all in the body and not in her mind. The mother may feel regret at that moment, but the speaker doubts its authenticity. However, the mother’s apology forces the child to respond, “I said It’s all right, / don’t cry, it’s all right.” The parent-child role has been reversed, and the child is forced to comfort the parent. The mother has never spoken of love, only of justification: “Where else could I turn? Who else did I have?” The mother’s tears and her pleas are too much for the child to ignore, and so the speaker is compelled to accept the apology. How reluctant she is to do so is revealed in the final lines: “I hardly knew what I / said or who I would be now that I had forgiven you.” The speaker has invested so much of her life in blaming her mother that the forced forgiveness leaves her with no real sense of her own identity. Who is the speaker if she cannot hate her mother? She cannot imagine what she will do with the rest of her life. Once again, as she did in the early two poems, Olds turns to melodrama to convey her ideas. The images are ones of desperation and overwrought emotion. These are the very images that Olds admits were conveyed during her Sundays in church. Forgiving the mother permits the speaker to achieve a kind of biblical self-righteousness that would appeal to the Calvinist orientation that formed Olds’s childhood. Just as Job has come to symbolize the image of the long-suffering and willing believer, the speaker in Olds’s poems imagines herself as a selfrighteous sufferer who has been forced to endure much pain. Because Olds has refused to divulge details about her own life, there is a temptation to see the author in her texts. That, of course, would be a mistake. Although there is no personal information to inform the readings of Olds’s poems, her own admittance of the importance of the Bible on her childhood can be used to help define her characters’ lives. Writers use what is familiar in life to create depth in their creations. And so, it is reasonable to assume that Olds has borrowed from her own experience with religion to help create a reality for her characters. As a result, the three motherdaughter poems included here are laden with self-righteousness and melodrama. The characters reveal a desperation but without the depth that the reader would hope to see. Olds does an effective job of capturing the Calvinist spirit in her poems, but she leaves the readers still wondering about the truth of the mother’s identity. Source: Sheri E. Metzger, Critical Essay on “I Go Back to May 1937,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2003. Metzger has a doctorate in English Renaissance literature. She teaches literature and drama at the University of New Mexico, where she is a lecturer in the English department and an adjunct professor in the university’s honors program.

Domesticity, death, erotic love—the stark simplicity of Sharon Olds’ subjects, and of her plainspoken language, can sometimes make her seem like the brooding Earth Mother of American poetry. (“I have learned to get pleasure,” Olds wrote in her last book, “from speaking of pain.”) In photographs she tends to look somewhat dark and remote, too; there’s a sense of brewing drama. She seems a natural heir to such melancholy talents as Ann Sexton and Sylvia Plath.

It’s a happy surprise, then, to discover that the 54-year-old Olds is anything but withdrawn and more-serious-than-thou. In fact, she comes across as a bundle of nervous energy, slightly neurotic, a bit like an intellectual Julie Haggerty. It’s the end of the semester at New York University, where Olds has taught in the Graduate Creative Writing Program for the last 12 years, and the atmosphere outside her small office is chaotic. Olds herself arrives a few minutes late, looking slightly harried, and apologizes profusely while pulling two paper cups of tea from a brown bag—one for herself, one for a visitor.

It’s hard to blame her for seeming a little breathless. In addition to her multiple duties at NYU, Olds runs the poetry workshop she founded in 1984 at New York’s Goldwater Hospital for the severely disabled, and she reads at numerous speaking engagements. What’s more, she claims to have such a backlog of poetry that when she does find the time to issue a new book—such as The Wellspring (Knopf), published earlier this year—it is generally made up of work written more than a decade earlier.

Born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford and Columbia, Olds arrived as a poet somewhat late: her first collection, Satan Says, was published when she was 37. Over the course of five books, however, she has quickly become one of America’s most highly regarded poets; her readings attract overflow audiences, and her volume The Dead and the Living won the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Olds’ new book, which follows on the heels of The Father (1992), a harrowing series of poems about the death of the narrator’s alcoholic father, is comprised largely of poems on somewhat more accessible themes—family life, parenthood, romantic love. But as Olds’ many readers have learned over the years, her work’s apparent simplicity can’t hide the scalding honesty of her observations. As Michael Ondaatje put it recently, her poems “are pure fire in the hands.” Like each of her previous books, The Wellspring leaves an emotional afterburn.

Olds spoke with Salon for nearly two hours, on topics ranging from poetic inspiration and bad reviews to the problem with reading the morning’s New York Times.

Thanks for the tea. Which reminds me that I once read somewhere that you don’t smoke or drink coffee, and that you consume very little alcohol. Why is that?

Well, one thing I’m really interested in, when I’m writing, is being accurate. If I am trying to describe something, I’d like to be able to get it right. Of course, what’s “right” is different for every person. Sometimes what’s accurate might be kind of mysterious. So I don’t just mean mathematically accurate. But to get it right according to my vision. I think this is true for all artists. My senses are very important to me. I want to be able to describe accurately what I see and hear and smell. And what they say about those things not being good for one’s longevity makes an impression on me also. So I did quit coffee and I did quit smoking. But I haven’t managed that with drinking!

So many poets are associated with alcohol and other kinds of excess.

There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers— encouraging them to die [laughs]. And Donald Hall has wonderful, sobering stories about many of these poets. But I don’t think anyone believes anymore that drugs and alcohol are good for writing, do they? I’m probably so out of it at my age that I don’t know what people think. But I think that exercise and as much good health as one can enjoy is the best thing for writing.

I was even more surprised to read that you don’t take a newspaper or watch television.

It’s true, but it’s kind of a different issue. At one point I took on a new job, and I just didn’t have time to do anything but work. [Olds was the Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program at NYU from 1989–91.] So I figured that for a year, just for the first year of this job, I would not watch TV, I wouldn’t read a newspaper, I wouldn’t read a book, I wouldn’t go hear any music, I wouldn’t do any of that kind of thing. Just so I’d have enough time. I was very afraid that I wouldn’t be able to do this job well. And the time never came back. But there are problems connected with this—with keeping informed about what’s happening in the world. So I try to look at the front page whenever I’m walking by a newsstand. And people talk about what’s happening, so I get a certain amount of information that way. It might be a bad thing, not to know what’s going on in the world. I can’t say I really approve of it.

Is this paring down an attempt to get back to basic things, in your life as well as your work?

I’m not sure that the benefit—as a writer and as a citizen—that I would get from reading at least the front page of the Times every day or every other day would outweigh the depression. Learning about so many things that we can’t do anything about. The amount of horror one used to hear about in one village could be quite extreme. But one might not have heard about all the other villages’ horrors at the same time. I just don’t have a big mind, I don’t have a big picture, I am very limited.

Yet didn’t some of your earlier, somewhat political poems take their inspiration from things you’d read in newspapers?

Yes, and they still do. I wish I wrote more about the world at more distance from myself. I think that for any of us to be able to imagine another person’s life, if we could do that really well, would be wonderful.

There is only one in The Wellspring, your new book. It’s a poem titled “Japanese-American Farmhouse, California, 1942.”

Well, The Wellspring was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others’ experience. But the book just insisted on having this more domestic shape—against my wishful thinking.

I didn’t realize that the “new” poems were so old.

That’s why I didn’t have time to go to the movies and read the paper and drink coffee [laughs]—because I’m very far behind in terms of putting books together.

Can you put this new book into place for me, then, in terms of your chronology?

The Gold Cell was published in 1987, and the poems in it were written in 1980, 1981 and 1982. Half of The Father [published in 1992] was written in ’83 and ’84. The second half was composed of one or two poems each from 1984, ’85, ’86, ’87, ’88, ’89. So for The Wellspring I went back to where The Gold Cell left off, which was work written through 1982. So The Wellspring goes through 1986. The book I’m working on now will be made of poems written in ’87, ’88 and ’89. The next one will be from 1990, ’91 and ’92.

I find that fascinating. Do many poets work that way?

I don’t think so. I got behind in putting books together.

How hard is putting a book together? It would seem like the hard part would be writing the poems in the first place.

Well, you just need time. When I quit all these things and said I didn’t have any time, I meant I didn’t have any time. So the teaching, the writing of first drafts, the traveling, the reading, and whatever else might be in the life—that was all I had time for. I didn’t have time to sit down and look at the work of a year and choose what to type. And then choose, among what gets typed, what to work on. And then among what’s worked on what to keep working on until lots of poems become just the ones that seem the best. Or the least worst!

Why do you keep yourself so busy with things that don’t pertain directly to writing? Is it because you love these other jobs, or is it because you’ve had to take them?

It’s a combination of both. The teaching is very rewarding, and very time-consuming, and very exhausting. But it’s wonderful. The community here at NYU is very precious to me. And the traveling and reading is rewarding in a different way, and it’s an honor to be asked. It’s hard to say no, when one is asked.

People who know your work well might be surprised to know that you have such a vigorous public life. Because your work is very focused and often kind of quiet. It’s hard to imagine the narrator of one of your poems fending off multiple phone calls.

But don’t you think that every single one of us is leading a harried life? We’re all taking on too much, we’re all asking too much of ourselves. We’re all wishing we could do more, and therefore just doing more. So I don’t think my life is different from anybody else’s. Every poet I know—although there may be some I don’t know who lead very different lives, who maybe live in the country and don’t teach—tends to be just like the rest of us: just really busy, really overcommitted. We wouldn’t necessarily see it in their poems. Because a poem is not written while running or while answering the phone. It’s written in whatever minutes one has. Sometimes you have half an hour.

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.

Your last book, The Father, was an unflinching account of your father’s—or at least the narrator’s father’s—death from cancer. Your new book deals with more domestic themes, and while it’s not lightweight, it doesn’t have that sense of darkness that hung over The Father. Did you find that writing these poems was refreshing, a kind of release?

The decision for me was whether to have The Father be a book that told a story—from the point of view of this speaker, the daughter—without, as in the earlier books, then having a section on something else and a section on something else. At first I thought it would not be a good idea to have a book all on one theme. I also didn’t know if I had enough poems on the subject that I liked well enough to make a book of them. But it turned out that I did. And it just seemed true to make a story that was all of itself. It pleased me to do so, and it still does. I’ve never had regrets that I went that way with The Father. The fact that there was a lot of anger and sorrow and a sense of connection to destructive feelings in The Father doesn’t bother me. For me, the subject kind of makes its demands. 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.

That’s an interesting phrase, not getting in art’s way. Is that why you write your poems in a style that’s somewhat accessible?

I think that it’s a little different from that for me. I think that my work is easy to understand because I am not a thinker, I am not a…How can I put it? 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.

I was recently reading in Des Moines with Yusef Komunyakaa and Philip Levine. You listen to them and you’re hearing a world-view, a bodyview, you’re hearing a spirit of a person, and mind, and heart, and soul. Their work is completely distinctive; you know you’re hearing a Komunyakaa poem immediately. And I don’t think they are trying to sound one way or another—it doesn’t seem to me to be something that comes from a conscious decision. Their spirits and their visions are embodied in their craft. And so is mine. It’s not Jane Saw Puff. But the clarity of Jane Saw Puff is precious to me. What was the other part of your question?

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.

Your poems often seem, on the surface anyway, somewhat more autobiographical than most— not that the “I” in your work is necessarily you. Do people try to read your life into them?

I don’t know if it would feel accurate to me to say that I put myself into my poems. I don’t know if that would describe what was happening in a poem that I wrote and that I liked. Someone is seeing, someone is thinking, dreaming, wondering, and remembering, in everybody’s poems. Whether there’s a speaker that has an explicit “I” or not, there is some kind of self or spirit or personality. We think of Lucille Clifton’s poems, and they don’t have to have an “I” in them for the spirit of the poet, a person, to be felt. I wouldn’t say she was putting herself in, but the qualities of her being come through. She’s not leaving herself, her wisdom and experience and music out. That’s partly what craft is, I think. The body of the poem is the spirit of the poem. But I do sometimes make an effort to use the word “I” as little as possible. I would not have chosen to have that word appear so much in my poems. My poems—I don’t even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience. Art is something else. It has something to do with wanting to be accurate about what we think and feel. To me the difference between the paper world and the flesh world is so great that I don’t think we could put ourselves in our poems even if we wanted to.

Do you ever wonder what one of your children will think when he or she reads one of your poems that might be, at least in some small way, about them? Or do you wonder about what insight they will have into their mother’s life through your work?

It’s a wonderful question, and it’s not one I can answer, really. Ten years ago I made a vow not to talk about my life. Obviously, the apparently very personal nature of my writing made this seem to me like maybe a good idea, for both sides of the equation—both for the muses and for the writer. But it’s a wonderful and important question. I think the thing that’s most important to me about it is this idea that every writer has to decide these things for themselves, and we learn by making mistakes. We learn by finding out, five years later, what we wish we hadn’t done. I’ve worked out this thing I’ve called “the spectrum of loyalty and betrayal.” Which is also the spectrum of silence and song. And at either end, we’re in a dangerous state, either to the self, or to others. We all try to fall in the right place in the middle.

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.

Your new book contains several poems that are quite realistic in terms of their descriptions of sex. Is it difficult writing poetry about sex, not to fall into language that might seem cliched?

I don’t think that sex has been written about a lot in poetry. And I want to be able to write about any subject. There is a failure rate—there are subjects that are probably a lot harder to write about than others. I think that love is almost the hardest thing to write about. Not a general state of being in love, but a particular love for a particular person. Just one’s taste for that one. And if you look at all the love poetry in our tradition, there isn’t much that helps us know why that one. I’m just interested in human stuff like hate, love, sexual love and sex. I don’t see why not. It just seems to me if writers can assemble, in language, something that bears any relation to experience—especially important experience, experience we care about, moving and powerful experience—then it is worth trying. The opportunities for offense and failure are always aplenty. They lie all around us.

Your poetry isn’t necessarily known for its comic aspects. But I’m wondering about your wonderful poem “The Pope’s Penis,” from The Gold Cell, where that came from and if it has proven controversial.

Life has a lot of sorrow in it, but also has a lot of funny things in it, so it makes sense to me to have that range. So many poets whose work I love are funny now and then. We’re just funny creatures, human beings. But that particular poem—I am careful where I read it, not wishing to give maximum offense. It’s a poem I didn’t get for a long time. I didn’t ask myself: Why do you feel okay about teasing this stranger? Why do you think that’s okay? I was just so startled when I noticed that this particular Pope was also a man. And I thought: Well, that means … [trails off]. And I just began musing on The Other, in a way.

And I wasn’t thinking, “I must not write anything about a religion that is not mine because I have no business doing so.” I’m sure there are a lot of people who feel that way, that we can write well only about what we deeply know and have known all our lives—that we can’t write about very different experiences. I don’t think that’s necessarily always true. I grew up in what I now call a hellfire Episcopalian religion—I think that phrase communicates the atmosphere—and I didn’t feel light years away from understanding the male hierarchy of power leading up toward the male God.

But I didn’t understand, until years later, that this poem was kind of a return gesture. This man, the Pope, seemed to feel that he knew a lot about women and could make decisions for us—various decisions about whether we could be priests or not, and who would decide whether we could have an abortion or not. He had crossed our line so far— this is according to my outsider’s point of view— that hey, what’s a little flirtatious poem that went across his line somewhat?

It looks like a young poem now. It mixes its metaphors. So I don’t tend to read that poem, but I don’t wish I hadn’t written it. I don’t want to take it out of the book. And unlike maybe three other poems in that book that I’ve rewritten—in the latest printing they are different from what they were—it’s okay enough for me that I don’t feel like I have to, or could, rewrite it. If I tried to fix the images it would just fall apart.

Many of the poems in your new book, certainly unlike that poem about the Pope’s penis, take their inspiration from very simple domestic things—a kid blowing bubbles in milk, a pair of blue jeans, a sick child.

Why is it, do you suppose, that you have two people in two different apartments, and they are surrounded by all the same stuff, and one of them will write about blue jeans and bubbles in milk, and the other will write about something less ordinary, or something with more ideas connected to it? How we perceive is just very different.

You published your first book of poems somewhat late, at 37. Can you tell me a bit about why that was?

That sure seemed old then, and it sure seems young to me now. It seemed old because I knew of all these amazing people who had done amazing work in their 20s. Of course, anyone who ever can do anything is lucky. It means that there has been enough education, enough peace, enough time, enough whatever, that somebody can sit down and write. Many lives don’t allow that, the good fortune of being able to work at it, and try, and keep trying.

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.

Have you ever learned anything from a review of your work?

Oh sure. Sometimes I feel like warning signs are thrown up. As long as one doesn’t get too discouraged.

I haven’t seen many—or any, actually—negative reviews of your work. Maybe it’s because I see so few poetry reviews. But do bad ones get to you?

Yeah. Sure. I think there have been plenty of them [laughs]. You were looking in a different direction. And they have differed a lot from each other in their amount of thoughtfulness, their amount of bad feeling. But we put our boat in the stream. By putting one’s work out there, one is asking to be considered as a part of the world. If the world feels very powerfully that this work should not have been written, it will say so. That seems quite fair. But then I think of the great things I have read, great stuff describing other people’s work that a critic likes or loves. Criticism can be so enriching, it can add to the pleasure we take in the poetry.

Source: Dwight Garner, “Sharon Olds,” in Salon.com, http://www.salon.com/weekly/interview960701.html, July 1, 1996.

The opening section of Sharon Olds’s The Gold Cell contains some of her most haunting poems. A white woman faces a black youth with the “casual cold look of a mugger” on the subway and considers how deeply they are in each other’s power. Some policemen coax a suicide from his parapet on a hot night, and they light cigarettes whose “red, glowing ends burned like the / tiny campfires we lit at night / back at the beginning of the world.” Some Ugandan villagers during a drought are beating to death a food-thief whose headwounds are “ripe and wet as a / rich furrow cut back and cut back at / plough-time to farrow a trench for the seed.” A 12-year-old girl who has been raped and has watched her best friend raped and stabbed to death lives on to go to high school where she works hard at math and becomes a cheerleader, “and she does a cartwheel, the splits, she shakes the / shredded pom-poms in her fists.” Olds’s characteristic note is a clear unsentimental compassion; her characteristic imagery is laid on thick, wet, and warm as bodies. The book’s three remaining sections return to themes powerfully treated in her earlier volumes, Satan Says and The Dead and the Living: father and mother, sexuality, son and daughter. In “I Go Back to May 1937,” the poet pictures her parents on the brink of their marriage and is tempted to warn them to stop:

but I don’t do it. 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.

Tell she does, sparing neither parent—father another Saturn eating his young, mother rolling over daughter like a tongue of lava—while the stunningly awful details, by their very intimacy and physicality, make anger impossible. These people are the poet, she is they. When Olds writes of sex, she sinks into voluptuous metaphors of food, predatory animals, satiety, birth. Writing of her children, she concentrates on their living and imperilled flesh, which we see as it were suspended in the amber of the poet’s locutions and her love. While she neither philosophizes nor moralizes explicitly, Olds’s refusal to establish any conventional poetic distance from her subjects amounts to a tacit moral imperative: that we affirm as intensely as possible our biological existence and the attachments to others it implies, and that we hold life as absolutely precious. “The gold cell” as a figure for life’s primary unit implies both entrapment (we cannot escape our parents, our children, our sexuality, our bodies) and pure treasure. Olds’s poems here are longer and slightly less taut than her earlier work. I’m puzzled at times by her lineation (e.g., many lines ending in “the” or “a” for no apparent reason other than a general preference for run-on). But the grace, the ease, the American casualness of her phrasing, along with the rich and precise tactility of her imagery, make a perfect combination. I found many of these poems no less than breathtaking. Source: Alicia Ostriker, “Comment: The Tune of Crisis,” in Poetry, Vol. CXLIX, No. 4, January 1987, pp. 231–37.