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Interview with Sharon Olds on Her Most Recent Book Odes

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Interview with Sharon Olds on Her Most Recent Book Odes

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Krista Tippett, host: Sharon Olds has written: "The politeness and the prudity of the world I grew up in meant that there were things that were important to me and interesting to me, but I had never read a poem about." She's been writing poems about all those things now for over 40 years. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her collection Stag's Leap, about walking through the end of a marriage she had also praised and opened up to poetry. Her most recent book, Odes, pays homage to aspects of the human body and experience that get bleeped out on public radio to follow FCC rules, including "Ode to the Clitoris," "Ode to the Penis," and "Ode to the Tampon." So the conversation you're about to hear has parental advisories, but please don't let that stop you - it is a joy.

[ music: "Seven League Boots" by Zoë Keating]

Sharon Olds: "Maybe one reason I do not wear makeup is to scare people. [ laughter] If they're close enough, they can see something is different with me,
something unnerving, as if I have no features,
I am embryonic, pre-eyebrows, pre-eyelids, pre-mouth,
I am like a water-bear talking to them,
or an amniotic traveller,
a vitreous floater on their own eyeball,
human ectoplasm risen on its hind legs to discourse with them."

Ms. Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. This conversation unfolded in Newark, New Jersey, at the 2018 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival.

Ms. Tippett: This is a lively Sunday morning crowd - which leads right into where I wanted to start, which is that you speak, often, about having had a hellfire and brimstone Calvinist upbringing. And then your first book was called Satan Says. So I think that tells us where you went with that. But I wonder how you would start to describe the religious and spiritual background of your childhood as it appears to you now, because, I think, like many things in childhood, what we see changes as we look back at it across time.

Ms. Olds: Yes. Thank you. Thank you for having me here.

Well, I would say that even before I was born, I was a pagan dancer. I was upside-down, and I was engaged in rhythm. I don't remember this, but it just seems true that the heartbeat and the breath and the borborygmi - the sounds of this digestion - so I was gradually hearing that. So I think, all my childhood, I was a pagan, underneath the burden of the particularly negative vision of Christianity that I was in the house of. My senses were super-pleasurable to me, and there was so much gorgeous beauty in the garden and - small garden and a brick barbecue, homemade, in which I could bake pies with lattice crusts, braided lattice crusts made of dirt. There was so much that was beautiful and good - and music - and then, I just tended to dance around.

I don't know when I got the message that I was odd, but I sure got it. I tried to be normal, almost all my life. But now I figure, we're all normal enough. Each of us is normal; each of us is weird. That's my feeling now.

Ms. Tippett: There was something I read - The Guardian wrote a piece about you after you became the first American woman to win the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. And in there was the story of the reaction you got when you first submitted your work to a magazine in the early 1970s, when they told you - do you know which one? Do you recall that story?

Ms. Olds: Yes.

Ms. Tippett: You want to tell what the response was?

Ms. Olds: Yes, I was submitting poems in '75, '76, '77, '78, and one magazine wrote back, "If you wish to write about your children, may we suggest The Ladies' Home Journal? We are a literary magazine." It wasn't that atypical back in the '70s.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah, you write as a woman; you don't merely write about being a woman, but even if you did - what it is to be a woman is such a robust and essential elemental variation on the theme of what it is to be human. It seems to me that you just decided, against a grain, that that was interesting and important to you, and it was interesting and important to write about, to give voice to.

Ms. Olds: Yes. I didn't decide; it just was so interesting to me. And loving dance and sexuality and - I think, almost every poem of mine that's a sexual poem is a sexual love poem. I don't think I've written much in the area - is there such a thing as "the area of pure sex"? I haven't gone there. But I just wrote about the things that interested me the most. A poem would come to me, and so I just wrote what came out of my pen, out of my arm, connected to my soul and mind and body. The fact that it hadn't been done much was like - oh! It was like - I don't know - it was exciting to be writing, maybe, the first poem about a diaphragm. I didn't know that until someone told me that.

Ms. Tippett: That no one had ever in history written a poem about a diaphragm before?

Ms. Olds: Someone said that to me.

Ms. Tippett: I think you probably have a lot of firsts in there. We're going to dive really deep into that. I do, though, want to note - in this book, as well - because it's The Dead and the Living - I think you pick up on something that also runs all the way through your work, which is the love that we have for our children and the intimacy, that particular intimacy is there. There's one short poem that I just found. It captures so much in so few words, which is, of course, what poetry does, right? "Exclusive." Do you remember this one?

Ms. Olds: Oh, yeah. This book came out in '84, so the poem would've been written maybe two years before then, so maybe ten years old, twelve years old.

"Exclusive (for my daughter)":

Ms. Tippett: Yeah, "to love what I do not own."

Ms. Olds: I changed it while I read it. On the page it says "like a god, as I had built you within me," and I said, "as you were built within me." And the next time that's about to reprint, they'll send me the book and ask, "Do you have any changes?" Oh, my God. So yeah, little things like that. I didn't do it. It happened in me.

[ music: "a collage of cut up flowers" by Lullatone]

Ms. Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today, with the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Sharon Olds.

Ms. Tippett: It's interesting that that especially fierce kind of love also has this - from the very beginning, this certainty that the flourishing of that life will mean separation from us, that we don't own that love. I mean, we don't ever own any love, but we have that illusion with other loves, maybe.

I want to move through a few of your books, but there's something, also, in this book, about your son, and I'm thinking a lot right now about being the mother of a son. I just wonder if you would read that. There's actually - there's one in this - [page] 68 - so these two, I feel. Maybe, let's talk about that and what this poetry surfaces for this conversation.

Ms. Olds: OK, so you'd like me to read these two.

Ms. Tippett: I think so.

Ms. Olds: Yes, thank you.

Ms. Tippett: If you're all right - if that sounds good.

Ms. Olds: I am so all right. This is like a dream of heaven. And you make such an excellent God, I must say.

"Son":

"Coming home from the women-only bar,
I go into my son's room.
He sleeps - fine, freckled face
thrown back, the scarlet lining of his mouth
shadowy and fragrant, his small teeth
glowing dull and milky in the dark,
opal eyelids quivering
like insect wings, his hands closed
in the middle of the night.

Let there be enough
room for this life: the head, lips,
throat, wrists, hips, penis,
knees, feet. Let no part go
unpraised. Into any new world we enter, let us
take this man."

Ms. Tippett: That was [page] 96.

Ms. Olds: Thank you.

"My Son the Man":

Now, if I was writing this poem now - I've learned so much since I wrote that poem, I would not be able to have chains in a poem without referring to the atrocious history of our country and without referring to my son's good fortune in blending in by being white and being a WASP and all of that.

I also didn't realize that my kids would grow up to be grown-ups like me and my former husband, imperfect people. I mean, my kids are wonderful people, but no person is perfect. Somehow, a little kid can seem so perfect. And then - you're not going to make the mistakes your parents made, but I didn't realize how many other mistakes were available to be made.

Ms. Tippett: That is so true! [ laughs] I know. It's so odd that we can endeavor to do it so much better - to parent so much better than we were parented - and objectively, you could make a case that many of us do. And yet, what we are raising are humans, and they end up having flaws and neuroses and their issues, and that's also part of how they become who they are, and how they -

Ms. Olds: Yeah, yes.

Ms. Tippett: Are you thinking, these days, about being the mother of a son, and the men in our lives, and -

Ms. Olds: Well, I'm certainly thinking about men. I'm between boyfriends, so I'm always thinking about men. But what's your -

Ms. Tippett: Well, like this line - this may just be me. We won't dwell here. But this line, "Into any world we enter, let us / take this man." Ms. Olds: Right, and the thing about being afraid of men - I was raised to be afraid of men. I was raised to not feel safe if I was the only person on the block, and then there was also a man, any man, or boys, especially more than one. It just was a time when many males felt very little respect for females - and anger of desire. And when I was 13, my classmate was kidnapped and raped and murdered in Berkeley, California. That, of course, showed us all a little bit, from the outside of that family, what was possible. And being afraid of men, afraid they'll think I'm ugly, and just all kinds of fears.

I was in a wonderful marriage, and so I wasn't afraid of my former husband. And I probably was a little bit of a sexist as a parent but not in the way you'd think, but more like thinking boys needed more encouragement, maybe, because it was harder for them to learn all that fine motor stuff and even some of the large motor stuff. But we talked about everything, my kids and I. So I think I did my best. I think that was the best I could do.

Ms. Tippett: I guess what's on my heart now is that I feel like there's so much unfinished work we have to do, as women and for women and in terms of gender. And yet, I also think that we have to do it together with men, and there's something about that line - again, "take them with us" - anyway, and because, also, there are good men in our lives, right?

Ms. Olds: Oh, yes. Absolutely. A lot of them are here at this conference.

Ms. Tippett: And a lot of them are here, poetry-reading men.

So interesting to me - here we've had a flavor of the depth and breadth and profundity of what you are writing about and the voice you're writing in.

You won the Pulitzer for Stag's Leap, which was about the end of your marriage. And I don't know, I'm sure other poetry has been written about divorce, so I don't know if this is a world first. But I do feel like the way you fulsomely wrote about the experience, from many different places along the spectrum of that experience - I think the fact that you loved and honored the marriage that was ending, also, gave a certain character to the poetry. I wonder if I asked, is there one poem in that book, Stag's Leap, that you would like to read, that you now appreciate at this remove.

Ms. Olds: There's one I read often - that I read to the high school kids because I realized it's a good poem for high school kids. It's called "Known to Be Left." It's early on. It's page 18. I wrote an awful lot of poems in the, maybe, four years in which this book was written, most of them in the first year. What did I say? [Page] 18. Thank you.

It doesn't always seem to be in our hands, how open we can be in our poems and how we can tell a truth that is a little bit under the surface of the truth.

"Known to Be Left":

Ms. Tippett: You've said that people were uncomfortable with you being - what did you say? - your being a "divorce sharee."

Ms. Olds: Did I say that?

Ms. Tippett: Telling people about it, you felt like Typhoid Mary when you were going through that.

Ms. Olds: Oh, I was in a crowd of long marriages, with children at the center of all of our marriages. And yeah, I felt like I had harmed something. Of course, I hadn't actually harmed anything or anyone. It was 50/50, and it turns out to have been a very good thing for my life as well as his. People change over the course of 32 years together, and I feel now that it was the right thing. I'm not ashamed in front of my friends, and I've had three extraordinary relationships during that time. I know things and I've felt things that I never would've known or felt if that hadn't happened. So yes - but in the beginning, I did.

There's a poem about a long drive with an old friend, wherein I confessed to him the question that was the worst thing. It's called "The Worst Thing." I confessed to him that the worst thing was - and then I just started boohooing, and I could hardly talk - was, what if I had harmed love? Love, like some ideal - I really feared that. And then he calmed that fear, and then it was easier.

[ music: "As Ballad" by Lambert]

Ms. Tippett: After a short break, more with Sharon Olds. You can always listen again and hear the unedited version of every show we do on the On Being podcast feed, now with bite-sized extras - wherever podcasts are found.

I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today with the poet Sharon Olds at the 2018 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2012 collection Stag's Leap, which she wrote over a period of several years through the end of her long marriage.

Ms. Tippett: Your newest book, your 2016 book, is Odes. And this is the one that has lots of words in it that we can't say on public radio.

I'm going to say a few of them right here, and we'll probably have to cut it out. It includes the "Ode to the Hymen," "Ode to the Clitoris," "Ode to the Penis," "Ode to the Condom," "Ode to the Tampon," lots of others, "Ode of Withered Cleavage," "Celibate's Ode to Balls" - we can say "balls" on public radio. [ laughs]

Ms. Olds: Who knew?

Ms. Tippett: I'm not going to ask you to read the ode to the penis because most of it would get - but I want to read a little bit of it because it's fabulous. This section, it starts with "Someone told me that what I write about men is objectifying." And then it ends: "I like you-not as an object but / as subject: a prime mover, working theory of plumbing and ecstasy, / a boy's pride and anxiety, windsock of zephyr and gale, half / of the equation of creation." It's great. [ laughs]

Ms. Olds: Thank you.

Ms. Tippett: Thank you. [ laughs]

You wrote this poem recently, which was published in The New Yorker - I don't think it's been printed - "No Makeup"? Would you read this one?

Ms. Olds: Sure. Do you have it?

Ms. Tippett: I do. I printed it out.

I was looking around, actually, this morning - I had it already in my preparation, and I read it in The New Yorker when it came out. It was fun. And then I was looking around this morning, because I wanted to print it out for you, and I came across this young woman, Caitlin Skinner, who has a YouTube channel, and she's a military officer. She's young and just lovely, smart, and a very appealing human. She's just started doing this, and the first piece she'd done on her YouTube channel is her - she's in her combat fatigues, and she's talking about what she's learned as a leader and as a mentor. And her second feed is her - not in her combat fatigues this time - reading this poem, "No Makeup." It was beautiful. So anyway, I want you to read it.

Ms. Olds: Wow.

Ms. Tippett: But imagine that too.

Ms. Olds: Caitlin?

Ms. Tippett: Caitlin Skinner.

Ms. Olds: Skinner; Officer Skinner, thank you, thank you.

"No Makeup":

Ms. Tippett: Thank you.

Ms. Olds: Thank you.

Ms. Tippett: I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma in the 1960s and '70s, and it was a real makeup culture. I actually knew people, women, young brides, who got up at 5:30 in the morning, for an hour before their husband, to curl their hair and put on their makeup. I doubt that that lasted very long into the marriage, but...

So again, I see somebody saying that this is trivial, but actually, it's a huge part of the lives of women, this makeup, no-makeup, how much, how dramatic it is; if at some point you decide to wear less...

Ms. Olds: And we go through phases, historically, and so it was a great shock to me to see 14-year-olds with very, very classy, very obvious and gorgeous but shocking - they had been children a couple of years before - so I think at first I thought, oh, we're going back to the '50s. The strides that we've made and the advances that we have made were like that, and now there's going to be a dip.

But I think the advances we've made are real and are not going to disappear. They are needed in different ways, all over the Earth. I'm not shocked anymore. And it's luxurious for me, when I cry at the movies, to just be able to wipe my eyes.

[ laughter] But mainly, I just couldn't function. Whatever way any of us - men, women, gay, straight - can function best, can let out of our mouths what we really mean, what we think and feel, then we should go for that style, whatever it is, I think.

Ms. Tippett: Sometimes I feel like younger women - and I'm sure this is a generalization that doesn't apply to everybody - I feel like some of them - I think about my own daughter. I think they wear makeup because it pleases them.

Ms. Olds: That's a good reason.

Ms. Tippett: I don't feel like it's all about the external, about pleasing others.

Ms. Olds: Right.

Ms. Tippett: And so that's liberation.

Ms. Olds: That's right. That's right.

Ms. Tippett: Don't you also envy how they don't care if anybody can see their bra strap showing?

Ms. Olds: I think that's so cool.

Ms. Tippett: I know. But this is one of these things, growing up a few decades ago - sorry, I've never said that in a - [ laughs] see what you're inspiring in me?

Ms. Olds: Well, I am so in agreement, and what I love is that I don't have to worry anymore. Of course, there are certainly people who think that at my age, one shouldn't have a bra strap showing. But then, it's also an excuse to get bras with pretty straps.

Ms. Tippett: It is. And I think these girls who are 15 and who are 25 now, their bra straps are going to show, and they're going to live to be 115. So that will be a whole new world. [ laughs]

Ms. Olds: It's going to be a tough world for them when they're getting close to 100.

Ms. Tippett: Well, there's that.

Ms. Olds: But we believe in you, young people. And we love you. And we thank you.

[ music: "Dustland" by Dekko]

Ms. Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett and this is On Being. Today, with the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Sharon Olds.

Ms. Tippett: I would like for us to just hear some more poems, before we end, from Odes. I pulled out a few - I wonder if you might want to read the "Unmatching Legs" ode because I think that is also part of the story of where you are, and with your dancing and just that piece of drama in your life right now, as your life is progressing.

Ms. Olds: I have realized that this book came about as a book of odes. I was traveling with my then-boyfriend, and a book of Neruda's just about fell off his shelf in an old used bookstore. It fell on him, and he said, "Here are poems. This is a book of poems."

I read some of them - "Ode to Salt," "Ode to the Table," "Ode to a Dog" - and didn't think of copying them. They were so entire, and it was Spanish-English, and I have enough Latin and Italian that I could actually understand, with the facing page. But then, later, weeks later, a week later, I thought, odes to common things. So the tampon is the first ode of this series that I wrote. And then it was also good to be able to write about sexuality without writing specific love poems to this man who would not have appreciated those poems going out into the world. I wrote them, and I have them, and I will put them into a book for him, a book of his. But that was one reason that I have some abstractions in this book.

"Unmatching Legs Ode" - I have to give a shout-out to Kwame Dawes - yo, Kwame - who accepted this poem for publication, which was just so thrilling, in the Prairie Schooner.

"Unmatching Legs Ode":

Ms. Tippett: Thank you.

Would you like to tell us anything else about your legs?

Ms. Olds: I like looking up muscles and nerves and finding out their names. I like weird words. I had a political struggle with that. I long wanted to leave a pile of poems at the checkout at ShopRite. I would look at the women who also were in line with me - and in those days, they were, gee, almost all women - and wonder which of my poems they might feel welcome to. And if it had a fancy, weird word near the beginning, eh, not so much.

So I tried to leave out the fancy, weird words, but the trouble was, I was in love with those words. They're like magic spells. I studied languages because I love them so much. I'm not good at them, and I don't know semantics or semiotics or anything like that, but I love those words. So, when I'm reading that, I see, uh-oh, "gastrocnemius" is coming. Get ready.

And again, having experienced myself as not confident but weird and partly not confident because of being weird but then developing a taste for the weirdness - and, you know, once we find friends, once we find close friends, they love us for our weirdness as much as our not-weirdness. And so, there's this woman of, I don't know, 65, whatever I was then, lying on the floor, watching her legs wave in the air - it's normal. And it's fun.

Ms. Tippett: [ laughs] You said to me, a little earlier when we were speaking about sons, that if you wrote that again, you might note how much privilege - I think that's an overused word; we need many words to talk about what we're talking about with that word - and about him being white. You do have this "Ode to My Whiteness" in this book, which I think is an important poem.

Ms. Olds: Thank you. I would not have this ode, were it not for the brilliant poet Evie Shockley's book, The New Black. In that book, I don't remember if it's "Poem to My Blackness" or "Ode to My Blackness," but this poem is after Evie Shockley.

"Ode to My Whiteness":

Ms. Tippett: This matter of whiteness is just one of these huge reckonings we have to have - and many conversations. And actually, I don't know that there's other poetry like this. So thank you for that contribution to our reckoning.

Ms. Olds: Thank you. Thank you.

Ms. Tippett: I wondered if we could finish with a shorter - what is it? Oh, [page] 94, your "Ode to Dirt." [ laughs]

Ms. Olds: Oh, yes.

Ms. Tippett: I don't know why - I just thought this would be a lovely way to end. It's a little shorter poem, and it's kind of about everything.

Ms. Olds: Thank you. It was one of the poems in this book not written early on in the ode-writing. I think, for every book that comes out of mine, there's ten times as many poems, or five times as many, that didn't make the grade. And there are early ones and late ones, and it took me so long - I couldn't bear to believe that the Earth could die. I just couldn't bear to believe it. So I didn't, until two weeks ago or whenever it was, and that certainly changed my life. And I'm grateful that I'm more in touch with the truth than I had been. But this poem showed a little consciousness of that.

"Ode to Dirt":

Thank you.

Ms. Tippett: Thank you, Sharon Olds.

Ms. Olds: Oh, thank you. Thank you.

[ music: "Arriére-Pensée" by Melodium]

Ms. Tippett: Sharon Olds is the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University. Her books of poetry include Satan Says, The Dead and the Living, Odes, and Stag's Leap - for which she won the Pulitzer and T.S. Eliot Prizes. She also helped found NYU's outreach program for residents of Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Special thanks this week to Martin Farawell, Catherine Bloch, Paul Allshouse, David Mayhew, Julia Hahn-Gallego, and the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival and Foundation.

Staff: On Being is Chris Heagle, Lily Percy, Mariah Helgeson, Maia Tarrell, Marie Sambilay, Erinn Farrell, Laurén Dørdal, Tony Liu, Bethany Iverson, Erin Colasacco, Kristin Lin, Profit Idowu, Casper ter Kuile, Angie Thurston, Sue Phillips, Eddie Gonzalez, Lilian Vo, Lucas Johnson, Damon Lee, Suzette Burley, Katie Gordon, Zack Rose, and Serri Graslie.

Ms. Tippett: The On Being Project is located on Dakota land. Our lovely theme music is provided and composed by Zoë Keating. And the last voice that you hear singing our final credits in each show is hip-hop artist Lizzo.

On Being was created at American Public Media. Our funding partners include:

The Fetzer Institute, helping to build the spiritual foundation for a loving world. Find them at fetzer.org.

Kalliopeia Foundation, working to create a future where universal spiritual values form the foundation of how we care for our common home.

Humanity United, advancing human dignity at home and around the world. Find out more at humanityunited.org, part of the Omidyar Group.

The Henry Luce Foundation, in support of Public Theology Reimagined.

The Osprey Foundation - a catalyst for empowered, healthy, and fulfilled lives.

And the Lilly Endowment, an Indianapolis-based, private family foundation dedicated to its founders' interests in religion, community development, and education.

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Krista Tippett, host: Sharon Olds has written: "The politeness and the prudity of the world I grew up in meant that there were things that were important to me and interesting to me, but I had never read a poem about." She's been writing poems about all those things now for over 40 years.

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As we sat at the feet of the string quartet,

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At dusk, on those evenings she does not go out,

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January 1989 | Pamela Alexander, Angela Ball, Judith Berke, John Blair, Philip Booth, Rita Dove, Alice Friman, Malcolm Glass, Rodney Jones, Sharon Libera, Thomas Lux, Michael McFee, Sharon Olds, Carole Oles, Jim Powell, James Reiss, J. Rosser, Kevin Stein, Jeanne Walker, Paul Zarzyski, Alfred Corn

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When Sharon Olds was a child, she was told she was going to hell. "I did worry," she confesses, "that if a beam of eyesight is made of dust, me looking at a flower would get some of the dust of my sinful nature on the flower." It's an unlikely start, perhaps, for a poet who went on to write some of the most sexually explicit poems of the 20th century, one who has won an international following for her celebrations of the human as animal. In Olds's poems, we are creatures who bleed, suck, give birth and - to use her uncompromising word - fuck. "Sexual love," says Olds, "is a subject that moved me immensely. Talk about a total challenge to one's descriptive powers!"

It is a challenge she has met with spectacular courage and candour, and one that has won her rapturous acclaim. "Sharon Olds's poems are pure fire in the hands," said Michael Ondaatje on the publication of her first Selected Poems, The Sign of Saturn. The British poet, Peter Redgrove, agreed. "Every poem," he said, "is a wonder - strong, actual, unsentimental and without bullshit - in a world glowing with solid reality." "This," said the poet and playwright Glyn Maxwell, "is the sound the confessional hordes have been trying to utter since Lowell."

"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". This quotation, from "The Sisters of Sexual Treasure" in her first collection, Satan Says, sets the tone, intensely personal and unflinchingly physical, that is the keynote of Olds's entire œuvre. Later in the same collection, she writes of the "infinite bliss" of discovering sex and her knowledge that "I could never live apart from them/ again, the strange race with their massive/ bloodied hooves". In "The Language of the Brag", a poem that might serve as an early manifesto, she writes of the physical act of giving birth as some kind of Whitmanesque celebration of the self and the written word. It's an early indication, perhaps, of the fascinating, and complicated, relationship in Olds's work between life and art.

In later collections, she 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" - and of her father's gradual, painful death. She writes about the joy of birth, the visceral pleasures of bathing and feeding a baby, and, most of all, she writes about love. More than any other poet I can think of, she writes about the fierce, animal ecstasy of marital love, the "complete friendship" and "huge invisible threads", the promises to kill each other in case of illness or harm. She also writes, ominously, of the threat of love's loss. "Do not tell me this could end," she writes in the penultimate poem in her Selected Poems, published by Jonathan Cape last year. And then, in the final poem in the collection, she presents a litany of broken objects - "whelk shell", "wishbone tossed unwished on", "chicken foot" and "Wrasse skeleton" - and their shadows, "fancies of crumbs/ from under love's table". It is, presumably, no coincidence that these poems coincided with the breakdown of her marriage.

It is, however, a question I cannot broach, because Sharon Olds made a vow 25 years ago never to name people in the poems or to speak publicly about her family. With her religious background, a vow is not something you break lightly. 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".

The intensity is there in the person, too. Sharon Olds, who is here in the country for a punishing schedule of readings, may be going grey, but her figure remains slender and strangely childlike. She speaks slowly and with unfailing courtesy, listening attentively and thanking the waiter at one point for a coffee "perfect in its composition and delivery". Her voice is gentle and her manner is, too. This is a woman who has lived and loved with great passion but who has, I think, also lived in fear of being hurt. She did escape the vicious father, and the vicious God, but it has taken quite a while. As for many Americans, therapy helped. "It's very wonderful," she says, "to talk to someone who's seen a lot of people in similar circumstances, who can tell you how crazy you are. Not very crazy," she adds with evident relief. "In fact, not crazy."

The serious poetry also started with a vow. It was after collecting her PhD, on the prosody of Emerson's poems, that she stood on the steps of the library at Columbia University and "gave up poetry". "I said to free will," she remembers "or the pagan god of making things, or whoever, let me write my own stuff. I'll give up everything I've learned, anything, if you'll let me write my poems. They don't have to be any good, but just mine. And that," she says, "is when my weird line came about. What happened was enjambment. Writing over the end of the line and having a noun starting each line - it had some psychological meaning to me, like I was protecting things by hiding them. Poems started pouring out of me and Satan was in a lot of them. Also," she adds, more surprisingly, "toilets. An emphasis on the earth being shit, the body being shit, the human being being worthless shit unless they're one of the elect."

Within a couple of years, she was publishing poems in magazines and teaching poetry workshops, first in her home and then at universities. She felt free to write what she liked, because "no one would ever read" what she was writing. "It was extremely rude and disloyal," she explains, "but no one would ever read it." She even made up a pseudonym, but she soon realised that if she was to have any life as a writer, she would need to use her own name. And so it was that this shy, fragile figure, reciting poems about fellatio, or her father's penis, or her diaphragm, became a regular, and electrifying, figure on the poetry circuit.

Perhaps inevitably, there were comparisons with the so-called "confessional" poets - Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell. In fact, says Olds, it was a different group of poets - people like Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks and Galway Kinnell - who had a greater influence on her work. "Those were the poets," she says, "whose lives I loved and whose work I loved. Although I felt, once I read her, that Plath was a great genius, with an IQ of at least double mine, and though I had great fellow feeling for Anne Sexton being the woman in that world, their steps were not steps I wanted to put my feet in."

It was, says Olds, her "beloved, late colleague" Mack Rosenthal who coined the term "confessional", because of Lowell's conversion to Catholicism and "Mack's thinking that Lowell had started writing that way because of his experience in the confessional". For her own work, she prefers the term "apparently personal". Because, she insists, the reader doesn't know. "I've never said that the poems don't draw on personal experience," she says, "but I've never said that they do. The dialogue that I'm comfortable having about them is one to the side of that actual subject. Art," she adds firmly, "is so different from life. It's just so different."

Sharon Olds will be reading her work as part of Poetry International in the Purcell Room on London's South Bank on Sunday 29 October at 7pm

Biography: Sharon Olds

Sharon Olds was born in 1942 in San Francisco. She was, in her own words, raised as a "hellfire Calvinist". After studying languages at Stanford, she went on to do a PhD in literature at Columbia University. Her first poetry collection, Satan Says, received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Centre Award. Her second collection, The Dead and the Living, won the 1983 Lamont Poetry Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other collections include The Gold Cell, The Father, which was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize, Blood, Tin, Straw and, most recently, Selected Poems. Sharon Olds was the New York State Poet Laureate for 1998-2000. She lives in New York and teaches poetry workshops at New York University.

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When Sharon Olds was a child, she was told she was going to hell. "I did worry," she confesses, "that if a beam of eyesight is made of dust, me looking at a flower would get some of the dust of my sinful nature on the flower."

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A Review and Analysis on Sharon Olds' Odes

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A Review and Analysis on Sharon Olds' Odes

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Books of The Times

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The author Sharon Olds. Her latest poetry collection, "Odes," covers sex, death and aging among other topics - like buttermilk and composting toilets. Credit Credit Hillery Stone

Sharon Olds feels bad about her neck. In her new book there is a poem called "Ode to Wattles," and it is about what you suspect it's about: the poet's "face hanging down from the bottom of my face," the "slackness of the drapery."

In the mirror, Ms. Olds is shocked yet thrilled at her visage. Old age - "my crone beauty, in its first youth" - has given her fresh subject matter, which she does not intend to waste. She writes:

I love to be a little
disgusting, to go as far as I can
into the thrilling unloveliness
of an elderwoman's aging.

No one who has kept up with Ms. Olds's work needs to be told that she loves to be a little disgusting. As a writer, she's always gotten an illicit thrill from pushing boundaries, whether scrutinizing sex or motherhood or parents or illness (but sex especially).

The critic Helen Vendler, not a fan, has called her work pornographic. The nimbleness and electricity of Ms. Olds's best sex poems, however, will not be denied. These poems declare, as vividly as did Janis Joplin: Honey, get it while you can.

Ms. Olds, 73, has been on a fierce late-career run. Her last book, "Stag's Leap," about her divorce from her husband of many years, deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013.

At around the same time, Ms. Olds took a small detour. She composed for Oprah magazine an article titled "Heartbroken? 6 Ways to Pull Yourself Back Up." (Poets and listicles: no more of these, please.) Item No. 2: "Carry a Power Hankie."

This I hated to see, if only because one of the great things about Ms. Olds's verse is that she never seems to be carrying a hankie at all, much less a fancy hankie. She avoids sentimentality the way a runner on the beach zigs to avoid the foamy lips of waves.

Her new book, "Odes," picks up where "Stag's Leap" left off, which is to say that it contains some of the best and most ingenious poems of her career. Some are about aging. There is "Ode of Withered Cleavage," for example, and "Hip Replacement Ode."

There is also "Merkin Ode," a merkin being a wig worn in the pubic region. These are on Ms. Olds's mind because, she writes,

My shrub
is in retreat, its wilderness
a little pushed back - my weeds are being,
by time, gently whacked.

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Credit Patricia Wall/The New York Times

Her poems have long found their center of gravity at crotch level. They contain an awareness, too, that as Philip Roth contended in "American Pastoral," the body's surface is "about as serious a thing as there is in life." Sex, for Ms. Olds, remains at the center of life and art.

We have no finer laureate of the clitoris, which she likens in one poem here, in 10 of the more miraculous words that 2016 has produced, to the "bench-pressing biceps of a teeny goddess who is buff." She describes the hymen as

not a
cat-flap nor a swinging door
but a one-time piñata. How many places in the
body were meant to be destroyed
once?

Her poem "Douche-Bag Ode" performs a service by containing a history lesson for millennials. It begins:

When I hear the young refer to someone as a
douche bag, I want to say, You may have
never seen a douche bag. They were red
rubber bags, like hot water bottles, you'd
fill it and hang it high enough
so that gravity ... I can't go on ...

She does, of course, go on, and suggests: "let's take some pity/on the creepiness of how women were treated/in the 1950s."

Ms. Olds has sometimes being criticized for being self-involved, for narcissism run amok. I see no logic to this sort of censure, agreeing with Philip Larkin, who said in an interview, "A very crude difference between novels and poetry is that novels are about other people and poetry is about yourself." Ms. Olds renders the personal universal.

There is a good deal of lesser work in "Odes." When Ms. Olds's poems miss, they really miss, more so than most poets at her level. Her "Ode to the Penis," for example, contains these lines: "I think/ you're lovely and brave, and so interesting, you are/ like a creature, with your head, and trunk, as if you have a life of your own." Or perhaps male poets have condescended for so long to the clitoris that this is her revenge.

There are other topics besides sex and death in "Odes." There are odes to buttermilk and composting toilets and other poets ( Stanley Kunitz, Galway Kinnell) and pine trees and sick couches and Sloan Kettering.

The book's warmth comes from the intensities of its language and the intensities that emerge from a life that seems well lived. In a poem about her living friends, she writes: "You were exactly who I'd been/ looking for, without daring to imagine." At their best, you can say the same thing of this writer's poems. No power hankie required.

Follow Dwight Garner on Twitter: @DwightGarner.

Odes

By Sharon Olds

108 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Laureate of Sexuality Scrutinizes the Body. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Sharon Olds, Laureate of Sexuality, Scrutinizes the Body in 'Odes'

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Books of The Times Sharon Olds feels bad about her neck. In her new book there is a poem called "Ode to Wattles," and it is about what you suspect it's about: the poet's "face hanging down from the bottom of my face," the "slackness of the drapery."