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Analytical Reflection of Late Poem to My Father by Sharon Olds

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Analytical Reflection of Late Poem to My Father by Sharon Olds

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Analytical Reflection of Her First Week by Sharon Olds

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Analytical Reflection of Her First Week by Sharon Olds

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Mother Knows Best: "Wonder as Wander" - Sharon Olds shares her poem "Wonder as Wander" and reflects on a conversation she had with her mother regarding her poetry.

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Advice to Young Poets: Sharon Olds in Conversation

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advice to young poets: sharon olds in conversation

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Advice to Young Poets: Sharon Olds in Conversation

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Michael Laskey: What is your earliest poetry memory?Sharon Olds: When I was eight, we were asked to write a poem, and after I handed mine in the teacher called me to her desk-which was not an unusual experience for me. She said, "Did you write this poem?" And I said, "Yes."

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Sharon Olds is an award-winning American poet. Olds is an esteemed poet and is most known for her poetry work that challenges society's norms and brings into conversation difficult topics that have helped challenge social barriers. Olds was born on November 19, 1942 in San Francisco, California to a strict religious family. Her religious family, sheltered her from the outside world. For example, Olds was not permitted to go to the movie theater or watch any television. Allen Ginsberg's, Howl and Other Poems, were among others that inspired her in her later educational life. On March 23, 1968, she married Dr. David Douglas Olds and later gave birth to their two children. In 1997, after 29 years of marriage, they divorced and Olds moved to New Hampshire to restart her life. In New Hampshire, Olds began to write poetry works about her family, abuse, and sex as she began to freely express her thoughts. Olds declined an invitation to read at a White House book fair in 2005 because of her conflicting political views with those of the Bush Administration. Olds' poetry works are included in over 100 collections, ranging from literary and poetry textbooks to special prized collections. Her poetry has been translated into seven languages for international publications. She was appointed as the New York State Poet Laureate from 1998 to 2000. Her collection of poems were published into a book titled Stag’s Leap, written in 2012, and included poems that explored details of her divorce. The book was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and Britain's T.S. Eliot prize. Olds has won numerous other awards for her work, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Olds currently teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University. Her next collection, Arias, will be published and released in fall 2019.

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Maybe one reason I do not wear makeup is to scare people.
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.
And such a white white girl, such a sickly toadstool,
so pale, a visage of fog, a phiz of
mist above a graveyard, no magenta roses,
no floral tribute, no goddess, no grownup
woman, no acknowledgment
of the drama of secondary sexual characteristics, just the
gray matter of spirit talking,
the thin features of a gray girl in a gray graveyard—
granite, ash, chalk, dust.
I tried the paint, but I could feel it on my skin, I could
hardly move under the mask of my
desire to be seen as attractive in the female
way of 1957,
and I could not speak. And when the makeup came off I felt
actual as a small mammal in the woods
with a speaking countenance, or a basic
primate, having all the expressions
that evolved in us, to communicate.
If my teen-age acne had left scars,
if my skin were rough, instead of soft,
I probably couldn’t afford to hate makeup,
or to fear so much the beauty salon or the
very idea of beautyship.
And my mother was beautiful—did I say this?
In my small eyes, and my smooth withered skin,
you can see my heart, you can read my naked lips.

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Maybe one reason I do not wear makeup is to scare people.
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.
And such a white white girl, such a sickly toadstool,
so pale, a visage of fog, a phiz of
mist above a graveyard, no magenta roses,
no floral tribute, no goddess, no grownup
woman, no acknowledgment
of the drama of secondary sexual characteristics, just the
gray matter of spirit talking,
the thin features of a gray girl in a gray graveyard-
granite, ash, chalk, dust.
I tried the paint, but I could feel it on my skin, I could
hardly move under the mask of my
desire to be seen as attractive in the female
way of 1957,
and I could not speak. And when the makeup came off I felt
actual as a small mammal in the woods
with a speaking countenance, or a basic
primate, having all the expressions
that evolved in us, to communicate.
If my teen-age acne had left scars,
if my skin were rough, instead of soft,
I probably couldn't afford to hate makeup,
or to fear so much the beauty salon or the
very idea of beautyship.
And my mother was beautiful-did I say this?
In my small eyes, and my smooth withered skin,
you can see my heart, you can read my naked lips.

This article appears in the print edition of the September 10, 2018, issue.

Sharon Olds has been contributing poems to The New Yorker since 1979. She is the author of the poetry collection " Stag's Leap," which was recently produced as a staged reading by the Salt Lake City Acting Company.
Read more "

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Maybe one reason I do not wear makeup is to scare people.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

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The Poetry of the in-between | Sharon Olds | TEDxMet

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Poet Sharon Olds Mourns and Heals the End of a Marriage

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Sharon Olds reading "Meeting a Stranger" at  Squaw Valley Benefit Reading 2013

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How Sharon Olds brought me back to writing.

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Updated June 26, 2017 09:15:16

Ode to the Hymen, Ode to the Clitoris, A Celibate's Ode to Balls, Blow Job Ode: these are not the subjects we expect women in their 70s to be paying attention to, let alone writing about.

But they all feature in Odes, the latest collection from Sharon Olds.

In recent years, the American poet has found critical acclaim.

She won the Pulitzer Prize and the TS Eliot Prize in 2013 for Stag's Leap, written when her husband left her after almost three decades of marriage.

Last year, Olds was awarded the Academy of American Poets' Wallace Stevens Award, which came with a $US100,000 cheque and acknowledgement she was an "American master, and a national treasure".

'These were my passionate subjects'

This is not the way Olds's poetry was received when she first began submitting it to magazines 40 years ago.

"My work was not greeted with universal enthusiasm; it's quite true," she says, laughing.

"It seemed tasteless to many. I wasn't doing it just to be shocking. These were my passionate subjects: parents, children, sexual partner, married sexual love."

Olds wrote directly about her giddy delight in sex, in the pleasure she and her husband took from one another's bodies. Take this excerpt from the poem You Kindly:

close to me, delicate blunt
touch of your hard penis in long
caresses down my face,

With what she jokingly refers to in Odes as "my heteromania talking", Olds continues to celebrate the intense physical and emotional connection of lovemaking.

But she also revels in its bawdy, comic aspects; take Blow Job Ode from this latest collection, which begins: "I never thought of it as a line / of work."

'I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman'

For a woman to write this explicitly about sex shocked many of Olds's early readers, but perhaps even more unsettling is the way her poetry mixes the erotic and the maternal.

Olds's writing ranges across these subjects, sometimes in the one poem, acknowledging that it is the same body that experiences orgasm, pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding; the same hand that caresses a lover, washes a baby, and writes a poem.

Being a mother gave Olds a kind of fierce entitlement to stand shoulder to shoulder with her male predecessors:

I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman,
Allen Ginsberg, I have done this thing,

I and the other women this exceptional
act with the exceptional heroic body,
this giving birth, this glistening verb,
and I am putting my proud American boast
right here with the others.
From The Language of the Brag

While Olds' writing has always drawn on her most intimate experiences of family, she used to deflect biographical questions by saying, "I have taken a vow not to talk about that."

"[It's] a kind of cheesy way to handle the problem," she acknowledges.

These demurrals, though, were blown out of the water with the publication of Stag's Leap, which she summarises as "a book of the end of a long marriage".

The book is saturated with intense feeling but uses the structure and shape of poetic form to hold that emotion; to read it is a raw experience but also a redemptive one.

Olds held off publishing the book for 15 years so as to allow her children to make their own interpretation of their parents' separation, but since its release has been "hugely touched" by readers' responses.

"The theme of this book," she notes wryly, "is a familiar theme."

'We want to be useful with our poems'

Writing, even about the most painful things, is a reward unto itself for Olds: "To do the making is a huge pleasure, it's like a basketball player or anyone who likes doing what they do."

But for Olds, poetry is not primarily personal - she emphasises that poets publish because they want to connect with others.

"I think of poetry as a social art and we want to help people. We want to be useful with our poems."

It's poignant to hear a poet speak this way, because poetry occupies such a strange place in our culture.

Poetry is revered: it's what we reach for at our most significant moments, at every wedding and funeral. But poets are derided: imagine the reaction to introducing yourself as a poet at a party.

Speaking to the ABC last year, American poet Ben Lerner said the job title brought a conflicted social status. On the one hand, poets are celebrated as expressing the deepest human truths; on the other, they are mocked as self-important tossers.

Lerner's explanation of this conflict is psychoanalytical: it's because we want so much from poetry that we reject it before it disappoints us.

And it's true that there is something particularly awful about a bad poem.

But when a poet gets it right, as Olds does when writing on her "passionate subjects", we see ourselves in a clearer light, and there is nothing more useful.

Topics: poetry, books-literature, author, arts-and-entertainment, united-states

First posted June 25, 2017 07:30:00

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Poet Sharon Olds will write about whatever she likes, thank you

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Updated June 26, 2017 09:15:16 Ode to the Hymen, Ode to the Clitoris, A Celibate's Ode to Balls, Blow Job Ode: these are not the subjects we expect women in their 70s to be paying attention to, let alone writing about. But they all feature in Odes, the latest collection from Sharon Olds.

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George Danby | BDN

For many of my teaching years, I've carried a poem by Sharon Olds in my heart. Every day, in every school, I saw examples of the fulfillment of its ancient history and prophecy of the future. "Mrs. Krikorian," the teacher who was an "amiable giantess with the kind eyes" begins:

She saved me. When I arrived in sixth grade,

a known criminal, the new teacher

asked me to stay after school the first day, she said

I've heard about you. She was a tall woman,

with a deep crevice between her breasts,

and a large, calm nose. She said,

This is a special library pass.

As soon as you finish your hour's work -

That hour's work that took ten minutes

and then the devil glanced into the room

and found me empty, a house standing open -

you can go to the library.

Who was your Mrs. Krikorian? Can you hear the voice of your past teacher who took you in? Who looked past your rap sheet and outward appearances, who touched your potential with a knowing look or kind word? Who was the gentle giant or giantess in your life; who gave you extra time in the library?
[Opinion: We all had a Miss Kelham, third-grade teacher, who made our worlds larger]
I remember mine by their tone of voice. Mrs. Tapley, Mr. Williamson and Mr. Stevens all had a kind of perfect pitch, a resonant voice, stature and bearing. The effect of their pedagogy and curriculum still appears in my adult writing, my math skills, spelling or geographical literacy. Long division still confounds me, through no fault of Miss McCormack. I have a good working knowledge of the Earth's surficial features. I can spell pretty well.

But what I learned from them is not the most important memory - and a clue as to what matters in schools. Their attitude and feeling toward me and toward their academic subject created the expectation for learning, a deep sense of aspiration. That's a supreme educational standard.

Good teachers make children feel cared for, understood, challenged and appreciated. Of course, we also remember their moments of righteous indignation, mock ire and appropriately-timed withering glances! I can still hear Mr. Stevens, my fourth-grade teacher, scolding Vicki for making a sixth trip to the pencil sharpener to drop yet another note on Caroline's desk. I do not remember his lesson, per se. Nor would Vicki, but surely she too can remember his tone. Its value was the true lesson.

By their tone, I knew my teachers were powerful, or not; knowledgeable, or faking it; sincere, or going through the motions. Looking back, I know that learning occurred most spontaneously, deeply, and lastingly for me when their tone synced with my developmental timing - and allowances were made for the unique tenor of any given day. It was then that I allowed myself to be taught - or conspired with my teachers to learn in spite of myself.

This is the fundamental transaction of good schools as well as authentic teachers: creating an atmosphere in which students learn because their teachers know them intimately, have their trust and ingeniously adapt information and skills.
[Opinion: Great teachers give more than grades - they inspire a love for truth and beauty]
It is my humble hope to think that I have affected a few of these transactions as a teacher and administrator. I can be certain of precipitating a few individual breakthroughs ("So that's what this poem means!"); confident of training young writers in some key skills (with help from E.B. White); and hopeful that I've recruited, hired and supported teachers with a gift for getting the tone right. It would be my tribute to Mr. Stevens to think that I had, in fact, struck the right tone for just a few of my students and colleagues, just as he did for me. It's my standard for even considering myself a teacher.

And whose Mrs. Krikorian are you?
Todd R. Nelson is a retired teacher and school principal in Penobscot. May 7 is Teacher Appreciation Day.

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Good teachers make children feel cared for, understood, challenged and appreciated. Of course, we also remember their moments of righteous indignation, mock ire and appropriately-timed withering glances!. Maine news, sports, politics, election results, and obituaries from the Bangor Daily News.

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As we get near the house, taking off our gloves,
the air forming a fine casing of
ice around each hand,
you say you believe I would hold up under torture
for the sake of our children. You say you think I have
courage. I lean against the door and weep,
the tears freezing on my cheeks with brittle
clicking sounds.
I think of the women standing naked
on the frozen river, the guards pouring
buckets of water over their bodies till they
glisten like trees in an ice storm.
I have never thought I could take it, not even
for the children. It is all I have wanted to do,
to stand between them and pain. But I come from a
long line
of women
who put themselves
first. I lean against the huge dark
cold door, my face glittering with
glare ice like a dangerous road,
and think about hot pokers, and goads,
and the skin of my children, the delicate, tight,
thin, top layer of it
covering their whole bodies, softly
glimmering.

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A week after my father died suddenly I understood his fondness for me was safe—nothing could touch it. In those last months, his face would sometimes brighten when I would enter the room, and his wife said that once, when he was half asleep, he smiled when she said my name. He respected my spunk—when they tied me to the chair, that time, they were tying up someone he respected, and when he did not speak, for weeks, I was one of the beings to whom he was not speaking, someone with a place in his life. The last week he even said it, once, by mistake. I walked into his room, and said “How are you,” and he said, “I love you too.” From then on, I had that word to lose. Right up to the last moment, I could make some mistake, offend him, and with one of his old mouths of disgust he could re- skew my life. I did not think of it, I was helping to take care of him, wiping his face and watching him. But then, a while after he died, I suddenly thought, with amazement, he will always love me now, and I laughed—he was dead, dead!