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Critcal Context (Confessions of a divorce)

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Critcal Context (Confessions of a divorce)

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"Her latest volume, Stag's Leap, which has won the award, is an arc of poems, an almanac of grief, written in the days, weeks and months after her husband, a doctor to whom she had been married for 32 years, left her for a colleague. Here is the moment he told her ("his navel, and the cindery lichen / skin between the male breasts"), the last time they slept together ("he put his palm / on my back, between the shoulder blades"), the telling of her mother ("I bought her / a doughnut and a hairnet"), pain and shock and yearning hunkered down into everyday objects, into washing machines, clocks, clothes. "There is an expression – the devil is in the detail," she says. "I think the earth is in the detail. I am quite myopic. I wear glasses. I am not good at big abstracts. I focus on things up close to me. Some poets have better imaginations than I have. They write about ideas that come out of experience, not ordinary life itself" (Durrant).
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jan/26/sharon-olds-american-poet-divorce

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"For the most part, we have read these poems before, and throughout “Stag’s Leap,” Olds’s language is as lovely as always (even when she stirs in a pebble like “iliofemoral”). What makes this a refreshingly worthwhile (and often engrossing) collection is how the self, diminished by loss, survives the journey into her lines. With enough distance, the losses of separation have become clear; and as she burns her ex’s easel in the family hearth in “The Easel,” not only do we get a hint at what happened (“I am burning his left-behind craft,/ he who was the first to turn/ our family, naked, into art”), but we get a reassurance that, for Olds, “craft” is no match for fire" (Brodeur).
https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2012/12/23/review-stag-leap-sharon-olds/89lXh0xbnhEeOFIL4I2mLM/story.html

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Music festival of love and sex.

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On this day in 1969, the Woodstock Music Festival opens on a patch of farmland in White Lake, a hamlet in the upstate New York town of Bethel.

Promoters John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfield and Michael Lang originally envisioned the festival as a way to raise funds to build a recording studio and rock-and-roll retreat near the town of Woodstock, New York. The longtime artists' colony was already a home base for Bob Dylan and other musicians. Despite their relative inexperience, the young promoters managed to sign a roster of top acts, including the Jefferson Airplane, the Who, the Grateful Dead, Sly and the Family Stone, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Creedence Clearwater Revival and many more. Plans for the festival were on the verge of foundering, however, after both Woodstock and the nearby town of Wallkill denied permission to hold the event. Dairy farmer Max Yasgur came to the rescue at the last minute, giving the promoters access to his 600 acres of land in Bethel, some 50 miles from Woodstock.

Early estimates of attendance increased from 50,000 to around 200,000, but by the time the gates opened on Friday, August 15, more than 400,000 people were clamoring to get in. Those without tickets simply walked through gaps in the fences, and the organizers were eventually forced to make the event free of charge. Folk singer and guitarist Richie Havens kicked off the event with a long set, and Joan Baez and Arlo Guthrie also performed on Friday night.

Somewhat improbably, the chaotic gathering of half a million young "hippies" lived up to its billing of "Three Days of Peace and Music." There were surprisingly few incidents of violence on the overcrowded grounds, and a number of musicians performed songs expressing their opposition to the Vietnam War. Among the many great moments at the Woodstock Music Festival were career-making performances by up-and-coming acts like Santana, Joe Cocker and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; the Who's early-morning set featuring songs from their classic rock opera "Tommy"; and the closing set by Hendrix, which climaxed with an improvised solo guitar performance of "The Star Spangled Banner."

Though Woodstock had left its promoters nearly bankrupt, their ownership of the film and recording rights more than compensated for the losses after the release of a hit documentary film in 1970. Later music festivals inspired by Woodstock's success failed to live up to its standard, and the festival still stands for many as a example of America's 1960s youth counterculture at its best.

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The Woodstock festival opens in Bethel, New York - Aug 15, 1969 - HISTORY.com

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On this day in 1969, the Woodstock Music Festival opens on a patch of farmland in White Lake, a hamlet in the upstate New York town of Bethel. Promoters John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfield and Michael Lang originally envisioned the festival as a way to raise funds to build a recording studio and rock-and-roll retreat near the town of Woodstock, New York.

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The riots not only destroyed many homes and businesses, resulting in about $50 million in property damage in Detroit alone, but far more significantly, they also depressed inner-city incomes and property values for decades.

(The papers, "The Labor Market Effects of the 1960's Riots" and "The Economic Aftermath of the 1960's Riots: Evidence from Property Values," are available at www.vanderbilt.edu/Econ/wparchive/working03.html and www.vanderbilt.edu/Econ/wparchive/working04.html.)

The economists start with sociologists' findings on the riots' causes: whether a city had a riot was essentially unpredictable, assuming the city was outside the South (where few riots occurred) and had a substantial African-American population. The sociologists' research, Professor Margo says, suggests that "there was so much racial tension in the air in the 1960's that a riot could happen almost anywhere, anytime."

That unpredictability is bad news for sociologists looking for causes but good news for economists analyzing consequences. It creates a natural experiment, dividing otherwise similar places into those that had riots and those that did not.

In cities with major riots, the economists find that the median black family income dropped by about 9 percent from 1960 to 1970, compared with similar cities without severe riots. This impact on the labor market may have actually been more severe in the long run.

From 1960 to 1980, male employment in cities with severe riots dropped four to seven percentage points, compared with otherwise similar cities.

The impact on property values is even more striking. In cities with severe riots, Professors Collins and Margo found, the median value of black-owned homes dropped 14 percent to 20 percent, compared with cities that experienced little or no rioting, from 1960 to 1970. The median value of all central-city homes, regardless of owner, dropped 6 percent, to 10 percent.

The racial difference is not surprising, because both riot damage and the perceived risk of future riots were concentrated in predominately black neighborhoods.

Again, these numbers reflect not just immediate property damage but long-term declines. If it is more expensive or less desirable to live or work in a particular neighborhood, property prices will drop.

"This effect," the economists write, "could work through any number of the channels that feed into the net benefit stream: personal and property risk might seem higher; insurance premiums might rise; taxes for redistribution or more police and fire protection might increase, and municipal bonds may be more difficult to place; retail outlets might close; businesses and employment opportunities might relocate; friends and family might move away; burned-out buildings might be an eyesore; and so on."

In a second statistical test, Professors Collins and Margo identify two factors that separate cities with riots from those without riots: whether the local government used a city manager (which lessened the chances of a riot) and how much rain fell in April 1968, the month that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

"If you have a lot of rain, people don't go out in the streets and riot," Professor Margo notes. So the same national event had different effects in cities that were otherwise similar. Here, too, the two economists find that cities without riots did significantly better economically over the long run.

These results help address an important economic puzzle. Since World War II, the incomes of black and white Americans have begun to converge. But racial differences in wealth, or net worth, have remained enormous, even for people with similar incomes and family configurations.

In 1998, the median income for African-American households was $20,000, or 54 percent of the median white household income of $37,000, according to calculations by Edward N. Wolff of the Jerome Levy Economics Institute. But the median net worth of black families was only $10,000, a mere 12 percent of the median white net worth of $81,700.

Wealth reflects history as well as current economics. And while there are many reasons for the wealth gap, it certainly does not help that the 1960's riots destroyed much of the accumulated wealth of many of the most prosperous African-Americans, those who had left the South for the greater economic opportunity of industrial cities.

A home is the most important asset for most American families, and home ownership is even more significant for African-Americans, who historically have had held little wealth in financial securities or business equity.

In 1940, black-owned homes were worth only 37 percent as much as white-owned homes, as against 62 percent in 1970 -- still a significant gap, but a much smaller one. From then on, however, the gap barely budges, with the ratio reaching only 65 percent by 1990.

The riots help explain why. These numbers include all houses nationwide. In inner cities, the trend actually reversed, and the gap in home value began to widen instead of narrow.

From 1940 to 1970, the value of homes owned and occupied by blacks in central cities jumped to 69 percent of the value of urban homes owned and occupied by whites, from 51 percent. (Home values were rising over this period as well.) By 1990, however, the ratio was down to a mere 53 percent, nearly as low as in 1940.

"That's a really startling number," Professor Margo says.

Economic Scene Virginia Postrel (www.dynamist.com) is the author of "The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture and Consciousness," just published in paperback by Perennial.

Correction: January 3, 2005, Monday A picture caption with the Economic Scene column in Business Day on Thursday, about the long-term consequences of the 1960's race rioting, misstated the date of riots in Detroit. It was 1967, not 1968.

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The Consequences of the 1960's Race Riots Come Into View

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Virginia Postrel Economic Scene column on two recent papers by Vanderbilt University Profs Robert A Margo and William J Collins that estimate impact of race riots in US during late 1960's on incomes and employment and on property values; finds riots not only destroyed many homes and businesses, resulting in $50 million in property damage in Detroit alone, but far more significantly, they also depressed inner-city incomes and property values for decades; photo (M)

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C.I.A

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Sharon Olds on transforming life into art

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Sharon Olds on transforming life into art Subscribe to the Guardian HERE: http://bitly.com/UvkFpD In the week when Sharon Olds won the TS Eliot prize with a collection of poems exploring her divorce, she reads from Stag's Leap and discusses how life passes into art.

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Poet Sharon Olds reads at Emory University

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Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Sharon Olds visited Emory University for a free reading March 20, 2014 at the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts on the university campus.

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Gone are the days when Lucy and Desi of "I Love Lucy" slept in separate beds. Instead, television shows containing nudity and sexual scenes, such as "Empire," "Scandal," or "How to Get Away with Murder," have become more commonplace. Perhaps it's not surprising, then, to hear that the amount of sexual content in the media has increased in the 21st century.[1]

In our Growing up with Media study, we found that most youth (47%) are exposed to a LOT of sexual content - they said that many, almost all, or all of at least one type of media they consume depict sexual situations like people kissing, fondling each other, and having sex. Conversely, very few - less than one in ten (8%) - report low exposure to sexual content.

Viewing violent media seems to be associated with violent behavior[2,3] whereas viewing pro-social media is associated with positive behavior.[4] It seems plausible that this relationship could be true for sexual content too, right? Among the 14 to 21-year-old youth in the Growing up with Media study whose media consumption had almost no or no sexual content at all, only 2% had ever had sex. In contrast, among youth who stated that most or all of the media they consume contain sexual content, 60% of them reported sexual activity. Interestingly, the average age of these two groups did not differ. In other words, the reason we're seeing what we're seeing is not because older youth are both more likely to consume sexual media and also be sexually active. Sexually active youth who consumed the most sexual media were also less likely to regularly use condoms compared to those who consumed the least amount of sexual content in media. While it's not clear from this study if we are seeing these trends because youth who have more sex are more likely to seek out sexual material or if it is because sexualized media is causing youth to become more sexually active, there definitely appears to be a relation between the two.

So, can anything be done about this? Absolutely! We can be more involved in teens' media consumption, discuss the content with them, and use our conversation as an opportunity to share our healthy values about sex with them. In doing so, not only do we help young people understand the positive and negative aspects of being sexually active as a young person, but we also help them see the differences between themselves and the television characters they are viewing.[5]

This article is based on Ybarra ML, Straburger VC, Mitchell KJ. Sexual media exposure, sexual behavior, and sexual violence victimization in adolescence. Clin Pediatr. 2014;53(13):1239-1247. doi: 10.1177/0009922814538700

Learn more about our research at Center for Innovative Public Health Research.

Find us on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

Thank you to Dr. Myeshia Price-Feeney and Ms. Emilie Chen for their contributions to this blog.

References:

[1] Ballie R. Study shows a significant increase in sexual content on TV. 2001; http://www.apa.org/monitor/may01/sexualtv.aspx

[2] Bushman B, Huesmann LR. Short-term and long-term effects of violent media on aggression in children and adults. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2006;160(4):348-352.

[3] Anderson CA, Shibuya A, Ihori N, et al. Violent video game effects on aggression, empathy, and prosocial behavior in Eastern and Western countries: A meta-analytic review. Psychol Bull. 2010;136(2):151-173. doi: 10.1037/a0018251.

[4] Prot S, Gentile DA, Anderson CA, et al. Long-term relations among prosocial-media use, empathy, and prosocial behavior. Psychol Sci. 2014;25(2):358-368. doi: 10.1177/0956797613503854.

[5] Brown JD. Media literacy has potential to improve adolescents' health. J Adolesc Health. 2006; 39:459-460.

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Is Sex in the Media Related to Sexual Behavior Among Teens?

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Gone are the days when Lucy and Desi of "I Love Lucy" slept in separate beds. Instead, television shows containing nudity and sexual scenes, such as "Empire," "Scandal," or "How to Get Away with Murder," have become more commonplace.

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Americans love to tout the value of waiting until marriage to have sex. We teach abstinence-only education in schools across the country, and even comprehensive sex-ed programs often point out that "abstinence is best." Pop stars from Britney Spears to Jessica Simpson, to the Jonas Brothers, to Miley Cyrus, to Justin Bieber routinely assert that they're waiting 'til marriage - putting them into the Good Role Model category (at least, until someone leaks a sex tape). There's a booming "purity industry", complete with jewelry, elaborate events, books, t-shirts and DVDs.

Our state and federal tax dollars have long been spent promoting "chastity". While conservative commentators are happy to assert that waiting until marriage is the best choice for everyone and people who don't wait aren't doing marriage "the right way", sex-positive liberals hesitate to say that having sex before marriage is an equally valid - if not better - choice for nearly everyone.

So here it goes: having sex before marriage is the best choice for nearly everyone.

How do I know? Well, first of all, nearly everyone has sex before marriage - 95% of Americans don't wait until their wedding night. And that's a longstanding American value. Even among folks in my grandparents' generation, nine out of ten of them had sex before they wed.

Of course, just because lots of people do a thing doesn't mean it's a good thing. But sex is. In terms of happiness, sex is better than money, and having sex once a week instead of once a month is the " happiness equivalent" of an extra $50,000 a year. People with active sex lives live longer. Sex releases stress, boosts immunities, helps you sleep and is heart-healthy.

Sex is good whether you're married or not, and certainly folks who wait until marriage can have a lot of sex once they tie the knot. But waiting until marriage often means both early marriage and conservative views on marriage and gender - and people who marry early and/or hold traditional views on marriage and gender tend to have higher divorce rates and unhappier marriages. We know that, on the other hand, there are lots of benefits to marrying later and to gender-egalitarian marriages. Couples who both work outside the home and also share housework duties have more sex. Financially independent, college-educated women who marry later in life have extremely low divorce rates.

It turns out that feminist values - not "traditional" ones - lead to the most stable marriages. And feminist views plus later marriage typically equals premarital sex.

Most adult human beings naturally desire sex. And despite the rightwing emphasis on concepts like "purity", having sex does not actually make you a dirty or "impure" person. On the contrary, sex is like most other pleasurable things in life - you can have sex in ways that are fulfilling, fun, good and generous, or you can have sex in ways that are harmful, bad and dangerous. Marriage is not, and has never been, a way to protect against the harmful, bad and dangerous potential of sex (just read the Bible if you want a few examples). Instead of fooling ourselves into thinking that waiting until marriage makes sex "good", we should focus on how ethical, responsible sexual practices - taking precautions to protect the physical and mental health of yourself and your partner; having sex that is fully consensual and focused on mutual pleasure - are part of being an ethical, responsible human being.

Sexual morality isn't about how long you wait. It's about how you treat yourself and the people you're with.

Sex, of course, isn't all ponies and rainbows. The United States has one of the highest unintended pregnancy rates in the world. We have one of the highest abortion rates. We have one of the highest rates of sexually transmitted infections. But our problem with sex isn't that we're having it before marriage; it's that we've cast it as shameful and dirty. And when our collective cultural consciousness says that sex is shameful and dirty, we don't have the incentive - or the tools- to plan for sex, to see it as a positive responsibility and to make healthy sexual choices.

We're obsessed with sex on television, in music and in advertisements, but we somehow lack the ability to talk about sex as a positive, moral, pleasure-affirming choice that, like any other adult decision, comes with a set of responsibilities. And when government money is going toward telling people to just wait until marriage, we are literally funding an idea that has never worked in all of human history, instead of supporting tried-and-true policies that could mitigate the harm of a sex-obsessed, but pleasure-starved, culture.

If waiting until marriage were simply an individual choice with no political consequences or backdrop - if it were as arbitrary a marker as waiting until the third date, waiting until you knew your partner's middle name or waiting until she wore really awesome high heels - it wouldn't be a problem. And personally, I don't really care when you, as an individual, choose to have sex. As long as you feel ready and it's consensual, I say you do you. But "waiting until marriage" as a cultural phenomenon - albeit one that isn't actually happening for nearly everyone in the western world - has some nasty views about women and sex lurking behind it. Using "purity" as shorthand for "doesn't have sex" by definition means that people, and mostly women, who have sex before marriage are impure, dirty or tainted. As Jessica Valenti says in her book The Purity Myth:

"While boys are taught that the things that make them men - good men - are universally accepted ethical ideals, women are led to believe that our moral compass lies somewhere between our legs."

It's all the more troubling when those beliefs are federally funded.

From a more practical standpoint, not everyone is going to get married, or even legally can get married. The instruction to wait forever to experience a fundamental human pleasure is pointless and cruel. And while the old adage tells women that men won't buy the cow if they can get the milk for free, if I'm buying a cow, you can bet I'm going to make sure the milk is to my liking. But our cultural view of premarital sex as morally tainted makes it harder for couples to engage in real talks about their sexual needs and desires before marrying, the same way they would talk about their religious values, how many kids they want or whether the wedding cake will be chocolate or vanilla.

Sexually frustrated marriages are both miserable and common - the inboxes of advice columnists from Dan Savage to Dear Prudie are filled with letters from couples with mismatched sex drives and bad sex lives. We'd be a lot better-off if we recognized that sex is incredibly important to a lot of people, and, for most couples, sexual compatibility is necessary for a great marriage. You really can't tell if you're sexually compatible unless you have sex. The insistence that premarital sex is dirty or perverse makes it a whole lot harder to have necessary conversations. And a worldview that positions sex as shameful and bad also isn't going to evaporate on your wedding night.

Purity peddlers construct a false universe where there are pure virgins who wait until marriage, and then there are slutty whores who are going home with different men every night of the week. The truth is that most adults will have a great many important relationships in their lives - some of those relationships will be romantic, and some of those will be sexual. That's a good thing: our relationships with other people, sexual or not, are how we grow, evolve and learn about ourselves. They're how we figure out what love is, what we like physically and emotionally, and how to negotiate our own needs with someone else's. Despite the claims of the wait-till-marriage camp, waiting to have sex won't protect you from heartache, frustration or love lost. But a variety of fulfilling relationships, sexual and not, will make you a more well-rounded, compassionate and self-assured person.

My point isn't that everyone should have sex before marriage - people should determine for themselves when they are ready to have sex. For the vast majority of people, that's going to be before they're married. Making that choice isn't a moral failing. On the contrary, it's often a great, healthy, overwhelmingly positive choice. Whenever you choose to have sex, the cultural message that waiting until marriage is the best choice is simply wrong. And it's wrong for almost everyone.

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The moral case for sex before marriage | Jill Filipovic

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Americans love to tout the value of waiting until marriage to have sex. We teach abstinence-only education in schools across the country, and even comprehensive sex-ed programs often point out that "abstinence is best."

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By Marianne MacDonald

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The woman many regard as America's greatest living poet lives in a sprawling Upper West Side apartment where, for the past 40 years, she has written in a rocking chair overlooking the Hudson. When she gives a reading, people queue around the block to hear her - the night before we meet, so many fans turned up that they had to crouch on the floor and on window-sills. Her work has been anthologised in more than 100 collections and she has won poetry's most prestigious awards - the San Francisco Poetry Center award, the Lamont Poetry prize, the National Book Critics Circle award, the TS Eliot prize - but she is strangely little known here. In America she divides opinion: Michael Ondaatje called her poetry "pure fire in the hands"; the critic Helen Vendler called it pornographic.

"A poet of sex and the psyche, Sharon Olds is infamous for her subject matter alone," says the former US poet laureate, Billy Collins. "But her closer readers know her as a poet of constant linguistic surprise." Olds's celebration of sensuality, her work's unembarrassed candour, is exactly what Robin Robertson, her editor at Cape, admires: ". . . its direct, robust physicality, its corresponding rejection of rigid religious moral doctrines - the very qualities that enrage her critics." Olds, he adds, was one of the first to write honest poems about women from a woman's viewpoint. Three years ago she also proved that poets could still be political when she rejected Laura Bush's invitation to the National Book Festival in Washington on the grounds, she said in an open letter, that it would be condoning the Iraq war and "the current regime of blood, wounds and fire".

Her sense of humour is apparent in her emails (she would scribble little pictures on the faxes she sent her publishers years ago at Cape), but her poems can be brutally direct. In The Father, she recorded in raw detail the ambivalent feelings of watching a troubled father die from cancer. But her most memorable poems are the ones where sex and love overlap. "In the middle of the night, when we get up / after making love, we look at each other in / complete friendship, we know so fully / what the other has been doing," begins her poem "True Love". "Last Night" is more unflinching.

"The next day, I am almost afraid.

Love? It was more like dragonflies

In the sun, 100 degrees at noon,

the ends of their abdomens stuck together. I

close my eyes when I remember, I hardly

knew myself, like something twisting and

twisting out of a chrysalis . . ."

She writes movingly, too, of great love for a husband, as in "The Spouses Waking Up in the Hotel Mirror":

"The man looked like himself, only more so

his face lucent, his silence profound as if

inevitable, but the woman looked

like a different species from an hour before,

a sandhill crane or a heron, her eyes

skinned back, she looked insane with happiness . . ."

In person, Olds is neat, elegant and contained. She is standing at the door of her apartment on the seventh floor as I arrive and is welcoming and relaxed as she makes me tea in her small back kitchen. But turning on the tape recorder makes her anxious and welds her arms to her stomach. Deeply private, she has hardly given any interviews. One of the few to be found online is from the New York Times in September 1999.

The facts: Olds is 66, has a grown-up son and daughter and was married for 32 years, until just over 10 years ago, to a psychiatrist. She now divides her time between Manhattan and her boyfriend Carl's place in New Hampshire. She has said she was raised in an atmosphere of "hellfire" religion, and her work is haunted by a narrator with confused feelings for a failing, drunken father, "like a stuck / buffalo, baffled, stunned, dragging / arrows in his hide", and an overwhelmed mother who "wept at / noon into her one ounce of / cottage cheese, praying for the strength not to / kill herself". She writes in one poem of the collision when a mother, after 37 years, apologised for her childhood, and "quietly screamed / Where else could I turn? Who else did I have?, the / chopped crockery of your hands swinging toward me, the / water cracking from your eyes like moisture from / stones . . ."

In her early 20s Olds made a vow to Satan to write her own poetry - and again and again in her work she circles around a sinister moment when the narrator was tied by her mother to a chair. She prefers not to claim the experiences she writes about as hers. "Poems like mine - I don't call them confessional, with that tone of admitting to wrong- doing. My poems have done more accusing than admitting. I call work like mine 'apparently personal'. Or in my case apparently very personal."

I ask what she can say about her early years. "Well, I was born in San Francisco," she says. Does she have brothers or sisters? A mother and father? She shakes her head uncomfortably, meaning she can't answer. "What I'm nervous about is making explicit and 'part of the record' connections between poems and actual people," she says apologetically. "I've never talked about actual biography - it just seems to me like the right thing to do when you look at the poems I write."

She read a lot as a child, starting one novel as she finished the last, and was sent east to the Dana Hall School in Wellesley, Massachusetts. She went to Stanford, where she read languages. She did a PhD in American literature at Columbia, studying Emerson, and trying to write her own poetry.

It was there, on the steps of Low Library, that she made her vow. "This is before these horrible Satan murders and Satanic cults, and I don't know why Satan - perhaps because the childhood god I had believed in was punitive, harsh, not a forgiving presence," she says. "Or because one's own personal will, what one wants in one's own life, was considered wicked. So what I said was something like: 'Give me my own poems and I'll give up everything that I've learned.' Of course I hadn't learned that much, because I wasn't that good a student. I said: 'It doesn't have to be any good, just as long as it's mine - I mean as long as it sounds like an ordinary person.' "

Her poems don't work if they aren't "hers", she says: if she doesn't write about things she cares about. "If the amount I've written is like a yard long, the amount of it that's been sent out, or published, is like an inch. Because so much of it is awful." She says she writes when "a poem has formed itself, or its beginning, within me, and it's time to get a pen and notebook and sit over there on the rocking chair next to the window and try to bring forth that which is within."

Can she see the words in her head? "It's a little more hearing - it's almost as if I hear them just before they come out the end of the pen. I don't hear them, but it's as if they're in a chamber just outside my hearing. I don't usually try to write a poem unless that's happening. The poems come to me, I don't go to them. As soon as I see that what I'm mulling - a line or a sentence is repeating itself in my mind, like an obsessive thought, or a kind of conceit or concept - as soon as I see that it's a poem, I go and write it. And there's a lot of crossing out, I write the first draft in maybe half an hour, 45 minutes - these are all pretty short poems. When I feel that I've made a false move, I try to cross it out back up to where it's okay. And then try to bring it down again, OK, all the way to the end."

Accuracy is everything. "Whether you're being accurate to an imaginary scene or a thought or an actual narrative . . . we've all had that experience of reading something and we just don't believe it. Having grown up with a tremendous amount of fantasy, especially about hell and also heaven - though I certainly wasn't going there." Why not? "I was a wicked creature." She cuts herself off, having strayed into the personal. "In the last couple of years I've had higher standards for what accuracy is. Like saying: 'The longest night of the year.' Well, there is one of those. Like, say, 'the longest night of the decade'. Well, actually, I kind of like that, even if it's not true. It's a metaphor." She smiles. "I kind of like that, actually. But I'm thinking of those words like 'never', 'always', 'everyone', 'perfect', 'best'."

I ask if she feels she is moving towards contentment. "I don't know. Towards more knowledge, probably," she answers. "Towards a little less ignorance and unconsciousness. Sometimes more contented, sometimes less. I don't see it as a single arc." But she seems a passionate person from her poetry? "Yes," she concedes. "I think that would be true of most of us poets." Does she mind that? "Not at all. Peace of mind is a lovely thing. Probably the more stressed we are, the more we long for peace of mind. But I guess the more placid people might love excitement."

She believes the art of poetry is "putting something down in its own particular form on paper which another person, alone, will read. I think for me the impulse to write has to do with making something, with capturing, recording, preserving, honouring, saving - or not turning away from, if it's a ghastly human thing one is driven to write about." And what does it offer the reader? She laughs. "Well . . . companionship. And pleasure: musical pleasure, in hearing it - and, to the inner ear, in reading it on the page. And recognition: 'Someone else has felt what I've felt.' And surprise: 'I never thought of that.' Reading poems can give us information about emotional states, or subjects, give us virtual experience which may be very different from our own. Yes! Maybe this is it! I think that the arts are for showing us ourselves - including what's dangerous about us - holding a mirror up to nature."

Olds has been placed by some in the tradition of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, two American poets who also mined passionate emotions. While she admires Plath particularly - "what a genius" - she doesn't relate to their suicidal impulses. "The women writers of that generation whom I have felt closer to are Ruth Stone, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks." Yet it does seem as if she has had a lot of painful times? "Mmm," she says.

"I'm so sorry: perhaps you were expecting me to say more about myself," she apologises. She does observe that she feels grateful to have had a life that's allowed her time to write poems, "which is something I've needed to do, and have loved doing".

What is not clear to her how much her poetry has been cathartic. "I guess I would say yes, to an extent - but it doesn't cure you." She is modest, for one so celebrated. "As for feeling my work is an achievement - there are little passages, maybe 15 of them, like a line and a half each, that I really like. They feel to me like 'real poetry', they're a bit more effortless than some other lines, maybe they're a little subtler, maybe they're a little mysterious. Their musicality, harmony, the plain authority of their music, seems more equal to the sense. They feel to me a little like lines which, on an off day, some version of Seamus Heaney might have written. And there are about 10 or 20 of these lines spread over nine books."

We discuss the gap between the intimacy of her poems and her decision not to claim them as her own experience, and when I get back to England, she emails me out of the blue. "This is to let you know that I've been wondering about my extreme reticence," she writes, "and am questioning it. My vow may be wearing thinner than I'd thought." I say that I am delighted. "The adventure changes its shape," the next email opens. "I've tried to make sense of my life," it goes on. "I mean, make a small embodiment of ordinary life, from a daughter's, wife's, mother's point of view. A work of art not polemical in intent, maybe more elegiac, maybe just wanting to preserve a moment or a feeling, to swim upstream against the current of time . . . At a high school once, during the Q & A following a reading I gave, a discussion of autobiographical or not autobiographical, a student said: 'If I thought you'd made up all the stuff in your poems, I'd be really mad at you.' And I knew how he felt, and in his place I'd feel the same way. It had not crossed my mind really that anyone would make up a life, make up these stories - it seemed so obvious to me they were being told, sung, from some inner necessity that rose in an actual life. But at that point I couldn't come out and say that, I think I had some idea I was protecting someone, I'm not sure who . . ."

With the softening of her vow she may be knitting her vivid inner world and contained outer world together. But, she said, I mustn't get the wrong idea: she happily talks about her private life to her girlfriends.

"And once a poem is written, and I like it enough to type it, and it's rewritten, and maybe published, and I'm in front of people, reading it aloud - I'm not too embarrassed by that," she goes on. "It doesn't feel personal. It feels like art - a made thing - the 'I' in it not myself anymore, but, I'd hope, some pronoun that a reader or hearer could slip into. But how much can a poem reflect or embody a life anyhow? You can want to come close, but it's so profoundly different - the actual body, the flesh, the mortal life."

Olds on Olds
One Secret Thing
"One secret thing happened

at the end of my mother's life, when I was

alone with her. I knew it should happen -

I knew someone was there, in there,

something less unlike my mother than

anything else on earth."

Probably during some ordinary task of the day this scene flashed into my mind's eye. Probably I tried to put it out of my mind - a troubling and moving scene - and then, on the third or fourth little jolt of visual memory, I thought, Wait. This isn't just obsession, this is a poem. Three things: 1 Should the first line have commas? When I read it (aloud or to myself), it doesn't go "One-secret-thing-happened," it goes "One, secret, thing, happened" - but commas would make it look a bit weird. 2 I felt surprised by the grammar of lines 5 and 6 when I saw it the next day, by the double meaning: who was in there was more like my mother than it was like anything else, and it was more like her than anything else was. For someone who has to cover both "nos" with fingertips to understand a double negative, this was something new. I think it happened out of the wish to honour the mysterious state of someone very near the end of their life. 3 When Ms magazine accepted "One Secret Thing" for publication, I felt how our secrets, our private lonely moments, are not just ours, everyone has them, and we can share them.

· Excerpt from One Secret Thing, published by Knopf in September

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Interview: Sharon Olds, prize-winning American poet

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The woman many regard as America's greatest living poet lives in a sprawling Upper West Side apartment where, for the past 40 years, she has written in a rocking chair overlooking the Hudson.

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Sex is everywhere. In advertising, in movies, even on smartphones.

Sex can also be beneficial. Many consider it "significant exercise." It may give you an advantage at work. It has so many positive effects, according to a town official in Sweden, that the official suggested paying municipal workers to go home and do it.

But there is one problem: Americans are having less sex.

That goes for people of all types, regardless of their gender, race, marriage status or the region in which they live, according to a new study published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. In fact, American adults had sex nine fewer times in 2014 than they did in the late 1990s.

From the early 1990s into the early 2000s, Americans generally had sex from about 60 to 65 times a year, according to the study. But after 2002, Americans appeared to lose interest. While the decline has been nearly across the board, one group seems to be pulling everyone else down: married couples.

Married couples generally have sex more often than single people, but that advantage is declining. Married couples had sex an average of 56 times a year in 2014, down from 67 in 1989. But more people are staying single - meaning there is less sex - and the couples who do walk down the aisle are making fewer trips into the bedroom.

The report highlighted several cultural changes in recent years that could have contributed to the decline. Americans have far more options these days for different kinds of pleasure - like browsing Facebook and social media, playing video games or watching Netflix.

The adults who were born and grew up during the rise of portable technology and entertainment, millennials and Generation Z, are having sex less often than any previous generation, the study found. So much for the stereotype of twenty-somethings as sexual deviants in a hookup culture.

Still, there is no clear reason for the decline, but the report did rule out two possibilities: longer hours at work and pornography. Americans work longer days, but a busy work life was actually connected with higher sexual frequency. The consumption of pornography, which is now more accessible than ever before, was also tied with a busier sex life.

Despite all the declines, one age group showed no interest in slowing down: people over 70. They had sex nearly 11 times during 2014, up from an average of 9.6 times in 1989.

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It's Not Just You. Americans Are Having Less Sex.

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Sex is everywhere. In advertising, in movies, even on smartphones. Sex can also be beneficial. Many consider it "significant exercise." It may give you an advantage at work. It has so many positive effects, according to a town official in Sweden, that the official suggested paying municipal workers to go home and do it.

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Author Padlet

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Author Padelt

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By People

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How Sex Doesn't Illustrate True Love in "last Night" and "sex Without Love" by Sharon Olds - Case Study

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History Other Essays: How Sex Doesn't Illustrate True Love in "last Night" and "sex Without Love" by Sharon Olds

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By Brian Sutton

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San Francisco is home to a little bit of everything. Whether you're a first time visitor or a long-time local, San Francisco's Golden Gates welcome all. This is the place to find out about all things San Francisco.

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"Getting into Stanford was just such an amazing shock. But once I got here and became so involved, got to meet all these wonderful people, I feel like I fit right in - and like I belonged here the whole time."

Class of 2023

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One of the world's leading research and teaching institutions. Catalyzing discovery, accelerating solutions, sustaining life on Earth, and preparing students for active citizenship.

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Sharon Olds is one of contemporary poetry's leading voices. Winner of several prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, Olds is known for writing intensely personal, emotionally scathing poetry which graphically depicts family life as well as global political events. "Sharon Olds is enormously self-aware," wrote David Leavitt in the Voice Literary Supplement. "Her poetry is remarkable for its candor, its eroticism, and its power to move." Olds's candor has led to both high praise and condemnation. Her work is often built out of intimate details concerning her children, her fraught relationship with her parents and, most controversially, her sex life. Critic Helen Vendler publically disparaged Olds's work as self-indulgent, sensationalist and even pornographic. However, Olds has just as many supporters who praise her poetry for its sensitive portrayal of emotional states, as well as its bold depiction of "unpoetic" life events. Discussing Olds in Poetry, Lisel Mueller noted: "By far the greater number of her poems are believable and touching, and their intensity does not interfere with craftsmanship. Listening to Olds, we hear a proud, urgent, human voice." And the poet Billy Collins has called her "a poet of sex and the psyche," adding that "Sharon Olds is infamous for her subject matter alone...but her closer readers know her as a poet of constant linguistic surprise."

Olds's poetry is known for its accessible and direct free verse style. Often first-person narratives, her poetic voice is known for both its precision and versatility. The colorful events of the poems are always rendered in sharply realized images that cut quickly from the gory to the beautiful and back again. Her books appeal to a wide audience, and almost all of her work has undergone multiple printings. Her National Book Critics Circle Award-winning volume The Dead and the Living (1984) alone has sold more than 50,000 copies, ranking it as one of contemporary poetry's best-selling volumes. Her work is viewed in the tradition of Walt Whitman as a celebration of the body, in all its pleasures and pains, and it particularly resonates with women readers. As Dwight Garner put it in a Salon piece, "Domesticity, death, erotic love-the stark simplicity of Sharon Olds's subjects, and of her plain-spoken language, can sometimes make her seem like the brooding Earth Mother of American poetry."

Born in 1942 in San Francisco, Olds grew up in Berkeley, California where she was raised, she has said, as a "hellfire Calvinist." She attended Stanford University and earned her Ph.D. at Columbia in 1972. She was thirty-seven when she published her first book of poems, Satan Says (1980). Over several volumes, Olds has carved out a unique place in contemporary American poetry. Steve Kowit noted that Olds "has become a central presence in American poetry, her narrative and dramatic power as well as the sheer imagistic panache of her work having won her a large following among that small portion of the general public that still reads verse." Such popularity has not met with universal critical approval, however. Olds has been accused of narcissism and superficiality. "For a writer whose best poems evince strong powers of observation, Olds spends too much time taking her own emotional temperature," maintained Ken Tucker in the New York Times Book Review. "Everything must return to the poet-her needs, her wants, her disappointments with the world and the people around her." But other critics have been eager to champion Olds's work. In a Seattle Times review of Blood, Tin, Straw (1999), Richard Wakefield noted that Olds writes "poetry more faithful to the felt truth of reality than any prose could be." And Poetry Flash reviewer Richard Silberg commended Olds for "taking on subjects not written before, or not written in these ways...the best of these poems have a density of inspiration line by line."

Olds released a collection of selected poems, is the music of being human, and in this book she is really singing. Her journey from grief to healing is so beautifully executed." Her collection of poetry, Strike Sparks, in 2002. Collecting poems from over two decades, the book received the National Book Critics Circle Award and was widely praised as a good introduction to Olds's major themes. David Kieley, in a review for the literary blog Bookslut, wrote that the book "is in many ways a poetic memoir in which we keep circling around the subjects of sex, motherhood, and Olds's troubled childhood and parents in a Catch-22 kind of spiraling chronology... The poems circle a profound atheism in which the physical body is a document of being; physical experience is the primary mode of forming and physical contact the primary human relationship." Olds's next volume of new poetry, One Secret Thing (2009) continues to mine similar veins of autobiography, personal myth and dream. Reviewing the book for the New York Times, Joel Brouwer described Olds's method: "Olds selects intense moments from her family romance-usually ones involving violence or sexuality or both-and then stretches them in opposite directions, rendering them in such obsessive detail that they seem utterly unique to her personal experience, while at the same time using metaphor to insist on their universality."

Olds's next book, Stag's Leap (2012), included poems that explored details of her recent divorce, and the book won both the Pulitzer Prize and Britain's T.S. Eliot prize. In awarding the T.S. Eliot prize, Carol Ann Duffy, chair of the final judging panel, said: "This was the book of her career. There is a grace and chivalry in her grief that marks her out as being a world-class poet. I always say that poetry Odes (2016), used the venerable poetic mode as means to address a wide range of topics including gender, age, and sexual politics.

In her Salon interview, Olds addressed the aims of her poetry. "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." She added that she is "not asking a poem to carry a lot of rocks in its pockets. 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."

Olds has won numerous awards for her work, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Widely anthologized, her work has also been published in a number of journals and magazines. She was New York State Poet from 1998 to 2000, and currently teaches in the graduate writing program at New York University.

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Sharon Olds is one of contemporary poetry's leading voices. Winner of several prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, Olds is known for writing intensely personal, emotionally scathing poetry which graphically depicts family life as well as global political events.