Sharon Olds | |
|---|---|
 Sharon Olds in Ezra Pound's birth house, Hailey, Idaho | |
| Born | Sharon Stuart Cobb (1942-11-19)November 19, 1942 (age 82) San Francisco,California, U.S. |
| Education | Stanford University (BA) Columbia University (MA,PhD) |
| Occupation | Poet |
| Spouse | |
| Partner | Carl Wallman |
| Children | 2 |
| Awards | Pulitzer Prize in Poetry,T. S. Eliot Prize,National Book Critics Circle Award |
| Website | www |
Sharon Olds (born November 19, 1942) is an American poet. Olds won the first San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980,[1] the 1984National Book Critics Circle Award,[2] and the 2013Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.[3] She teaches creative writing atNew York University and is a previous director of the Creative Writing Program at NYU.[4]
Sharon Olds was born on November 19, 1942, inSan Francisco, California, but was brought up inBerkeley, California, along with her siblings.[5] She was raised as a "hellfireCalvinist," as she describes it.[6] Her father, like his before him, was analcoholic who was often abusive to his children. In Olds' writing she often refers to the time (or possibly even times) when her father tied her to a chair.[7] Olds' mother was often either unable or too afraid to come to the aid of her children.
The strict religious environment in which Olds was raised had certain rules of censorship and restriction. Olds was not permitted to go to the movies and the family did not own a television, but her reading was not censored. She liked fairy tales, and also readNancy Drew andLife magazine.[8] By nature "apagan and apantheist," she has said that in childhood she was exposed in her church to "both great literary art and bad literary art," with "the great art being psalms and the bad art being hymns. The four-beat was something that was just part of my consciousness from before I was born." Of her Calvinist childhood, she said in 2011 that though she was about 15 when she conceived of herself as anatheist, "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."[9]
Olds was sent east toDana Hall School, an all-girls school for grades 6 to 12 inWellesley, Massachusetts, that boasts an impressive list of alumnae.[10] There she studied mostly English, History, and Creative Writing. Her favorite poets includedWilliam Shakespeare,Emily Dickinson,Walt Whitman, andEdna St. Vincent Millay, but it wasAllen Ginsberg'sHowl and Other Poems that she carried in her purse through 10th grade.[11]
For her bachelor's degree Olds returned to California where she earned her BA atStanford University in 1964. Following this, Olds once again moved cross country to New York, where she earned her Ph.D. in English in 1972 fromColumbia University.[5] She teaches creative writing atNew York University. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on "Emerson's Prosody," because she appreciated the way he defied convention.[10]
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do it. I want to live.
On March 23, 1968, she married Dr. David Douglas Olds in New York City and, in 1969, gave birth to the first of their two children. In 1997, after 29 years of marriage, they divorced. She lives in the sameUpper West Side apartment she has lived in for many years while working as a Professor atNew York University.[13] In a review of her 2022 collectionBalladz, Tristram Fane Saunders mentions the moving poems she wrote about her longtime partner, the late Carl Wallman of New Hampshire, who died in 2020.[14]
In 2005, First LadyLaura Bush invited Olds to theNational Book Festival inWashington, D.C. Olds declined the invitation and responded with anopen letter published inThe Nation. The editors suggested others follow her example. She concluded her letter by explaining: "So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it."[15]
Following her Ph.D., Olds let go of an attachment to what she thought she knew about poetic convention and began to write about her family, abuse, and sex, focusing on the work and not the audience.
Olds has said that she is more informed by the work of poets such asGalway Kinnell,Muriel Rukeyser andGwendolyn Brooks than byconfessional poets likeAnne Sexton orSylvia Plath. Plath, she comments "was a great genius, with an IQ of at least double mine" and while these women charted well the way of women in the world she says "their steps were not steps I wanted to put my feet in."[9]
When Olds first sent her poetry to a literary magazine she received a reply saying, "This is a literary magazine. If you wish to write about this sort of subject, may we suggest theLadies' Home Journal. The true subjects of poetry are … male subjects, not your children."[16]
Olds eventually published her first collection,Satan Says, in 1980, at the age of 37.Satan Says sets up the sexual and bodily candour that would run through much of her work. In "The Sisters of Sexual Treasure" she writes, "As soon as my sister and I got out of our/ mother's house, all we wanted to/do was fuck, obliterate/her tiny sparrow body and narrow/grasshopper legs."[17]
The collection is divided into four sections: "Daughter," "Woman," "Mother," "Journeys." These titles echo the familial influence that is prevalent in much of Olds' work.
The Dead and the Living was published in February 1984. This collection is divided into two sections: "Poems for the Dead" and "Poems for the Living." The first section begins with poems about global injustices. These injustices include theArmenian genocide duringWWI, the1921 Tulsa Race Riot, the reign ofMohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, and even thedeath of Marilyn Monroe.
Olds' bookThe Wellspring (1996), shares with her previous work the use of raw language and startling images to convey truths about domestic and political violence and family relationships.[18] In aNew York Times review, Lucy McDiarmid hailed her poetry for its vision: "likeWhitman, Ms. Olds sings the body in celebration of a power stronger than political oppression."[19]Alicia Ostriker noted Olds traces the "erotics of family love and pain." Ostriker continues: "In later collections, [Olds] writes of an abusive childhood, in which miserably married parents bully and punish and silence her. She writes, too, of her mother's apology "after 37 years," a moment when "The sky seemed to be splintering, like a window/someone is bursting into or out of."[17] Olds' work is anthologized in over 100 collections, ranging from literary/poetry textbooks to special collections. Her poetry has been translated into seven languages for international publications. She has been published inBeloit Poetry Journal. She was the New York StatePoet Laureate for 1998–2000.[18]
Stag's Leap was published in 2013. The poems were written in 1997, following the divorce from her husband of 29 years. The poems focus on her husband, and even sometimes his mistress. The collection won theT. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry.[20] She is the first American woman to win this award.[20] It also won thePulitzer Prize for Poetry.[21]
Olds did not participate in theWomen's Movement at first, but she says, "My first child was born in 1969. In 1968 the Women's Movement in New York City—especially among a lot of women I knew—was very alive. I had these strong ambitions to enter the bourgeoisie if I could. I wasn't a radical at all. But I do remember understanding that I had never questioned that men had all the important jobs. And that was shocking—well, I was 20 years old! I'd never thought, "Oh, where's the woman bus driver?" So there's another subject—which was what it felt like to be a woman in the world."[22]
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Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (2001–2025) | ||
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