Background of the author
Salon interview with Sharon Olds
Some of Sharon Olds' thoughts:
"It's curious where different people think their mind is. I guess a lot of people believe that their mind is in their brain, in their head. To me, the mind seems to be spread out in the whole body — the senses are part of the brain. I guess they're not where the thinking is done. But poetry is so physical, the music of it and the movement of thought. Maybe we can use a metaphor for it, out of dance. I think for many years I was aware of the need, in dance and in life, to breathe deeply and to take in more air than we usually take in. I find a tendency in myself not to breathe very much. And certainly I have noticed, over the years, when dancing or when running, that ideas will come to my mind with the oxygen. Suddenly you're remembering something that you haven't thought of for years."
"I think that my work is easy to understand because I am not a thinker, I am not a . . . How can I put it? I write the way I perceive, I guess. It's not really simple, I don't think, but it's about ordinary things — feeling about things, about people. I'm not an intellectual, I'm not an abstract thinker. And I'm interested in ordinary life. So I think that our writing reflects us."
"There are some things that have to do with art that we can't control. This creature of the poem may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force. That's what I'm thinking about when I'm trying to get out of art's way. Not trying to look good, if a poem's about me. Not trying to look bad. Not asking a poem to carry a lot of rocks in its pockets. But just being an ordinary observer and liver and feeler and letting the experience get through you onto the notebook with the pen, through the arm, out of the body, onto the page, without distortion. And there are so many ways I could distort. If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it's really not right for that poem, but I wanted it, that would be distorting. It's kind of like ego in a way, egotism or narcissism. Where the self is too active."
"I don't know if it would feel accurate to me to say that I put myself into my poems. I don't know if that would describe what was happening in a poem that I wrote and that I liked. Someone is seeing, someone is thinking, dreaming, wondering, and remembering, in everybody's poems. Whether there's a speaker that has an explicit “I” or not, there is some kind of self or spirit or personality. . . . That's partly what craft is, I think. The body of the poem is the spirit of the poem. But I do sometimes make an effort to use the word “I” as little as possible. I would not have chosen to have that word appear so much in my poems. My poems — I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience. Art is something else. It has something to do with wanting to be accurate about what we think and feel. To me the difference between the paper world and the flesh world is so great that I don't think we could put ourselves in our poems even if we wanted to."
Class Discussion Questions:
1. All of the poems we read have at least one characteristic in common: a first-person speaker. Yet Olds has said that her poems are only "apparently very personal"; what could she mean by this assertion?
2. In "Little Things," does the "duty to find things to love" reflect a duty to write poetry (as in "I Go Back to May 1937," the speaker says, "I will tell about it")? "Does it reflect a duty to read poetry?
3. How do you react to the open sexuality and graphic nature of "My Father Speaks to Me from the Dead?" Through whom does the father speak? What is "matter's love"?
4. What's the connection in "Adolescence" between a contraceptive device and the speaker's "own life"?
5. In "The Talkers," why does the speaker describe sentences as "delicate chains"?
6. "First Weeks" seems to be about two births; does this interpretation reflect an appropriate way to read the poem?
