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The Culture Issue

Sex, Death, Family: Sharon Olds Is Still Shockingly Intimate

“No one should read more than one poem at a time from this book.”

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If you have ever studied poetry — if perhaps you were, like me, the sort of emotional nerd who lugged around thick anthologies, memorizing sonnets — then you will already know this fact: The word “stanza” means “room.” (Edward Hirsch: “Each stanza in a poem is like a room in a house, a lyric dwelling place.”) This means that every poem, and every book of poems, is a sort of house tour. The poet leads you, room by room, through the various chambers of his or her world. Different poets, of course, are very different hosts. T.S. Eliot cracks the front door solemnly, greets you with a formal nod and recedes into his velvety labyrinth; Wallace Stevens throws confetti in your face while shouting spelling-bee words; Emily Dickinson stares silently down from an upstairs window, blinking in Morse code.

Sharon Olds, the celebrated modern poet, is more welcoming. You don’t even have to knock; she will already be there, waiting in the hall, calling out greetings. Her voice is easy and intimate, almost alarmingly charming, and so you will follow wherever she leads. Olds will guide you into her tiny spaces — into small rooms bursting with great joys (love, childbirth, sex, more sex) and into other rooms crowded with terrible sorrows (sickness, betrayal, agony, death). Eventually she will show you that all the rooms are interconnected, that the door to joy is the door to sorrow, that it has been one big room all along.

I am speaking here metaphorically, about Sharon Olds on the page. But I am also speaking literally, about Olds in person — the actual human woman who lives in the actual world. This summer, I went to visit her at her apartment near Washington Square Park. (Olds teaches at N.Y.U. and resides, like many professors, within the university’s vast real estate empire.) Sure enough, as soon as the elevator doors rumbled open on the 17th floor, Olds was waiting. She stood, small and eager, near the end of a long hallway.

“Hi!” she called.

“Hey,” I answered.

“Hey!” she echoed. Her voice was high and lilting and full of feeling, like a little reed pipe someone might play in a forest to make cartoon animals start to dance.

“Hi!” I said. It was taking me a long time to walk down the hall.

“Welcome!” Olds said, waiting, and then: “It’s a long hall!”

When I finally reached her, Olds had a question: “May we shake hands?” This was one of those fraught plague-time requests. I had already rescheduled our interview because I had been exposed to a mystery illness and didn’t want to risk infecting one of America’s great poets on the brink of her 80th birthday. But I had just tested negative. So I told Olds that, sure, we could shake hands if she didn’t mind. “I like to,” she said, with real relish, as if we were talking about windsurfing or wine tasting or tango lessons on a moonlit beach.

‘I don’t mind talking this way — I know it seems so dumb — but: I was born a pagan.’

We shook hands — that brief, ritual meeting of the body — and as we did so, Olds searched my face. (“I base a lot of my feelings about people on what I think I see in their faces,” she would tell me later.) She has large, emotional eyes and extremely long gray hair. In person, I found her subtly different than I’ve always found her in print. On the page, Olds is bold, controlled, precise, authoritative. In person, she comes across as softer and looser, a bit meek and deferential — a quick charcoal sketch of the sweetest grandmother on Earth. She is chatty and vulnerable; she will giggle and coo and occasionally break into sudden tears. “I’m nervous, Sam, I’m nervous!” she confessed, early in our conversation.

Well, I was nervous, too. This was, after all, Sharon Olds, a poet who — after 13 collections spread over four decades (her latest, “Balladz,” was published this month) — has as much claim as any living writer to the title of National Literary Treasure. She has, by now, won most of the major prizes, including, most recently, the Poetry Society of America’s Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement. (She showed up to the ceremony wearing a glittery sequined face mask, with her hair pinned back by sparkling butterfly barrettes.) In the landscape of contemporary poetry, Olds is like a distant round mountain: familiar, gently beautiful, sometimes easy to look past. But hike up there and you will find a living wilderness, still rough and sharp and brimming with life.

Olds’s artistic signature — what really makes Sharon Olds Sharon Olds — is a kind of aggressive intimacy: a willingness to write, with stunning lack of restraint or shame or embarrassment, about the most private aspects of human experience. She is our great translator of what she has called “all the eloquence of the body.” Over the decades, as Olds has aged, her poetry has not flinched. If anything, it has grown more free. Her collection “Odes,” published when she was 73, began with an “Ode to the Hymen” and went on to include odes to the clitoris, penis, condom, tampon, douche bag, menstrual blood, stretch marks and testicles. There is a “Hip Replacement Ode” and an “Ode to My Whiteness” and an “Ode to the Last Thirty-Eight Trees in New York City Visible From This Window.” There is also — classic Olds — a “Blow Job Ode.”

Olds is every bit as sexually frank as any of her 20th-century male near-peers (Roth and Updike come swaggering to mind), but she also adds something new. She is ravenously interested, always, in what it means to be deeply embedded in a family — not just alienated from it, or limited by it, but part of it, in the most intimate and integrated and vulnerable ways. She has described, in astonishing detail, all the urgent minutiae of ordinary family life: breastfeeding, cleaning up spills, sending kids off to camp and college. This careful chronicling has produced the story, transformed through poetry, of an entire life, daily and monumental: sex, birth, parenthood, divorce, illness, abuse; dead gerbils and dead parents and the perpetually dying human body. She is our poet laureate of the beauty and wreckage of domestic life.

Olds’s work has had a huge influence, for generations now, on other writers. “As a young female poet, I remember almost a fear of the intensity, of the honesty,” says Deborah Garrison, who now works as Olds’s editor at Knopf. “I was fascinated and terrified.” But Olds’s boldness, Garrison says, opened up a radical new space. “It’s like she gave us a framework for understanding structures of love in a family. She’s put a road map there for, never mind being a poet, but just being a woman who’s an adult. It’s almost like we can feel that we lived Sharon’s life, if that’s not a bizarre thing to say.”

Ocean Vuong, who teaches alongside Olds at N.Y.U., first discovered her work as a student, roaming the library, pulling out books by authors he had vaguely heard of. He calls Olds’s poetry “foundational” to his career. “Her writing opened doors for so many people,” he told me. “Whether you read her or not, if you write about the body’s position against pleasure, and the profound and the profane, you’re writing in the shadow of Sharon Olds.”

Olds was born in San Francisco in 1942. Her childhood, she has said, was “hellfire Calvinist.” Her father was a steel salesman — in the poetry, he is portrayed as silent, cold, drunk, casually misogynistic. Her mother was a housewife who, in the poems, sometimes wields a tortoiseshell hairbrush as a weapon of punishment. The atmosphere was severe and repressed, pure sepia midcentury American. If you didn’t finish your dinner, it would be served to you again, cold, the following night.

From the beginning, young Sharon felt that she didn’t fit in. “I would put it this way,” she told me. “I don’t mind talking this way — I know it seems so dumb — but: I was born a pagan. There is no question in my mind that when I was born, I was not a Calvinist. At all. I had no interest in Calvinism when I was born. I was a little human animal. I danced a lot, from when I could stand up. I loved flowers. I was sentimental, emotional — not in a sick way. I was happy. I was a goofy little kid.”

She says that her older sister, recognizing this, tried to protect her. (“I don’t know if she was a pagan,” Olds says. “She was more thoughtful than I. And beautiful.”) But the parents were too powerful. Olds has written, extensively and obsessively, with sorrow and anger and empathy, about her parents. She has described, for instance, in multiple poems, a day her parents tied her to a chair, hostage-style, for spilling a bottle of ink on their bed. “I was strangely happy,” she writes in one version. “I would never say I was sorry, I had left that life behind.”

Back then, Olds kept her angst to herself. “When I was a child, there was no idea that children should tell anyone what their troubles were,” she told me. “Zero. If there were troubling things in a family, the most important thing was that no one would find out.” But eventually, in Olds’s case, everyone would find out. Decades later, her poetry would reimagine and probe the family secrets with so much naked candor it could blow out a church’s stained-glass windows.

After leaving home (boarding school in New York, college at Stanford, Ph.D. from Columbia), Olds would go on to document everything, good and bad, in a kind of rolling poetic autobiography. She would write, over and over, about childhood punishments, about her parents’ divorce, about going through puberty, about making out with boys in cars. She would write about having multiple orgasms and the revolutionary reversal of childbirth: “it was like being/entered for the first time, but entered/from the inside, the child coming in/from the other world.” She would write a poem called “After 37 Years My Mother Apologizes for My Childhood.” (“I hardly knew what I /said or who I would be now that I had forgiven you.”) All the intense religious energy Olds grew up marinating in seemed to be transferred, in the work, to the mundanity of everyday life. Ordinary events are sanctified by the light of her attention, elevated by her distinctive hymnlike rhythms. From the poem “Life With Sick Kids”:

One child coughs once
and is sick for eight weeks, then the other child coughs so
hard he nearly vomits, three weeks, and then
stops and then the first child coughs a first cough,
and then the other delicately and dryly begins to cough,
death taking them up and shaking them
as kids shake boxes at Christmas.

Poetry allowed Olds to play her whole life like a xylophone: All those stories, sitting there in cold silence, could be struck and made to sing.

In the 1970s, when Olds started submitting poems to literary journals, the reception was not encouraging. In those days, Olds’s signature subjects were considered narrow, trivial, domestic, “female.” One editor, in his rejection, added some advice: “If you wish to write about this sort of subject, may we suggest The Ladies’ Home Journal.” Even decades later, after Olds had established herself, criticism followed her. Helen Vendler, the formidable literary critic, once dismissed Olds’s work as “pornographic.” Others, more subtly, relegated it to the school of “confessionalism” — a classification that often suggests, among poets, something like “diary entries with line breaks.”

“It’s a coded pejorative,” Vuong told me. “It’s interesting — there were poets who confessed a lot more who don’t get that moniker. We see this in Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara. What is it about certain poets that confess so much but don’t get that pejorative? The trend is that it’s often given to women after Sylvia Plath. A lot of it is misogyny, quite frankly, in the guise of defending the virtues of the art. It’s very thinly veiled.”

The poet Terrance Hayes, another of Olds’s N.Y.U. colleagues, agrees. “If you think she’s confessional, then I’m confessional, too,” he says. “Let’s just say, whatever it is that Sylvia Plath gave us — if you are a Sylvia Plath fan, and I am — Sharon is some evolution of that.”

But Hayes insists that Olds’s work is too distinctive to be contained by such a limiting term. “It’s almost too weird to be fully confessional,” he told me. “I don’t know how to articulate that. It’s her. Whatever her frequency is as a person on the planet.” He compared Olds to poets like Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg and Sonia Sanchez, both in her longevity in the poetry world and in the idiosyncrasy of her voice. “What they’re really doing is channeling a certain very personal, very hard to replicate energy. They’re tracking some kind of frequency that is just theirs. It’s too simple to call it a diary entry, or even testimony.” Some of Olds’s poems, Hayes says, are like “overhearing a kind of prayer” — “something private and individual that we bear witness to. And not all poets are like that.”

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Credit...Ruven Afanador for The New York Times

Olds is, indeed, extremely weird. This is a woman who once referred to her father, in a published poem, as “my sperm king,” who once described wanting to nurse from a large-breasted stranger she saw on the subway (“I am so/tired, and thirsty”). Olds once imagined, in gruesome detail, her own cremation:

And I know what happens in the fire closet,
when the elbow tendons shrink in the heat, and I
want it to happen — I want, dead, to
pull up my hands in fists, I want
to go out as a pugilist.

In Olds’s best work, this absolute private weirdness comes into contact, like lava hitting seawater, with the most universal experiences in human life. The resulting poems are simultaneously familiar and bizarre. Consider, for instance, her slim masterpiece “The Father”: 52 short poems describing, with shocking intimacy, the illness and death of the terrifying man who raised her. The book takes place mostly in a hospital room, in the orbit of this “large man gone small with cancer.” The experience brings daughter and father closer; they even laugh together. When the doctor informs her father that he is beyond a cure, he answers, simply, “Thank you,” then sits there “with the dignity of a foreign leader.” “At the end of his life,” Olds writes, “his life began to wake in me.”

The book proceeds through grief, rage, love, tenderness. It rises to wild intensities. Olds imagines eating her father’s ashes. She imagines, perversely, being back inside his testicles “the day before he cast me.” (“I am his flesh, he can love me without/reserve, I will be his pleasure.”) She is there in the end, a witness to “the smallness of his last breath, dust-ball under a doll-house bed.”

In her father’s death, the whole human life span comes together like a terrible chord. The book’s final poem is called “My Father Speaks to Me From the Dead.” It is a monologue about the things he loves about his daughter, including the parts of her body. (“Of course I love/your breasts — did you see me looking up/from within your daughter’s face, as she nursed?”) And it ends with a devastating connection that is also a disconnection, a final statement of the reality, and the impossibility, of love:

I have been in a body without breath,
I have been in the morgue, in fire, in the slagged
chimney, in the air over the earth,
and buried in the earth, and pulled down
into the ocean — where I have been
I understand this life, I am matter,
your father, I made you, when I say now that I love you
I mean look down at your hand, move it,
that action is matter’s love, for human
love go elsewhere.

Back in Olds’s smallish New York City apartment — after a comically brief tour (“this is a closet, this is another closet”) and a discussion of where we should sit (“I’ve just realized that this chair is broken”) — right when we were beginning to row out into deep conversational waters, Olds suddenly hesitated.

“Is this too personal to say?” she asked.

I was amazed. Sharon Olds worrying about oversharing is like LeBron James worrying about jumping too high, or like the Golden Gate Bridge worrying that it might be too orange. And yet, during our conversation, she did this several times. “Can I say things to you that we’ll then pretend I didn’t say?” she asked. “Is it legal to say this?” she wondered. (I had asked, this last time, where her sister lives; Olds declined to say.)

“I have part of my family that doesn’t mind being talked about, and part of my family that does,” she told me. “And I respect that. To have a parent who is a, what you might call, ‘family poet’ — who grows up wishing for that? Nobody. Nobody!”

Olds’s two children are now fully grown. She prefers not to say much about them. She has always been keenly conscious of the way her work might affect their lives. For their benefit, she waited 10 years to publish what would become her 10th collection, “Stag’s Leap,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning book-length account of her divorce from her first husband. Olds won’t even say, on the record, if she has grandchildren.

But privacy is not her only hesitation. Part of Olds’s resistance is aesthetic, philosophical. A voice on a page, as any good literature teacher will remind you, is not the same thing as a human being in the world. “I” is a character, like any other — maybe especially when it seems to be telling the truth. In her teaching, and since the beginning of her career, Olds has always insisted on a distance, however small, between her work and her life. “Around the workshop table,” she told me, “I will say to someone: I think the characterization of the speaker’s mother, in your poem, is da da da. I just can’t say the words — I’m having trouble even now — I can’t say, I just can’t say, ‘your mother in your poem.’ I can’t say it. Because first of all, it’s paper and pen. It’s not a person. It’s a speaker’s vision of a person. I said this in the beginning, probably, to protect everyone. Myself and everyone else. Because people didn’t do that a lot then. People didn’t write intimately about their own family.”

But there were other reasons, too. “I mean, this was what, 50 years ago?” Olds said. “This was my huffy little complaint: that the guys all got asked about their craft. And to me, people would say, ‘Did that really happen to you?’ That wasn’t what anything had anything to do with, as far as I was concerned. I wanted to be an artist! That’s a little ignorant, I now see. I couldn’t see that my work was inviting this. Because of course people care about what happens to other people, especially children.”

Olds prefers to hedge by calling her work “apparently personal.” One day, on a visit to a high school, a student called her out for this. “What do you mean, ‘apparently personal’?” she remembers him saying. “If I thought you made this up, I would be very mad at you.” Olds was taken aback. But she also agreed. “Bravo,” she told the student. “I would feel exactly the same way. Forgive me that I can’t say the words. But you’re right. You’re right!”

Olds still writes by hand, in cheap spiral-bound notebooks. When she’s really humming, she can fill a whole notebook in just a few days. Only a small fraction of this private writing will ever be published. Publication, for Olds, is not entirely the point. The act of writing itself, she insists, is fun — a physical discipline that sits somewhere between drawing and dancing. Olds writes searchingly, as a way to think and feel herself through the world. In her apartment, she told me that she had written, just that morning, a poem partly inspired by her feelings about our upcoming conversation. “Clouds of meaning were rolling this way and that,” she said.

When Olds finishes a notebook, she gets very organized. (“I’m kind of a fussbudget,” she says.) She records its start and end dates. She creates an index. She reads the material over and over, dog-earing pages. In this way, she builds up a huge archive of thinking and feeling; although her finished books tend to be slim, they carry inside them, hidden like dark matter, the gravity of all the unpublished writing that helped make them possible.

People get so caught up in Olds’s provocative subject matter that they can underestimate the rigorous pleasures of her style. She is, deep down, a showboat. Her opening lines (“You get so soft when you get sick”) are sharp little hooks. Her endings are surprising but sound; they make me think, often, of a gymnast twisting off the vault before suddenly, before we’re quite ready, thumping into a balanced landing. Although Olds writes free verse, it is strenuously rhythmic, and she obsesses about where the different “beats” will fall. With these tools, she can make huge poetic events happen in tiny spaces; thoughts and feelings and images can flip, almost instantly, into their opposites. It’s like seeing an aircraft carrier make a U-turn in a swimming pool.

Olds’s latest collection, “Balladz,” was written largely during quarantine. It is, accordingly, a sad and lonely book. Olds’s longtime companion, Carl, died in February 2020, just weeks before Covid shut down the world. She spent the next two years, alone, in a house in the woods in the Hudson Valley. The poems hold that isolated energy. Olds writes, with her usual shocking openness, about Carl’s death — she compares the two of them, pressed together in his hospice bed, to a tightly coiled sprout emerging from a germinating seed. She writes about masturbation and sex dreams. (“Sometimes I sleep with a different man in my sleep every night.”) She writes a poem about not killing a spider (“With a juice glass/and a large postcard,/I trapped the glorious dancer”) and two consecutive poems about killing a centipede. Once again, she imagines her own death. And of course she returns, with fresh intensity, to her parents, especially her mother. When Olds read the finished manuscript, she told me, she was shocked. “No one should read more than one poem at a time from this book,” she said. “Someone might get a serious stomachache from reading several of these in a row.”

Olds continues to write, as she has for decades now, about her aging body. As she puts it in “Balladz,” “My equipment for staying alive is wearing out.” “Well, I have two metal hips and then one swollen leg,” she told me. “I forget what it’s called — my big leg.” She laments that she can no longer dance. Her hands shake because of something called an “essential tremor.” It feels, she says, as if her body is humming, the same way an air-conditioner makes a room hum. “It’s not Parkinson’s,” she said. “And it’s not circumstantial — or whatever the opposite is to essential. ‘Unnecessary’? It’s essential.” At the Frost Medal ceremony, Olds spilled a glass of water on the floor. To eat a bowl of soup, she has to steady the spoon with both hands, then lean way down over the bowl.

She does not seem particularly bothered by any of this. In fact, as Olds described her laborious soup-eating technique, she got very excited remembering a bowl of soup she ate recently at a restaurant. “Chickpeas, kale, turmeric, curry — haaaaaaa!” she said, moaning with deep shuddering pleasure.

Even on the brink of 80, the pagan child was alive and well. She has found other ways to dance. Olds and I sat talking in her apartment for nearly three hours, during which time she moaned, with similar pleasure, over all kinds of things: the names of writers she loves, her students’ poetry, the deliciousness of the doughnuts at a shop called Dream Fluff in Berkeley. She spoke, with passionate interest, about the N.B.A. playoffs, which she had been watching religiously. She showed me pages in her notebook — the same notebook in which she does her daily writing — where she had sketched drawings of key plays (Jrue Holiday stealing the ball from Marcus Smart) and listed, very neatly, the height and weight and wingspan of every player on the Miami Heat.

Sharon Olds, in other words — I will say it again — is gloriously weird. In the same way that calling her poetry “confessional” is inadequate, it is silly to reduce her personality to the first impression she makes: sweet, timid, nurturing — “almost like she’s your darling third-grade teacher,” as Deborah Garrison put it, laughing. “You meet her and she seems both fragile and sensitive,” Hayes told me. “But she’s also very sly. She’s got three eyes on her all the time. You know what I mean? In person, there’s something much more bouncy and nimble. And weirder. She’s always sort of handling things in a very slippery and elegant way. I had to be around her long enough to see how that’s in the lining of the poems.”

In the poetry, the clearest evidence of Olds’s nimble slippery bounciness, I think, is in her use of similes. Sometimes she will go on runs of colorful comparisons, like a rapper or a stand-up comedian. “I have real simile brain,” she told me. “My brain sees in similes.” Years ago, a great friend, the poet Galway Kinnell, caused a brief crisis in her life when he denounced similes in favor of metaphors. Nothing, he insisted, is really like anything else. “Oh, my God, he’s right!” Olds thought. “He’s so smart! I’m so dumb! Oh, my God!”

But then she realized something: The two friends just had different brains. A little space existed between the two of them — and this space was actually what made the relationship interesting. That’s exactly how a simile works. Olds has never been comfortable saying definitively, as metaphors do, that something is something else. She ascribes this to her terrifying childhood experience of religion, the idea that blood was wine, that body was bread. To this day, she clings to the comforting distance of that “like.” Blood is like wine, yes; body is like bread, sure — in the same way that a poem is like a real experience but not the thing itself. In the same way that death is like birth, sorrow is like joy, a poet is like a host, an ending is like a beginning. To have a simile brain, as Olds does, is to live in a world of radical interconnection, a world in which nothing stands alone, nothing is ever only itself. And yet everything, in that vast network of mutual meanings, is allowed to remain exactly itself.


Sam Anderson is a staff writer for the magazine. He last wrote about animals for the recent Voyages Issue.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 52 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Secrets and Lies. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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