![]() She was the New York State Poet Laureate for 1998-2000.Īuthor Michael Ondaatje says of her work "Sharon Olds's poems are pure fire in the hands, risky, on the verge of falling, and in the end leaping up. ![]() Her poetry has been translated into seven languages for international publications. 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" " Olds’ work is anthologized in over 100 collections, ranging from literary/poetry textbooks to special collections. Olds sings the body in celebration of a power stronger than political oppression." Alicia Ostriker noted Olds traces the "erotics of family love and pain." Ostriker continues: "In later collections, writes of an abusive childhood, in which miserably married parents bully and punish and silence her. A reviewer for The New York Times hailed her poetry for its vision: "Like Whitman, Ms. Olds' book The 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. In "The Sisters of Sexual Treasure" she writes,Īs soon as my sister and I got out of our Old's first collection Satan Says sets up the sexual and bodily candour that would run through much of her work. 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." Olds has commented that she is more informed by the work of poets such as Galway Kinnell, Muriel Rukeyser and Gwendolyn Brooks than by confessional poets like Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath. Freed up, she began to write about her family, abuse, sex, focusing on the work not the audience. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it".įollowing her Phd on Emerson's prosody, Olds let go of an attachment to what she thought she 'knew about' poetic convention. The letter closes: "So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. Olds responded, declining the invitation in an open letter published in the October 10th, 2005 issue of The Nation. ![]() In 2005, First Lady Laura Bush invited Olds to the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. She currently teaches creative writing at New York University. Olds has been the recipient of many awards including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the San Francisco Poetry Center Award. in English from Columbia University on the prosody of Emerson's poems. The four-beat was something that was just part of my consciousness from before I was born." She adds "I think I was about 15 when I conceived of myself as an atheist, but 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." After graduating from Stanford University she moved east to earn a Ph.D. She says she was by nature "a pagan and a pantheist" and notes "I was in a church where there was both great literary art and bad literary art, the great art being psalms and the bad art being hymns. She was raised as a “hellfire Calvinist”, as she describes it. Sharon Olds was born in 1942 in San Francisco.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |