POET

Sharon Olds (1942 - )

BIOGRAPHY

Sharon Olds is one of contemporary poetry’s leading voices. Winner of several prestigious awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize, 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). Satan Says explores “the roles in which she experiences herself, ‘Daughter,’ ‘Woman,’ and ‘Mother,’“ according to Mueller. In an article for the American Book Review, Joyce Peseroff claimed that throughout Satan Says, “the language often does ‘turn neatly about.’ In Olds’s vocabulary ordinary objects, landscapes—even whole planets—are in constant motion. Using verbs which might seem, at first, almost grotesque, she manages to describe a violent, changing universe…In a way, these poems describe a psychic world as turbulent, sensual, and strange as a world seen under water…Sharon Olds convincingly, and with astonishing vigor, presents a world which, if not always hostile, is never clear about which face it will show her.”

In a review for the Nation, Richard Tillinghast commented on Olds’s next volume, The Dead and the Living (1984): “While Satan Says was impossible to ignore because of its raw power, The Dead and the Living is a considerable step forward…Olds is a keen and accurate observer of people.” Elizabeth Gaffney in America declared Olds “courageous,” noting that “out of private revelations she makes poems of universal truth, of sex, death, fear, love. Her poems are sometimes jarring, unexpected, bold, but always loving and deeply rewarding.” David Leavitt observed that Olds’s “poetry focuses on the primacy of the image rather than the ‘issues’ which surround it, and her best work exhibits a lyrical acuity which is both purifying and redemptive.” The Father (1992), a collection of poems about the death of Olds’s father from cancer, revolves around such a “primacy of the image.” Olds describes her father’s illness, his final days, and his death in a series of closely observed, graphic poems. Writing in Belles Lettres, Lee Upton remarked that the collection “amounts to something close to a spiritual ordeal for the reader, for the poems are wrenching in their candor and detail.” American Book Review contributor Steve Kowit stated: “As a coherent sequence of poems, The Father has a most uncommon power—impelling the reader forward with the narrative and dramatic force of a stunning novel.” Olds keeps the focus tightly fixed on her dying father, cataloguing the details of a death seen intimately. Reviewers found Olds’s unwavering gaze both the book’s strength and its weakness. Clair Willis of the Times Literary Supplement commented that “the volume as a whole is a risky undertaking, nearly marred simply by offering us too much of the same. Yet finally it works.”

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’s ninth volume, The Unswept Room (2002), deals loosely with the implications of motherhood; in the Guardian, Carol Rumens described it as having a “maternal slant.” Rumens continued that the theme was “never as relentlessly central or focused as the father…in previous collections…[and] often perceived as a faltering, otherworldly voice, a nymph or dryad crying, singing or softly complaining, mother elicits a more fluttering and uncertain response from her daughter-confessor.” Kate Daniels, reviewing The Unswept Room in the Women’s Review of Books, also noted the new note in Olds’s work: “without abandoning her characteristic intensity, [Olds] continues to disquiet and decenter, but in a newly ruminative voice that bespeaks the journey of mid-life.” Daniels observed that “as carefully as an archeologist, [Olds] combs through the accoutrements of a life in late middle age,” and added that “clearly, the philosophical and spiritual development within so many of the poems in The Unswept Room suggests a poet who is preparing herself for the remainder of life rather than mourning her past or bemoaning lost opportunities…Perhaps it is because the room of Olds’s life is yet unswept, redolent with the delicious detritus that composes any life.”

Olds released a collection of selected poems, Strike Spark, 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, sex and the body among them. 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. We bounce around in time and with each pass by a topic we see it more clearly or from a different perspective. 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.” Echoing the consistent criticism of Olds as self-fixated, Olivia Laing wrote a mixed review in the Guardian, declaring that “at best, Olds’s solipsistic scrutiny bears linguistic fruits of astonishing juiciness—and no one can write about sex with such ardent precision. At worst, her poems resemble the enjambed guts of an eloquent narcissist.”

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.

[Updated 2010]

CAREER

Poet. Lecturer-in-residence on poetry at Theodor Herzl Institute, 1976-80; visiting teacher of poetry at Manhattan Theater Club, 1982, Nathan Mayhew Seminars of Martha's Vineyard, 1982, Poetry Center, Young Men's Christian Association of New York City, 1982, Poetry Society of America, 1983, New York University, 1983 and 1985, Sarah Lawrence College, 1984, Goldwater Hospital, Roosevelt Island, NY, 1985-90, Columbia University, 1985-86, and State University of New York College at Purchase, 1986. Holder of Fanny Hurst Chair, Brandeis University, 1986-87; New York University, New York, NY, associate professor of English, 1992—, acting director of graduate program in creative writing. Founding director, New York University workshop program at Goldwater Hospital, New York.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

POETRY

Satan Says, University of Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 1980.
The Dead and the Living, Knopf (New York, NY), 1984.
The Gold Cell, Knopf (New York, NY), 1987.
The Matter of This World, Slow Dancer Press, 1987.
The Sign of Saturn, Secker & Warburg, 1991.
The Father, Knopf (New York, NY), 1992.
The Wellspring: Poems, Knopf (New York, NY), 1996.
Blood, Tin, Straw, Knopf (New York, NY), 1999.
The Unswept Room, Knopf (New York, NY), 2002.
Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980-2002, Knopf (New York, NY), 2004.
One Secret Thing, Knopf (New York, NY), 2008.

OTHER

(Author of foreword) Tory Dent, What Silence Equals, Persea Books (New York, NY) 1993.
(Author of preface) Muriel Rukeyser, The Orgy: An Irish Journey of Passion and Transformation, Paris Press (Ashfield, MA) 1997.

CONTRIBUTOR TO ANTHOLOGIES

The Norton Introduction to Poetry, 2nd edition, Norton (New York, NY), 1981.
The Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Robert Pack, Sydney Lea, and Jay Parini, University Press of New England (Hanover, NH), 1985.
Three Genres, The Writing of Poetry, Fiction, and Drama, edited by Stephen Minot, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1988.
The Pushcart Prize, VIII: Best of the Small Presses, Wainscott, 1989.
Read to Write, Donald M. Murray, Holt (New York, NY), 1990.
The Longman Anthology of American Poetry: Colonial to Contemporary, edited by Hilary Russell, Longman (New York, NY), 1992.
The Armless Maiden: And Other Tales for Childhood's Survivors, edited by Terri Windling, Tor, (New York, NY), 1995.
For a Living: The Poetry of Work, edited by Nicholas Coles and Peter Oresick, University of Illinois Press, (Urbana, IL), 1995.
Our Mothers, Our Selves: Writers and Poets Celebrating Motherhood, edited by J. B. Bernstein, Karen J. Donnelly, Bergin & Garvey Trade, 1996.
The House Is Made of Poetry: The Art of Ruth Stone edited by Wendy Barker, Sandra M. Gilbert, Southern Illinois University Press (Carbondale, IL), 1996.
By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry, edited by Molly McQuade, Graywolf Press (Saint Paul, MN), 2000.
Literature and Its Writers: A Compact Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, edited by Ann Charters, Samuel Charters, Bedford/St. Martin's Press (Boston, MA) 2004.

Contributor to literary journals and magazines, including American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, Atlantic Monthly, Iowa Review, Kayak, Kenyon Review, Massachusetts Review, Mississippi Review, Ms., New Republic, Nation, New Yorker, Paris Review, Pequod, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, and Yale Review. Olds's works have been translated into Italian, Chinese, French, and Russian.