OLDS, Sharon

Born 19 November 1942, San Francisco, California

Sharon Olds writes in the tradition of the confessional poets, especially of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, but has turned their poetic idiom to new purpose. Where Plath and Sexton bitterly denounced the state of affairs for women, they paradoxically sought haven in the persona of the crazy lady and threatened harm to themselves rather than the world. Olds speaks with similar energy, vividness, and emotional urgency about her life as a woman, as both daughter and mother, but seeks catharsis and healing rather than destruction of the self. The raw power of her poetry, which caused the critic David Leavitt to remark that "I was inclined to turn my eyes from the page," is often leavened by a wry humor.

Olds received a B.A. from Stanford University in 1964 and a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1972. She has taught poetry in many places, including the Theodor Herzl Institute, the Poetry Center at the YMCA in New York City, Goldwater Memorial Hospital (Roosevelt Island, New York), and at many colleges and universities, including Sarah Lawrence, Columbia, State University of New York at Purchase, and Brandeis. The Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts (1982-83) have awarded her fellowships. Satan Says (1980) received the San Francisco Poetry Center award in 1981, and The Dead and the Living (1984) was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets for 1984 and received the National Book Critics Circle award in 1985.

Love—erotic, maternal, and compassionate—lies at the heart of her poetic project. Rage lies there too, but rage is to be exorcised in relation to her own past and to be deployed in the present in defense of the vulnerable, like her own children and people caught in political violence. She can even rage in defense of the father, who has hurt her deeply. In "Late Poem to My Father," she thinks of him as a child, "the / tiny bones inside his soul / twisted in greenstick fractures, the small / tendons that hold the heart in place / snapped. And what they did to you / you did not do to me." Her fourth book, The Father (1992), is reminiscent of the deathwatch poetry of the 19th century. The poems lovingly and relentlessly detail the death of the father and the speaker's care for him.

Olds celebrates the body in the tradition of Walt Whitman. Sex, as human connection, regeneration, and a source of great energy, is sacred. Likewise, all the functions of the body, male and female, are sacred: menstruation, childbirth, dying, nursing, miscarriage. She revels in sexual life and in the sensual poem. In Olds' world there are no dirty words; she uses the common names, "cock, sex, nipples," and "fucking," domesticates and reclaims them. In the short lyric "The Pope's Penis," the pope cannot repress his penis, but Olds converts failure into spiritual triumph: "and at night, / while his eyes sleep, it stands up / in praise of God."

This maternal and erotic love of the body determines Olds' straightforward politic: love the body of the person, love the body of the world. To affirm the life of the human body stresses the preciousness of each and every life and our mutual belonging. Olds transforms William Carlos Williams' famous imperative, as poet Linda McCarriston notes: "No ideas but in beings." The poet asserts an intimate connection with others, no matter how distant, who are hurt. Olds' refusal to maintain a conventional poetic distance from her subjects conveys what Alicia Ostriker calls a "tacit moral imperative." She serves as a clear-eyed, compassionate witness; where others retreat behind irony, she confronts horror directly.

Olds' fifth collection, The Wellspring, continues the poetic exploration of her personal life found in her previous collections. In the nine years since her last collection, her children have grown up and her perspective has subtly changed. The savage quality of her poems, which perhaps began to ease in The Gold Cell, seems to have further abated. Not that her fierce attention has diminished; her sense of wonder and her imaginative scrutiny persist in full force, but with an increased sense of affection, wisdom, and humor.

The Wellspring is another intimate portrait of Olds' family as seen through various points in her life cycle. More than anything else, these portraits continue to demonstrate the physical urgency, the primacy, of the physical in human life; the title explicitly refers to this—a watery source of physical life.

In The Gold Cell Olds laments her parents' union in the poem "I Go Back to May 1937." She wants to warn them how wrong they are for each other, the grief they will come to. Still, in her imagination she doesn't intervene because, of course, she wants to live. In The Wellspring, Olds envisions a happier set of circumstances; rather than dwelling on her parents' loveless sex, she imagines herself and her brother swimming in her father's testicles; she imagines her mother at her own birth, "bearing down, pressing me out into / the world that was not enough for her without me in it." This fascination with life's beginnings can also be seen in the poem "May 1968." Here, even as Olds lies in the street at a student protest, her attention shifts from the action above, namely advancing mounted police, to the drama within, where she is keenly aware of the life she holds there, the child she believes she's conceived.

Olds remains a clear-eyed witness to her own life. If her more recent poems seem to admit more light, perhaps it is because she has come to peace with her childhood and has chosen to step out of the dark tangle of her rage.