Sharon Olds-Background

Sharon Olds

Personal Life:

Sharon Olds was born in 1942 in San Fransisco, USA. If her poems mean anything she probably didn’t have a very happy early life. One aspect she found irritating about her upbringing was her family’s stern Calvinist religion, so by the time she was 15 she had identified herself as atheist. She graduated from Stanford University in 1964 and got her PhD from England’s Columbia University in 1972. Besides writing poetry she also teaches poetry and creative writing, for example in the Theodor Herzl Institute from 1976 to 1980, the year she released her first poetry collection Satan Says. She still teaches poetry and creative writing after Satan Says, first in the New York University and now in the Goldwater Hospital for the disabled.

Writing Style:

1. Not afraid to talk about her personal life e.g. in “I Go Back to May 1937” in which she recalls her parents marrying and how this set off the chain of events which are detailed in most of the poems in the rest of the collection, The Gold Cell.

2. Her works are often on morbid topics e.g. in “Photograph of the Girl”:

“She cannot be not beautiful, but she is/ starving. Each day she grows thinner, and her bones/ grow longer, porous. The caption says/ she is going to starve to death that winter/ with millions of others.”

However all in all she means to be painfully shocking but not outright depressing. For example right after the passage above the poem finishes with:

“Deep in her body/ the ovaries let out her first eggs,/ golden as drops of grain.”

3. She often touches on aspects of human interaction and relationships, for example in “The Talk” in which a mother and her 8-year-old daughter talk about the daughter’s rudeness, ending with

“She [the daughter] took it and took it and broke, crying out/ I hate being a person! diving/ into the mother/ as if/ into/ a deep pond – and she cannot swim,/ the child cannot swim.”

This paints a picture of how children and mother interact and the mother’s role in helping the child “learn to swim”. This poem might even be a personal experience the author had, either as the child or the mother.

4. She is not afraid to be politically incorrect. This is reflected in horrifying sensationalist poems like “1954”, which is about a murdering rapist, and in other poems such as “The Pope’s Penis”. As shown in the passage from “Photograph of the Girl” she isn’t afraid to describe sexual topics like ovaries and has even developed a habit of using them in understanding human nature, as well as generating bolder feelings within the readers. Her first collection, Satan Says; and her fifth one, The Wellspring, contain exceptional use of this technique.

5. She not only likes to explore the relationships between the people in her family but also likes to explore the relationships between the black and white races. For example in the poem “On the Subway” she tries to make many accurate political comparisons between a white woman(the narrator) and a black man:

“He [the black man] has the casual cold look of a mugger, alert under hooded lids...I am wearing dark fur, the whole skin of an animal taken and used.”

“I didn’t know if I am in his [the black man’s] power –he could take my coat so easily, my briefcase, my life – or if he’s in my power, the way I am living off his life, eating the steak he does not eat, as if I am taking the food from his mouth.”

Influences:

1. Galway Kinnel: Like Sharon Olds, Galway Kinnel is a contemporary poet whose poems often detail painful truths about human nature.

2. Galway Kinnel, in turn, is a follower of the humanist poet Walt Whitman, known for his sexually “obscene” poems, and Sharon Olds’ poems have in fact been connected to Whitman.

3. Sharon Olds isn’t influenced any more by woman than by men. Although she respects writers like Sylvia Plath and believes that her IQ is probably twice that of Sharon Olds’, she decided not to follow her writing style.

Collections:

1. Satan Says (1980)

2. The Dead and the Living (1984)

3. The Gold Cell (1987)

4. The Father (1992)

5. The Wellspring (1996)

6. Blood, Tin, Straw (1999)

7. The Unswept Room (2002)

8. One Secret Thing (2008)

Bibliography

· http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/sharon_olds/biography: Famous poets and poems.com. Information published around 2006-2010.

· http://www.enotes.com/poetry-criticism/olds-sharon: enotes.com, Olds, Sharon, Introduction. Information updated up to 2011.

· http://www.helium.com/items/1022128-biography-sharon-olds: Helium.com, Biography: Sharon Olds. Information published around 2006 by Cheryl Flyod-Miller.

· The Wikipedia on Sharon Olds, Galway Kinnel and Walt Whitman:

· http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharon_Olds

· http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Whitman

· http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galway_Kinnell

Resources from the Literature Resource Center at www.tki.org/epic

· Sharon Olds: Overview. Author: Tim Woods. Source: Contemporary Popular Writers. Ed. Dave Mote. Detroit: St. James Press, 1997.

· Soul Substance. Author: Christian McEwen. Source: Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Christopher Giroux. Vol. 85. Detroit: Gale Research, 1995

Poems by Sharon Olds:

· I Go Back to May 1937

· On the Subway

· Photograph of the Girl

· The Talk