Sharon Olds
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Sharon Olds (born November 19, 1942) is an American poet and author of eight volumes of poetry.
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[edit] Life
Sharon Olds was born in 1942 in San Francisco. She was raised as a "hellfire Calvinist."[1] After graduating from Stanford University she moved east to earn a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University. Olds has been the recipient of many awards including the San Francisco Poetry Center Award, and the T. S. Eliot Prize.[2]
She currently teaches creative writing at New York University.[3]
[edit] Letter to Laura Bush
In 2005, First Lady Laura Bush invited Olds to the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. Olds responded, declining the invitation in an open letter published in the October 10th, 2005 issue of The Nation. 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. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.[4]
[edit] Poetry
Her 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, sexuality, family relationships, and the body. The reviewer for The New York Times hailed Olds's poetry for its vision: "Like Whitman, Ms. Olds sings the body in celebration of a power stronger than political oppression."[5] Alicia Ostriker described as an "erotics of family love and pain."(28).
Olds’ work is anthologized in over 100 collections, ranging from literary/poetry textbooks to special collections. Her poetry has been translated into seven languages for international publications. She was the New York State Poet Laureate for 1998-2000.[6]
[edit] Honors & Awards
- Satan Says (1980), received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award.
- National Book Critics Circle Award.
- The Dead and the Living, won the 1983 Lamont Poetry Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
- The Father, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and was a finalist for The National Book Critics’ Circle Award.
- Her poem "I Go Back to May 1937" was recited in the 2007 film Into the Wild to illustrate the family dysfunction of the main character.
[edit] Bibliography
- Satan Says. University of Pittsburgh Press. 1980. ISBN 9780822934134.
- The One Girl at the Boys' Party (1983)
- The Dead and the Living. Knopf. 1984. ISBN 9780394530482.
- The Gold Cell. Knopf. 1987. ISBN 9780394556994.
- The Father. Secker & Warburg. 1993. ISBN 9780436339523.
- The Wellspring (1996)
- Blood, Tin, Straw. Knopf Publishing Group. 1999. ISBN 9780375707353.
- The Unswept Room. Tandem Library. 2002. ISBN 9781417709373.
- Strike Sparks: Selected Poems. Knopf. 2004. ISBN 9781400042784.
- One Secret Thing. Random House, Inc.. 2008. ISBN 9780307269928. http://books.google.com/books?id=V9Uz2oTYoBEC&printsec=frontcover&dq=inauthor:Sharon+inauthor:Olds.
[edit] Reviews
Author Michael Ondaatje:
Sharon Olds's poems are pure fire in the hands--risky, on the verge of falling, and in the end leaping up. I love the roughness and humor and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss.[7][citation needed]
Admirers of Olds’s poems will find more of them in this, her ninth collection. 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.[8]
Sharon Olds is a stunning poet, and this volume gathers together much of her best writing from the past 26 years. She has always confronted the personal details of her life with remarkable directness and honesty, but the key to her success is the way this material is lit up by a range of finely judged shifts in scale and perspective. Her poems are vivid morality plays, wrestling with ideas of right and wrong, full of symbolic echoes and possibilities.[9]
[edit] References
- ^ "About Sharon Olds". Modern American Poetry. University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/olds/about.htm.
- ^ http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=5124
- ^ http://cwp.fas.nyu.edu/object/cwp.faculty.sharonolds
- ^ Sharon Olds (September 19, 2005). "Open Letter to Laura Bush". The Nation. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051010/olds.
- ^ "SHARON OLDS, Author's Page". The New York Writer's Institute. http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/olds.html.
- ^ http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/olds.html
- ^ "The Wellspring: Poems". amazon.com. http://www.amazon.com/Wellspring-Poems-Sharon-Olds/dp/product-description/0679765603.
- ^ JOEL BROUWER (April 24, 2009). "Poetry Chronicle". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/books/review/Brouwer-t.html.
- ^ Charles Bainbridge (11 February 2006). "Seeing things". The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/feb/11/featuresreviews.guardianreview21.
[edit] External links
- Audio recording (.mp3) of Sharon Olds reading from her work at the Key West Literary Seminar, January 2003
- Poems by Sharon Olds at PoetryFoundation.org
- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - Modern American Poetry's Sharon Olds section
- Reviews of Blood, Tin, Straw
- Olds' Poet Laureate site
- DWIGHT GARNER (May 1997). "Sharon Olds, The Salon Interview". Salon.com. http://www.salon.com/weekly/interview960701.html.
- Marianne Macdonald (26 July 2008). "Olds' worlds': Interview". The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jul/26/poetry.
- Video: Sharon Olds reads "A Supermarket in California" by Allen Ginsberg from the book Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud edited by Robert Pinsky.
