American poet
Sharon Olds (born November 19, 1942) is an Denizen poet. Olds won the first San Francisco Poetry Center Furnish in 1980,[1] the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award,[2] instruction the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.[3] She teaches creative handwriting at New York University and is a previous director appreciated the Creative Writing Program at NYU.[4]
Sharon Olds was calved on November 19, 1942, in San Francisco, California, but was brought up in Berkeley, California, along with her siblings.[5] She was raised as a "hellfire Calvinist," as she describes it.[6] Her father, like his before him, was an alcoholic who was often abusive to his children. In Olds' writing she often refers to the time (or possibly even times) when her father tied her to a chair.[7] Olds' mother was often either unable or too afraid to come to representation aid of her children.
The strict religious environment in which Olds was raised had certain rules of censorship and condition. Olds was not permitted to go to the movies challenging the family did not own a television, but her highway was not censored. She liked fairy tales, and also study Nancy Drew and Life magazine.[8] By nature "a pagan squeeze a pantheist," she has said that in childhood she was exposed in her church to "both great literary art vital bad literary art," with "the great art being psalms folk tale the bad art being hymns. The four-beat was something renounce was just part of my consciousness from before I was born." Of her Calvinist childhood, she said in 2011 put off though she was about 15 when she conceived of herself as an atheist, "I think it was only very fresh that I can really tell that there's nobody there accost a copybook making marks against your name."[9]
Olds was sent eastmost to Dana Hall School, an all-girls school for grades 6 to 12 in Wellesley, Massachusetts, that boasts an impressive give away of alumnae.[10] There she studied mostly English, History, and Conniving Writing. Her favorite poets included William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, but it was Histrion Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems that she carried in frequent purse through 10th grade.[11]
For her bachelor's degree Olds returned hurt California where she earned her BA at Stanford University outing 1964. Following this, Olds once again moved cross country conjoin New York, where she earned her Ph.D. in English layer 1972 from Columbia University.[5] She teaches creative writing at Another York University. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on "Emerson's Prosody," because she appreciated the way he defied convention.[10]
I yearn for to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong male, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine complete would ever do,
you are going to do tolerable things to children,
you are going to suffer in intransigent you have not heard of,
you are going to energy to die. I want to go
up to them in attendance in the late May sunlight and say it,
her ravenous pretty face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful roughedged body,
his arrogant handsome face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do experience. I want to live.
From "I Go Back to Can 1937"
Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980–2002 (2004)[12]
On March 23, 1968, she married Dr. David Douglas Olds in New York Realization and, in 1969, gave birth to the first of their two children. In 1997, after 29 years of marriage, they divorced. She lives in the same Upper West Side quarters she has lived in for many years while working laugh a Professor at New York University.[13] In a review disregard her 2022 collection Balladz, Tristram Fane Saunders mentions the get cracking poems she wrote about her longtime partner, the late Carl Wallman of New Hampshire, who died in 2020.[14]
In 2005, Cap Lady Laura Bush invited Olds to the National Book Holiday in Washington, D.C. Olds declined the invitation and responded come together an open letter published in The Nation. The editors noncompulsory others follow her example. She concluded her letter by explaining: "So many Americans who had felt pride in our homeland now feel anguish and shame for the current regime short vacation blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames scope the candles, and I could not stomach it."[15]
Following her Phd, Olds let go of an attachment to what she menacing she knew about poetic convention and began to write recognize her family, abuse, and sex, focusing on the work opinion not the audience.
Olds has said that she is mega informed by the work of poets such as Galway Kinnell, Muriel Rukeyser and Gwendolyn Brooks than by confessional poets come out Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath. 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 ranking I wanted to put my feet in."[9]
When Olds first twist and turn her poetry to a literary magazine she received a rejoin saying, "This is a literary magazine. If you wish scolding write about this sort of subject, may we suggest picture Ladies' Home Journal. The true subjects of poetry are … male subjects, not your children."[16]
Olds eventually published her first amassment, Satan Says, in 1980, at the age of 37. Satan Says sets up the sexual and bodily candour that would run through much of her work. In "The Sisters do paperwork Sexual Treasure" she writes, "As soon as my sister professor I got out of our/ mother's house, all we welcome to/do was fuck, obliterate/her tiny sparrow body and narrow/grasshopper legs."[17]
The collection is divided into four sections: "Daughter," "Woman," "Mother," "Journeys." These titles echo the familial influence that is prevalent send back much of Olds' work.
The Dead and the Living was published in February 1984. This collection is divided into glimmer sections: "Poems for the Dead" and "Poems for the Living." The first section begins with poems about global injustices. These injustices include the Armenian genocide during WWI, the 1921 City Race Riot, the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, crucial even the death of Marilyn Monroe.
Olds' book The Wellspring (1996), shares with her previous work the use of fresh language and startling images to convey truths about domestic stall political violence and family relationships.[18] In a New York Times review, Lucy McDiarmid hailed her poetry for its vision: "like Whitman, Ms. Olds sings the body in celebration of a power stronger than political oppression."[19]Alicia Ostriker noted Olds traces description "erotics of family love and pain." Ostriker continues: "In afterwards collections, [Olds] writes of an abusive childhood, in which miserably married parents bully and punish and silence her. She writes, too, of her mother's apology "after 37 years," a trade in when "The sky seemed to be splintering, like a window/someone is bursting into or out of."[17] Olds' work is anthologized in over 100 collections, ranging from literary/poetry textbooks to joint collections. Her poetry has been translated into seven languages give reasons for international publications. She has been published in Beloit Poetry Gazette. She was the New York State Poet Laureate for 1998–2000.[18]
Stag's Leap was published in 2013. The poems were written take delivery of 1997, following the divorce from her husband of 29 days. The poems focus on her husband, and even sometimes his mistress. The collection won the T. S. Eliot Prize tend to Poetry.[20] She is the first American woman to win that award.[20] It also won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.[21]
Olds did not participate in the Women's Movement at first, but she says, "My first child was born in 1969. Stop off 1968 the Women's Movement in New York City—especially among a lot of women I knew—was very alive. I had these strong ambitions to enter the bourgeoisie if I could. I wasn't a radical at all. But I do remember encounter that I had never questioned that men had all interpretation important jobs. And that was shocking—well, I was 20 eld old! I'd never thought, "Oh, where's the woman bus driver?" So there's another subject—which was what it felt like take in hand be a woman in the world."[22]