Sharon Olds, poet: ‘I wish there were poems at the supermarket checkout’

No one has written about their dying father’s spit, or the Pope’s penis, or being left for another woman after 32 years of marriage like Sharon Olds, one of the most admired poets in the United States. She has a crystalline style, as well as the courage to reach a hand out to regions of the human condition that, although universal, not so many touch. There’s a certain frankness in the verses she pens about sexuality, death, guilty motherhood and difficult upbringings.

Olds holds the title of “poet laureate of the beauty and ruin of domestic life,” as well as a loyal base of readers and almost every major award given to poets in the United States. The Joan Margarit Poetry Award was recently added to her collection. She received it in New York City from the hands of the King of Spain. Margarit — the Catalan poet, who died in 2021 –—was a friend of hers. She recalled “his humor and talent for writing about ordinary lives, love and his left-wing stance on poetry.”

“He was a very attractive and sensitive person, not at all selfish,” the author tells EL PAÍS, on a splendid September morning.

The meeting was in her small office in a building from the early-20th century, which serves as the headquarters of a creative writing school associated with New York University in the Village. She has taught there since 1984. The window overlooks a small patio with a black birch tree being attacked by woodpeckers. “I sit here and watch the migratory birds. Once, a peregrine falcon landed,” the poet remembers.

Her interest in birds came after moving to New York from Berkeley, where she was born on November 19, 1942. She suffers from certain ailments that come with old age, but notes that contact with her students (who she defines as “open, intelligent and fun”) helps her, she smiles, to stay young.

Question. When you were the age of your students, did you feel part of a poetic scene?

Answer. My first book (Satan Says, 1980) didn’t come out until I was 37. It seems like a young age now, but it wasn’t then. I wasn’t part of any movement. In Berkeley, there were the beatniks… I tried to get close to them in high school. In my debut, many of the poems had to do with being a mother with young children. So, I wasn’t exactly cool.

Q. A young mother and a late poet. Were the two things connected?

A. Yes. We often write about what we love most [and] there weren’t that many poets writing about having children. It didn’t seem like a good idea, but in my case, it ended up being one. I also wrote about my childhood and adolescence and about my parents. I was a kind of family writer.

Q. Some critics dismissed your work in those years as “feminine.”

A. They considered it rude. Impolite and, yes, fundamentally feminine. At first — especially when I wrote openly about my sexuality — I received hateful letters. I was a weirdo. I dedicated myself completely to raising my children, so, when I wrote — since I wasn’t in any university, nor did I have any job to lose — I did it freely.

Q. Was it easy to move from one coast to the other?

A. When I was little, I heard people talk about New York as a very daring place. They said that “nice people didn’t live there.” I come from a politically conservative family, so, as soon as I could, I went to New York. Graduate school was very difficult for me, because I’m not smart in that way. But I did it.

Q. In what sense are you smart?

A. Actually, it wouldn’t occur to me to say [that I’m smart]. I feel comfortable with poets. It’s like being at home. There’s a certain language between us that I master… a certain way of being quick and witty. Maybe that counts as being smart.

Q. Was Berkeley a liberal city as early as the 1950s?

A. Yes, but not where I lived. I used to go to coffee shops with a friend. There, we would see real artists, painters, people reciting their poems. I was a fan, an aspiring beatnik. A bourgeois beatnik!

Q. Did you take any walks on the wild side?

A. I felt different from the California Republican Party background that I came from. But did I actually have the daring and the freedom of a real Beatnik? Not at all. I wanted a family life, a home life. I started writing. And I was happy. Obviously, today, I’ve become a character –—at my age, everyone is — but I don’t know how that happened.

Q. Is it easy for you to write?

A. It’s not easy to write well.

Q. I was referring to the act of writing itself…

A. No, I enjoy it. Problems with hand tremors and my eyes have started. It’s not as easy for me as it was for decades.

Q. Does a lot of your production never see the light of day?

A. A lot. I would say an unusual amount. I write a lot, by hand, in a notebook. For me, handwriting is related to dance. I always danced. I don’t do it as much as before, I have some arthritis and back problems. For me, writing has more to do with hand movement than typing. I like to see the shape of my lines. I have a physical relationship with my poems.

Q. What role would you say poetry plays in the United States today?

A. An extremely important one, but not so influential. I think that if children were given the opportunity to write lots of poems at school and share them — if they had time to dance or draw — it would have a huge effect. It would allow them to know what they think and feel… it would give them the courage to act on those thoughts and feelings. The potential of art in this country is enormous.

Q. You’re an optimistic woman…

A. Yes, I am. Absolutely. But do I really believe in my optimism? Let’s just say that, most of the time, I work hard to believe in it.

Q. Do you see many differences between the poet you are now and the one you were at 40 years old?

A. I think my verses are a little longer and more irregular. I also think I sometimes change the subject halfway through now. I share my poetry with a group of close friends. Since the pandemic, we meet on Zoom. It was in those meetings that it occurred to me that it’s okay to change the subject in the middle of a poem.

Q. Galway Kinnell was one of your mentors.

A. More than that, he was my best friend.

Q. He aspired to create verses that could be understood without needing a university degree.

A. Very important. When I push my cart at the grocery store, I sometimes wish there were poems at the checkout line, along with People magazine. If so, I would post my poems that can be understood without [academic] qualifications. [But I do] enjoy using strange words, so a university degree helps to understand them.

Q. What kind of words?

A. Scientific terms, species of birds, or long, complicated words that catch my attention. My children make fun of me because now they say that they need a dictionary to read my poetry.

Q. Do they read your poems?

A. Well, no. When they were little, I told them that they could read my poems when they were 21. One of them listened to me. The other one ran to my office to do it secretly.

Q. If your poems were in the supermarket, some might have to be covered, like adult magazines at gas stations.

A. [Laughs]. Some would think that I write about topics that shouldn’t be written about. There’s a lot of virulent conservatism in this country and, fortunately, I live in an environment where I don’t encounter it much. At first, my work was considered scandalous. But then, gradually, the world changed. Nowadays, it’s only half-shocking.

Q. Did the fact that you were a woman have anything to do with the way you were received at first? Some of your contemporaries — such as John Updike or Philip Roth — wrote very explicitly and nobody scolded them.

A. And they didn’t write from a woman’s point of view very often, which is why I thought it was important to do so. It’s not easy to write in an interesting and fresh way about your own experiences. When it really works, there’s as much luck as hard work.

Q. Have you ever asked permission to write about someone?

A. Most of what I write about other people doesn’t see the light of day. Because it’s simply not my business. I know it seems like I feel very free, but if you knew how much [I keep to myself], you would understand that I’m not. Writing about parents seems correct to me, because one didn’t ask to be born… [we were all small once] and they were enormous, powerful. Writing about a lover, a spouse, or a friend seems good to me, because it starts from a relationship of equality. Asking permission may be necessary at times. It probably depends on how loyal you want to be. Your children are something else, though, [because] they didn’t ask to be born.

Q. Do you get embarrassed easily?

A. I feel scared or nervous sometimes, but embarrassed… not so much. I’m not sure why. I think I learned as a child to ignore other people’s opinions. I felt afraid, because of the religion in which I was [brought up in]. There’s a lot of pleasure in writing about what no one dares to write about...

Q. When you conceive a poem such as Ode to a Blowjob, do you consider the reaction it may provoke?

A. I imagine people will laugh when they hear the title. But I think it’s an interesting poem. It contains a lot of ideas. For someone who grew up in a Puritan and Calvinist home, censorship is a source of exhaustion, so it’s a pleasure to skip it. I want to believe that Odes (the collection from 2016) may please someone who’s tired of so much silence. That book came about in part because I was immersed in a relationship that I didn’t want to write about. I expressed myself through abstractions, almost in a philosophical or historical way. It was fun to cover topics like that. Not so much in an intimate way, but as something everyday.

Q. Has poetry helped you with grief or pain?

A. Oh, sure. But I don’t believe in writing for healing purposes. Nor in forcing yourself to write to overcome pain or sadness. Now, if it comes out [naturally], it’s wonderful.

Q. Do you believe in the myth that good literature is born from unhappiness?

A. No, no. I don’t know where good literature comes from. If I knew, I would create more. Good literature comes from anything, including joy.

Q. Stag’s Leap — which earned you a Pulitzer Prize in 2013 — is a book about your divorce from your ex-husband, which caught you by surprise. Did you write it as a way to have the last word?

A. [Laughs]. Many of those poems are love poems. Love should have the last word. Oh, no, no, it’s very pitiful to have the last word. It’s not fair. Anyone who associates with a writer who writes about their personal life knows that it’s not fair. But, at the same time, if you start writing with a destructive spirit, you’ll discover that poems are useless. That’s not art. And the opposite — trying very hard to do something beautiful — doesn’t work, either.

Q. In another of your most admired collections of poems, The Father (1992), you detail the agony and death of your father, a recurring character in your work. He usually appears as a guy with a penchant for drinking — someone cold and somewhat misogynistic. You said you were born to write that book.

A. I said that a long time ago. I meant that it’s about an extremely important character, [someone who I felt] fear and admiration for, very mixed feelings. Today, I would say that it’s a book that I wouldn’t have imagined I could have written. But that’s true of all my books. Also for Stag’s Leap. Many people criticized it because it wasn’t a sufficiently angry book...

Q. And who can judge that?

A. True. But there are many love poems in it. There are decades of love, which ended in a certain way, a very common way. It was good that it was that way. It contains moments of cold anger. And that’s a good thing. But there’s also a lot of tenderness.

Q. Do you know what your ex-husband thought about Stag’s Leap?

A. That’s a topic I don’t go into. I’m sorry.

Q. Do you still read Emerson?

A. It has been many, many years since I read Emerson. It made sense to me to try to write a dissertation on prosody (the patterns of rhythm) in one of his books. He wasn’t prepared to be a poet. That is, he wrote bad poems. Studying [his work] was my way of listening to the rhythm. It’s like listening to jazz, classical or rock.

Q. How important is music in your life?

A. Hugely important. There are languages in which there’s only one word for both “music” and “dance.” So there’s no dance without music, nor music without dance. I feel that way. To read another person’s poem is to join their breathing and the beating of their heart. The poet Robert Hass has written about that… how you give many of the rhythms of your body over to the poet whose work you’re reading.

Q. Filmmaker John Cassavetes argued that you can only be a true artist by being faithful to the truth, regardless of whether you harm someone. Do you agree?

A. That’s a very important topic for me. And I remember Muriel Rukeyser — the great feminist poet — when she said that she had never known a poem that hurt anyone. Hurt someone’s feelings? Yes, sure, but they don’t really hurt. The desire to do harm doesn’t produce good art. But if you’re very sincere... will you hurt people’s feelings? Maybe. Am I willing to see mine hurt so that someone can write a real poem? Absolutely.

Q. Balladz (2022) — your latest book — marks a certain return to politics for you, the poet who rejected an invitation from Laura Bush to the White House in protest of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

A. I largely wrote it during the pandemic. During that time, I became aware of my privilege. It affected my view of the world. I think the poems show that. I spent two years alone, living alone in an old house in the woods. Isolation affected my poetry; the verses lengthened and became more prosaic. I wasn’t in contact with other poets. I didn’t listen to poetry, [I only] read it. That makes the book different from the rest.

Q. Do you feel guilty about your privilege?

A. Of course.

Q. Your bestseller — The Dead and the Living (1984) — has poems that deal with the Vietnam War or Pinochet. Is the personal necessarily political?

A. Yes. It doesn’t usually work for me to write about people I don’t know. [In that collection], I was inspired by photographs. What I write about my own life — or about something that appears to be my own life — works best. I don’t know why.

Q. Do you consume news?

A. If I do, it’s very difficult for me not to fall into the rabbit hole of despair. And I get lost in its details, rather than the ordinary details. For example: how sunlight reflects off the ground. I know that the news is more important than that reflection, but at the same time, the possibility of feeling joy in existence is already tenuous enough. If I focus too much on the terrible things that are happening, it’s not good for me. That’s why I tend not to have the strength to stay up to date. All my friends read newspapers and they tell me [about what’s going on]. It’s not something I’m proud of. It’s like a defense mechanism. It works for me.

Q. I would say that something you’ve defended in your poetry is the possibility of being able to completely love someone. Do your young students agree with that?

A. I disagree with anyone who says that it’s impossible to fully love a man, a woman, a child, or an animal. Love is very complicated. And many of us have suffered too much damage at too young an age. It’s natural that it’s somewhat difficult to think about [unconditional love] after that.

Q. Is it difficult for you to connect with new ways of seeing love?

A. I don’t think it is, because it has so much to do with respect for each individual’s soul and body. I don’t think we choose who we’re going to love.

Translated by Avik Jain Chatlani.

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