An Interview with Sharon Olds

                                            -by John Amen

John Amen: Let me begin by asking you a little about your background. When did you start writing? Did you study writing in school?

Sharon Olds: Like lots of kids who love to read, I started trying my hand at writing pretty young. Whatever we studied in school--Romeo and Juliet with Elmer Sitkin in 8th grade, Woolf’s The Waves with Olive Day Bramhall in 11th grade--taught us about craft and passion. Music taught us--Bach, Beethoven, opera--and then, at fourteen, rock and roll, and jazz, and the blues. Counterpoint, cut-and-thrust, improv, wild invention--with, for me, underneath, the 4-beat church-hymn rhythm lying like heartbeat (along the sighing of the lungs).

JA: Can you tell me about your work habits? I mean, do you have certain set times when you write? Do you write everyday?

SO: My work habits as a teacher and reading-giver are to be on time, enjoy the company of others interested in the arts, meet the great young!  Take my vitamins, no drugs! My play/visitation fortunes as a writer are such that I wait until a poem “comes to me" to write it--when I notice something is beginning to be sung in me, then I begin to write it down (with my black Bic medium-point, in my ShopRite notebook), listening to it closely to try to get it right.

JA: Have you ever gone through a period or periods of being “blocked?"

SO: It’s an interesting idea, isn’t it, the writer's block--like a road block, or an inability to remember something valuable or threatening. When I hear the phrase I picture a big block of wood--or sometimes an ice cube. I guess I have writer’s block when it comes to irony and abstraction. Even my things don’t have ideas!

JA: The concept of being “locked in a little cedar box" (from “Satan Says") strikes me as a very powerful metaphor. Could you talk a little about what “the cedar box" represents for you?

SO: I don’t know what the cedar box represents. I don’t think it represents a cedar box, I think it just is a cedar box. Maybe we used to associate them (especially with painted scenes on top) more with girls than boys; maybe such a box makes us think of bedrooms, bureau-tops, things held in safekeeping--but I don’t think of the box in the poem as a symbol. Now cedar, it’s a lovely smell, and it’s a preservative, and it scares away moths, right? They don’t like to lay their eggs in the smell of that rosin.

When I’m reading a poem--let’s say Gwendolyn Brooks, or Seamus Heaney--I’m not looking for ideas so much as desiring to experience, in the imagination, a life, an image of a life.

JA: In “What if God," you present a grim depiction of childhood abuse, and ask, “what was [God] doing" while these horrors went on. There is, in this piece, it seems to me, a revolt against the idea that no matter what happens “there is a God in the house"; in other words, that all is as it should be. How large a role has distancing yourself from at least certain aspects of mainstream religious morality played in your attempts to emerge from “the cedar box," both personally and artistically?

SO: Yes, I completely agree that the imaginative world of this poem does not seem to be a place where everything is just the way we wish it were. As for distancing oneself, I think anyone who is trained to believe that a stolen quarter can travel backwards one thousand nine hundred and fifty years in time, and laterally thousands of miles in space, and appear as a nail in the hand of someone who is his own father, will need some repair work around the mental area (I hope that’s irony, but it’s probably just sarcasm).

JA: At the end of “To One Who Wrote Me, ‘I, Too, Am An Incest Survivor’," you write, “I forgot you, as my mother, even when with me,/seemed to forget me, as her mother had forgotten/her. Now I remember. Here is my hand, if you will take it." To me, there is a tone of forgiveness to these lines, a sense that the speaker has made peace with certain aspects of her past. I’m wondering, first, if my response to these lines rings true with you; and, secondly, if you could talk a little about the healing or redemptive value of writing?

SO: To me it might seem more as if the speaker has discovered her own blindness, rather than made peace .... But maybe acknowledging one’s own flaws can constitute a step toward a less victim-ish perspective on the flaws of others. I do not have a writer’s block against sentimentality! Maybe ten years ago, I noticed that I was a kind of “salvation addict" who could not give fair shrift to loss and despair. I don’t know if having a lot of epiphanies in your poems makes you a Romantic; maybe I’ve become a bit more of a Realist over the years.

JA: I particularly appreciate the lines, “I have never understood the spirit,/all I know is the shape it takes,/the wavering flame of flesh/... What I want/to do is to find every cell,/ slip it out of the fishes’ mouths,/ ash in the tree, soot in our eyes" (“For and Against Knowledge"). There is a celebratory or triumphant tone to these lines, a sense that the speaker has (perhaps after much struggle) embraced her sensuality without an accompanying sense of guilt or inclination toward self-debasement.

SO: I’m so glad you like that line; I remember the relief of writing it. Again, I’m not sure I’m able to follow you into an interpretation; to me the lines seem to mean merely what they say.

JA: In most academic settings, when discussing a poem, we tend to talk about the speaker, as opposed to the poet herself. We say, for example, “the speaker says..." as opposed to “Sharon Olds says..." When I read your work, however, I tend to want to say that it is indeed “you" and not “a speaker" who is delivering the poem. It is difficult, of course, to make an argument for this, but I sense that your work, at least indirectly, rebels against the sort of creative process talked about by T.S. Eliot, the notion that “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him [or her] will be the man [or woman] who suffers and the mind which creates." Could you talk about this a little?

SO: Well, it’s thrilling to hear Tom Eliot say “the more separate in him or her will be the man or woman who suffers and the mind which creates." Maybe I feel the body, mind, heart, soul which create are a bit closer to each other than (with respect) Old Possum would think.

I agree completely that the speaker of a poem is a speaker--the poem is (as best it can be) a work of art.

I also like the use of the term “the speaker" in workshop. It frees each maker of art around the table from being dealt with as an autobiographer, perhaps making it possible for us to try for more accuracy--with a less anxious self-consciousness.

JA: You have taught writing for many years at New York University. Is the process of teaching writing rewarding for you? Do you find that teaching writing benefits you as a writer; in other words, that teaching is also a learning or explorative process for you?

SO: I love my students and learn from them. It’s a mortal species thing, isn’t it, each one teach one.

JA: You are, at this point, a prominent and well-published poet. Was there, however, a time when you were dealing with rejections and the frustration of being obscure? If so, what was that time like for you? And, what are your frustrations now, if any, when it comes to the matter of publishing poetry and reaching readers?

SO: Knowing one has found a reader is a wonderful feeling, a gift of energy. So much of it is dumb luck. And one is always, I think, daily, aware of the aspects of one’s work regarded by various others as flaws--and one may well agree they’re flaws! But each of us is so limited, so specific, of course none of us will appeal to very many different kinds of readers. It’s an astonishing good fortune to find a reader, don’t you think? It feels like a miracle.

JA: Can you offer any suggestions to aspiring writers?

SO: Take your vitamins!