If One Woman Told the Truth About Her Life

As I prepare to teach a course on Sharon Olds (two sessions online for The Poetry School on 30^th October and 6^th November 2.00-4.30 London time) I am reading through her poems, from her first book, Satan Says, to her most recent books.

Sharon Olds was a student of the poet Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980 ) who encouraged her students to take off their ‘masks’, to write what they ‘could not tell’. She was a particularly powerful influence on women poets. She famously wrote, ‘What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.’ This vision seems to transgress against the poetics of reticence which I claim is present in all poetry. I will be considering this transgression in subsequent posts and also showing how Sharon Olds does surprisingly employ a poetics of reticence in her work although it is not immediately apparent.

Olds’s work began to appear in the late 1970s during a time when the American poetry scene was dominated by male poets. Her poems seemed to split the world open. Her direct transparent language, abundant with similes and enjambed lines, were trying to tell ‘the truth about her life.’ She writes in her poem ‘Satan Says’, the first poem in the book with that title, about her parents: ‘I love them but / I’m trying to say what happened to us / in the lost past.’ (Click here for the full poem). In the poem, a devil figure encourages her to only say horrible things about her parents which she does wish to say (and which she will say about her parents in all of her books) but at the same time, she insists that she loves them. This dynamic represents the sensibility in Olds’s work: No matter how directly she writes about the failures and even abuse of others, she will not deny her attachment to, her connection with, her love for these same people. This mindset runs through all of her work. It’s a difficult balance to strike, and she has been both maligned and praised for it by critics.

Did the poems split the world open? They were definitely ground-breaking. No woman poet had written so explicitly about childhood, being a mother, budding female sexuality, and marital intimacy.  These poems were unflinchingly private but she called them ‘seemingly personal.’ There was no need for her to own that they were her life although it was generally accepted that they did and do reflect her life.

Full disclosure: I was Sharon Olds’s personal assistant from 1992-1994 and then on and off until, I think, 1998 (those years are a blur). I bought pencils, made phone calls, mailed letters, ordered books, and typed handwritten poems onto my computer. This experience gave me a real inside look into a poet’s work life. Olds was the most organized person I had ever met. When I arrived at her apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for an appointment with her to discuss what tasks I would be doing that week she had a list of the things she wanted me to do and a photocopy of that list – one for her and one for me. This was in sharp contrast to Galway Kinnell who I also worked for – when I arrived at his apartment, he would sit behind an enormous desk piled with books and papers which extended across the large room in his NYU apartment in the West Village. He would lift papers looking for things, and I can still remember him saying each time: ‘I must have misplaced it, I must have misplaced it.’

Once Sharon asked me to buy the novel by Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, and when I handed it to her in a paper-bag she became very serious and held the package in both her hands. After she removed the book from the paper, she read the title out loud: Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book. She said this with awe and then looked surprised and squeezed the book slightly and turned it around and around and finally said, ‘but it’s a real book!’ This moment was so her. Not taking the things around her for granted, looking carefully. This quality reminds me of Moses who, when walking by a burning bush in the desert, stopped to look. Apparently, burning bushes were common in deserts and most people would just walk by them. But he stopped, looked into the fire, noticing something unusual about this bush.

Sharon seemed to experience things on the cellular level; her third book is called The Gold Cell because, I heard her say once, the word ‘cell’ is one of the most common words in the book so she felt like it belonged in the title. The physical, cells, what living things are made of is the stuff of her poems. I suspect that the Kingston book was like a living being in her mind and she was experiencing its mystery and beauty and otherness as she held it for the first time in her hands.  

The poem below is from Satan Says. In subsequent posts I’ll include poems from her other books to give a sense of the arc of her work:

The Language of the Brag

I have wanted excellence in the knife-throw,
I have wanted to use my exceptionally strong and accurate arms
and my straight posture and quick electric muscles
to achieve something at the centre of a crowd,
the blade piercing the bark deep,
the haft slowly and heavily vibrating like the cock.

I have wanted some epic use for my excellent body,
some heroism, some American achievement
beyond the ordinary for my extraordinary self,
magnetic and tensile, I have stood by the sandlot
and watched the boys play.

I have wanted courage, I have thought about fire
and the crossing of waterfalls, I have dragged around

my belly big with cowardice and safely,
my stool black with iron pills,
my huge breasts oozing mucus,
my legs swelling, my hands swelling,
my face swelling and darkening, my hair
falling out, my inner sex
stabbed again and again with terrible pain like a knife.
I have lain down.

I have lain down and sweated and shaken
and passed blood and feces and water and
slowly alone in the centre of a circle I have
passed the new person out
and they have lifted the new person free of the act
and wiped the new person free of that
language of blood like praise all over the body.

I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman,
Allen Ginsberg, I have done this thing,

I and the other women this exceptional
act with the exceptional heroic body,
this giving birth, this glistening verb,
and I am putting my proud American boast
right here with the others.