Sharon Olds
Sharon Olds
Sharon Oldsis an American poet. Olds has been the recipient of many awards including the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the first San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980 She currently teaches creative writing at New York University...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth19 November 1942
CountryUnited States of America
people care way
My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.
notebook rocks asking
I'm not asking a poem to carry a lot of rocks in its pockets. Just being an ordinary observer and liver and feeler and letting the experience get through you onto the notebook with the pen, through the arm, out of the body, onto the page, without distortion.
drinking coffee smoking
So I did quit coffee and I did quit smoking. But I haven't managed that with drinking!
book writing two
Many poets write books. They'll tell you: Well, I've got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me.
mother daughter father
The decision for me was whether to have 'The Father' be a book that told a story - from the point of view of this speaker, the daughter - without, as in the earlier books, then having a section on something else and a section on something else.
village might horror
The amount of horror one used to hear about in one village could be quite extreme. But one might not have heard about all the other villages' horrors at the same time.
pain pleasure i-have-learned
I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain
mystery
A family is a mystery.
reading benefits pages
I'm not sure that the benefit - as a writer and as a citizen - that I would get from reading at least the front page of the Times every day or every other day would outweigh the depression.
wellspring wells written
Well, 'The Wellspring' was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others' experience.
thinking artist important
I think this is true for all artists. My senses are very important to me.
country different may
Every poet I know - although there may be some I don't know who lead very different lives, who maybe live in the country and don't teach - tends to be just like the rest of us: just really busy, really overcommitted.
jobs new-job
At one point I took on a new job, and I just didn't have time to do anything but work.
running phones answering-the-phone
Because a poem is not written while running or while answering the phone. It's written in whatever minutes one has. Sometimes you have half an hour.