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| Sarah Browning moderates conversation with Sharon Olds |
From Split This Rock Executive Director Sarah Browning:
I was fortunate to be invited by Teri Cross Davis, Poetry Coordinator at the Folger Shakespeare Library, to introduce and moderate a conversation with the poet Sharon Olds on Monday, October 17. Below is my introduction. If you're in DC, check out the rest of the season of poetry at the Folger here. Especially next week's reading by Irish poet Eavan Boland and Austin Allen, winner of the Anthony Hecht Prize!
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When I first began
writing seriously, in the early 1990s, I felt an immense terror at my own
vulnerability. I had routinely heard women’s poetry disparaged as sentimental,
confessional, domestic, self-indulgent – and political poetry dismissed as
propaganda. I could not free myself from these internal voices and wrote only
self-defended dense little nuggets of poems. Shame had my tongue tied in knots.
Until my friend the novelist Dori
Ostermiller introduced me to the work of Sharon Olds, by then already a dozen
years in print but brand new to me. I found within these finely crafted poems a
wild freedom, a female speaker who owned her own body, who spoke frankly of its
sexual desire, who told the sorry tales of its violation.
This courage struck me then as a
radical political act. Today, when hundreds of thousands of women have taken to
social media to tell of the men who’ve assaulted them in just the way a
presidential candidate brags about doing, this courage is revolutionary.
Which
may be why some critics have been so venomous in their attacks, calling Olds’
work sensationalist, just as some are dismissing the true stories of women’s
lived experience as hype cooked up for political gain. But women know better –
we have lived at the intersection of peril and joy our entire lives. Olds is
our chronicler.
Sharon Olds is the author of 13 books of poems, which have
won her – among other recognition – the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book
Critics Circle Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, and Britain's T.S. Eliot prize;
she is the first American woman to win. She has been the state poet laureate of
New York, received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National
Endowment for the Arts, and served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American
Poets. She teaches in New York University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program
as well as at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York City.
Olds’
most recent book is Odes, which
critic Alexandra Schwartz in The New York
Times called, “perhaps the funniest book
I’ve read this year, and also among the most moving and philosophical, charged
with the kind of metaphysical self-interrogation that is a central, though
often overlooked, aspect of her work.” The work is playful – Olds makes up delicious
words: valentinaceous, starvacious,
arroyoing… and even includes a few little sketches. I hope you’ll take it home tonight and enjoy its
sheer, daring beauty and striking truth telling.
Olds’ first book, Satan
Says, includes a tribute to the poet Muriel Rukeyser, of whom, I’m ashamed
to say, I had never heard until those early 90s days when I was devouring Olds’
work. It’s a short poem and I’d like to read it to you now, as it has become a
talisman for my own work, both as a poet and in the creation and growth of
Split This Rock, now grown to thousands of poets performing the essential task of
witnessing that Sharon Olds pays testament to in this poem:
SOLITARY
for
Muriel Rukeyser
I keep thinking of you
standing in Korea, in the courtyard
of the prison where the poet
is in solitary.
Someone asked you why not in
the street
where you could be seen. You
said you wanted
to be as close to him as you
could.
You stood in the empty
courtyard. You thought
it was probably doing no
good. You have written
a poem about it. This is not
that poem.
This is another – there may
be details
wrong, the way variations
come in
when you pass on a story.
This is a poem
about a woman, a poet,
standing in a courtyard,
feeling she is probably doing
no good.
Pass it on: a poet, a woman,
a witness, standing
alone
in a prison
courtyard
in Korea.
I am immensely proud to introduce to you a poet, a woman, a witness: Sharon
Olds.
Photo by Chloe Miller.
