#OldsAudio

[aaknopf]

Understanding the imprint of her mother on her body and soul has been one of the encompassing projects of the poetry of Sharon Olds. Over the years, her poems have explored the child’s desire to protect itself from harm, as well as the grown daughter’s imperative to tell the truth about the mothering she received and, into her later age, to try to forgive.

Tender Bitter

When I started having tender thoughts about myself as a child—that long, pointed chin, those tiny eyes—I started having tender thoughts of my mother. She would look up, a lot—short for an adult— with a look of dazed longing, her fine straight hair wrapped wet around many small rollers, and bound back with combs put in backward, to give her hair some height, or with a fillet like a goddess. My hair was loopy, soft, lollopy like flop-eared rabbits’ ears, she wrote about it in my Baby Book, “Shar’s not conventionally beautiful—but that naturally curly hair!” I don’t think she would have traded with me, she remembered her cold Pilgrim mother, in my mom’s sleep, slipping the bobby-pins out of the dreaming child’s spit curls. We were big on trading—you were supposed to want to take Jesus’s place on the cross, as he had taken yours. I think my mother would have died for me— and I think I would have died for her— is that how the other animals do it? Who dies for whom? My mom sometimes liked my mind—the odd things I said—she would write about my mind in my pink Baby Book. She came from ignorant educated people of self-importance and leisure. She did not see that what I said was funny, like joking, it was metaphor. But it charmed her. She would not have taken it from me, she would not have known what to do with it, nor did she want to mar me, as her mother had marred her. My mother . . . loved me. If she had not beaten me, I would have been purely enamored with her—she was so sad, and pretty. Her eyes were a hundred bright bright blues, like a butterfly’s scales but crystal electric, like a shattered turquoise goblet. She did not take away my ability to love—with her elder sister, and my elder sister, she taught it to me. And she did not take my mind—the one thing of value I was born with—my mother did not take the simile away from me.

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Learn more about Balladz by Sharon Olds.

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[aaknopf]

In her National Book Award–nominated Balladz, Sharon Olds offers a section of “Amherst Balladz,” acknowledging the profound poetic debt and gratitude she, like so many other American poets, owes and offers to Emily Dickinson. In the first ballad from this group, as Olds touches on the pain of growing up female, Emily enters the mix with the speaker’s childhood girlfriends.

Amherst Ballad 1 

Let us Play - Yesterday -  I a Girl - sent East -  Pacific to Atlantic -  Chicago - Betweenst - 

Change Stations there - East Side to West -  Betwixt -  Beauty Salon - Big Sister -  Must Have her Hair - Washed. 

New England School - Old Mansions -  Everyone a Woman -  Some Sweet - some Noble - Christian - Jew - Muslim -

Sally - Strome - Faiza - And Daphne - whose note from Anon - Waited in my Locker - Who are You? Are you Nobody too?

One Senior had slept with her Half-Brother - And the Girl - Dearest to me - Had been Attempted - by her Father - Who Was my Father -

Olive Day Bramhall - Winifred Post - And the Seniors - Weintraub, Cynthia - And the one I Loved the Most - Paiewonsky, Avna. 

And the Lovers - Miss Math and Miss Latin - And Ancient - Augusta Gottfried - Whose Approval I Craved - but she saw Into me - beneath the impostor.

And John Stuart Mill - those Sentences In upward Thrust each Himalay - And the Isaac Watts Music Box - Tart Genius - Emily.

Berries of her Quatrogon Running down - our Chin - Presence of - another World - This world - within.

Cream and Honey of her Rhyme - Tomboy Accurate With Sling and Stone - Palpable Hit -

God one Target - Man another - And New England Trochee Grove - Alive with Radical Wit - and Eros - Salt Tongue - and Groove.

She was our Girl - our Woman - Man enough - for me - her Will Adamant - we held her in Earthy Celestial Respect, where I Hold Her Still

And she moves - when Held - like an Antibody - Holding a Virus  From the Body Politic - To Dance It Into Bliss - of Perish.

. .

More on this book and author: 

Learn more about Balladz by Sharon Olds.

Browse other books by Sharon Olds.

Hear Sharon Olds read in person at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas on April 13th (this event is free, open to the public, and there’s no registration) or at the Los Angeles Book Festival, April 22–23.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

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[aaknopf]

A poem to bring hope and humility in this new season, by our own Sharon Olds, drawn from her recently released Balladz. This collection (the third in her series paying homage to poetic and song forms, following Odes and Arias) is a finalist for the National Book Award. “Improv” treats us to a meditation on the fruits of friendship and to the deep thought that travels quickly down the page in any Olds poem. The poet is also the subject, this week, of a New York Times Magazineprofile by Sam Anderson.

Improv

On the morning of the drive from sea-level to the mountain, I asked if we could stop for melted cheese! at the Mexican place in Truckee. Then I worried, does Bob think I’m a diva? Am I always asking for things? And I thought of Toi’s letter, and I know she is the locus of a gift— and I am too, a spiral of energy, a genie, a dust-devil, I was born with it, a life force, it does not belong to me, or to anyone else, I’m the container of it, the guardian. And I love to let it out toward people— nectary nosegay gusts of it. My mother would ask me to rub her back, she said that I had Vivian Hands, like her college best friend’s— the palms of my hands would listen for what my mother’s muscles wanted—as now, I seem to be writing, but I’m listening for what you want, it would be my joy to give it to you. There is so much joy on the earth even as it is being dis-inhabited by the other animals, and over-inhabited by us—as it is being knocked off course and smoked and drowned. While we have food, let us share it and eat it. There is so much action required of us now. And pleasure is required of us. O my darlings, so much pleasure is required of us.

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Learn more about Balladz by Sharon Olds.

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Hear Sharon Olds read at various points throughout The Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark, NJ from October 20, 2022 to October 23, 2022. Hear Sharon Olds and John Keene read at 92NY in New York, NY on October 25, 2022. Both events can be accessed in person and online.

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[aaknopf]

In the collection Arias, much of contemporary life and thought flows through the finely tuned instrument of Sharon Olds’s voice. In the poem below, she sings of the wish never to cause hurt with our words, and of the need to apologize, especially when our ignorance may have compounded that hurt.

Looking South at Lower Manhattan, Where the Towers Had Been

If we see harm approaching someone— if you see me starting to talk about something I know nothing about, like the death of someone who’s a stranger to me, step between me and language. This morning, I am seeing it more clearly, that song can be harmful, in its ignorance which does not know itself as ignorance. I have crossed the line, as the line was crossed with me. I need to apologize to the letters of the alphabet, to the elements of the periodic table, to O, and C, and H, oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, which make up most of a human body— body which breaks down, in fire, to the elements it was composed of, and all that is left is ashes, sacred ashes of strangers, carbon and nitrogen, and the rest departs as carbon dioxide and is breathed in, by those nearby, the living who knew us and the living who did not know us. I apologize to nitrogen, to calcium with the pretty box-shape of its crystal structure, I apologize to phosphorus, and potassium, that raw bright metal we contain, and to sodium and sulfur, and to the trace amounts which are in us somewhere like the stars in the night—copper, zinc, cobalt, iron, arsenic, lead, I am singing, I am singing against myself, as if rushing toward someone my song might be approaching, to shield them from it. More on this book and author:

Learn more about Arias by Sharon Olds.

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[aaknopf]

In this tall, strong ode, a photo shoot becomes the occasion for a deeper encounter with the natural world.

Pine Tree Ode

I was sitting on the top stones of a wall—can you get even closer to the tree, he said, so I went inches from the trunk of the tallest of the ones we'd been standing among like small children among the legs of the grown-ups. Now, the side of my face was almost against the bark, intimate, I could see where its growing had pulled its surface open, into wooden lozenges, like stretch marks, I could not feel it breathe but I felt it alive beside me, a huge ant running down, and stopping, and turning its feelers, in the air, between us, and then walking so fast it seemed to be pouring back up. Then I looked, up, along the branchless stem, into the canopy, to the needles fanning out in bunches eating the sun. And the length of it seemed like bravery, like strong will, a single, whole, note, like a tenor's cry, sustained, as if a tree were a spurt from the earth, a heart's gush. And the ants flowed from ground to sky, sky to ground. I don't know where the ants had been, or their ancestors had been, the noon the tornado came through, wall of water a hundred and thirty miles an hour, solid ferocious grey static. The tree stood. And now I sat up straight beside it, feeling my way back through species, and species, toward the pine, and toward the ones we both descended from, the fern, the green cell—the sun, the star-stuff we are made of.

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