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
love-is self-love community
.. to a poet, the human community is like the community of birds to a bird, singing to each other. Love is one of the reasons we are singing to one another, love of language itself, love of sound, love of singing itself, and love of the other birds.
mom mother daughter
The older I get, the more I see the power of that young woman, my mother.
ideas knows
I did not know him, I knew my idea of him.
forbidden
it is forbidden to love where we are not loved
daughter children memories
Poems come from ordinary experiences and objects, I think. Out of memory - a dress I lent my daughter on her way back to college; a newspaper photograph of war; a breast self-exam; the tooth fairy; Calvinist parents who beat up their children; a gesture of love; seeing oneself naked over age 50 in a set of bright hotel bathroom mirrors.
daughter natural-talent getting-older
The older I get, the more I feel
dream memories ideas
Who wants to put together something that will bear some relationship to the vision or memory or experience or story or idea or dream or whatever.
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.
quitting said i-quit
When I quit all these things and said I didn't have any time, I meant I didn't have any time.
teaching nyu community
The teaching is very rewarding, and very time-consuming, and very exhausting. But it's wonderful. The community here at NYU is very precious to me.
mystery
A family is a mystery.
ideas would-be lines
If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it's really not right for that poem, but I wanted it, that would be distorting.
deceiving leaving-me
I did not deceive him, he did not deceive me, I did not leave him, he did not leave me, I freed him, he freed me.
i-love-you running savages
I have heard about the civilized, the marriages run on talk, elegant and honest, rational. But and I are savages.