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
writing lucky late
I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.
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.
heart sides half
When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up. Even when it's I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver.
ideas knows
I did not know him, I knew my idea of him.
years down-and looks
I didn't have time to sit down and look at the work of a year and choose what to type.
baseball blow world
Baseball is reassuring. It makes me feel as if the world is not going to blow up.
writing thinking way
I think that my work is easy to understand because I am not a thinker, I am not a... How can I put it? I write the way I perceive, I guess.
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
pain children long
I have never thought I could take it, not even for the children. It is all I have wanted to do, to stand between them and and pain. But I come from a long line of women who put themselves first.
pain pleasure i-have-learned
I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain
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.