3/18/2023 0 Comments Blood and wine endingsShe has, by now, won most of the major prizes, including, most recently, the Poetry Society of America’s Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement. This was, after all, Sharon Olds, a poet who - after 13 collections spread over four decades (her latest, “Balladz,” was published this month) - has as much claim as any living writer to the title of National Literary Treasure. “I’m nervous, Sam, I’m nervous!” she confessed, early in our conversation. She is chatty and vulnerable she will giggle and coo and occasionally break into sudden tears. In person, she comes across as softer and looser, a bit meek and deferential - a quick charcoal sketch of the sweetest grandmother on Earth. On the page, Olds is bold, controlled, precise, authoritative. In person, I found her subtly different than I’ve always found her in print. (“I base a lot of my feelings about people on what I think I see in their faces,” she would tell me later.) She has large, emotional eyes and extremely long gray hair. We shook hands - that brief, ritual meeting of the body - and as we did so, Olds searched my face. ‘I don’t mind talking this way - I know it seems so dumb - but: I was born a pagan.’ “I like to,” she said, with real relish, as if we were talking about windsurfing or wine tasting or tango lessons on a moonlit beach. So I told Olds that, sure, we could shake hands if she didn’t mind. I had already rescheduled our interview because I had been exposed to a mystery illness and didn’t want to risk infecting one of America’s great poets on the brink of her 80th birthday. When I finally reached her, Olds had a question: “May we shake hands?” This was one of those fraught plague-time requests. “Welcome!” Olds said, waiting, and then: “It’s a long hall!” It was taking me a long time to walk down the hall. Her voice was high and lilting and full of feeling, like a little reed pipe someone might play in a forest to make cartoon animals start to dance. She stood, small and eager, near the end of a long hallway. and resides, like many professors, within the university’s vast real estate empire.) Sure enough, as soon as the elevator doors rumbled open on the 17th floor, Olds was waiting. This summer, I went to visit her at her apartment near Washington Square Park. But I am also speaking literally, about Olds in person - the actual human woman who lives in the actual world. I am speaking here metaphorically, about Sharon Olds on the page. Eventually she will show you that all the rooms are interconnected, that the door to joy is the door to sorrow, that it has been one big room all along. Olds will guide you into her tiny spaces - into small rooms bursting with great joys (love, childbirth, sex, more sex) and into other rooms crowded with terrible sorrows (sickness, betrayal, agony, death). Her voice is easy and intimate, almost alarmingly charming, and so you will follow wherever she leads. You don’t even have to knock she will already be there, waiting in the hall, calling out greetings. Sharon Olds, the celebrated modern poet, is more welcoming. Eliot cracks the front door solemnly, greets you with a formal nod and recedes into his velvety labyrinth Wallace Stevens throws confetti in your face while shouting spelling-bee words Emily Dickinson stares silently down from an upstairs window, blinking in Morse code. Different poets, of course, are very different hosts. The poet leads you, room by room, through the various chambers of his or her world. If you have ever studied poetry - if perhaps you were, like me, the sort of emotional nerd who lugged around thick anthologies, memorizing sonnets - then you will already know this fact: The word “stanza” means “room.” (Edward Hirsch: “Each stanza in a poem is like a room in a house, a lyric dwelling place.”) This means that every poem, and every book of poems, is a sort of house tour. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |