Sharon Olds' "Victims": Again, Sympathy vs. Judgment

Tilt

Cormorant

The Victims by Sharon Olds












Sharon Olds’ “The Victims” is another poem about the death of a character who is problematic for the speaker.

 (Here I confess I feel a little silly insisting on the distinction between author and speaker, since Sharon Olds created an entire book of poems about her troubled relationship with her father. However, if even one of a poem’s details is fictional or unverifiable, I think it justifies the convention of separating author from speaker or narrator.)

Sharon Olds call her speaker’s character into question much more than John Crowe Ransom did in “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter” (my last post). Olds is willing to speak ill of the dead. In fact, she might revel in it.  

Therefore, is sympathy vs. judgment (again, see the July 24 Banjo52) the main tension in which are we caught in “The Victims,” or are both the speaker and her father likely to elicit more judgment than sympathy?

Remember, “sympathy” is not pity, which is condescending. Sympathy is a feeling of connection to, identification with, even respect for that other character—whom we find appealing in some way, perhaps to our alarm.

The Victims by Sharon Olds

Asymmetry

Sylvia Plath's "Mirror," Conrad Hilberry's "Tongue," Six-Shooters, Walking Naked

Mirror?

'Mirror' by Sylvia Plath

I'm offering Sylvia Plath's "Mirror" again because of a recent visitor comment about the poem at my June 4 post. Mr. Somewords says: "'I have looked at it so long / I think it is a part of my heart.'  This line, coming from the mirror itself, is one of my favorite lines of Plath, ever. The mirror confuses a wall with its heart. I love the idea of a mirror worrying about losing its own essence because of what it has reflected for so long.”

No argument here, Mr. Somewords. To offer one’s Self as a confusion (conflation?) of mirror, heart and wall—that takes guts, and it would probably be a worthy insight coming from any of us. 

I wonder if William Logan and Sharon Olds have found any walls within their hearts.

Wall.  Mirror?

Stones in water = wall or mirror?

Adolescent narcissism and self-pity are probably two of the risks Sylvia Plath takes repeatedly, and she’s been heartily criticized for it  (or was all of that criticism after death?).  But I challenge those who smugly condescend toward Plath from their imagined heights as scholars or reviewers.  How about we all reveal what we see in ourselves in our most honest, most naked moments.  Reveal it, force-feed it to ourselves—then share it with a reading public.

Climbing up a wall

Might that lead to world peace?   Some say toting six-guns is a way to keep the peace; some Texan even proclaimed, “An armed society is a polite society.”  Well, I 'spect. Maybe.

Or could it be that all we have to do is walk naked, in every sense of the word, everywhere we go?  Instead of muttering or chirping some meaningless “hey” to everyone, like Yeats’ “polite, meaningless nods” . . . we confess our most recent taboo thought or obsession. 

Would that lead to less violence? Or more? Might it lead to a mass scramble for cover, both literally and figuratively?

There may be a more polite, though brutal version of all that in Conrad Hilberry’s poem, “Tongue”:

   Conrad Hilberry - Tongue       

(my apologies for white on black—it’s the only version I could find—why do it that way?)

And here is Conrad Hilberry reading the poem:   Dr. Hilberry Reads Poem

 The poem involves behavior rather than thought, but I see it as the boy’s being caught unaware, fully exposed, as if he'd confessed to three counties all his puerile dumbness—which looks remarkably similar to adult dumbness. Hilberry’s youngster is King Lear’s “man more sinned against than sinning."

Embarrassment often overrides pain when we’re caught in our most moronic, vulnerable moments, as we all are from time to time. Don’t you think?  I’d love to invite examples, but for now I’m not offering any of my own.

Organic twisting

Organic

Thanks, Mr. “Somewords,” for starting this train of thought, which I think has some value. Although I too partake aplenty, I’m sick and damned tired of all our asinine pride and posturing, much of which has a frantic quality, because we’re trying to sprint away from self-awareness instead of swallowing whole the blood of our dumbness, like Hilberry’s kid, who has no choice.

Organic Thrust

Sylvia Plath's "Mirror." William Logan and Sharon Olds, continued

I'm not ready to leave the issues and questions I've tried to stimulate in the previous two posts about William Logan, Frieda Hughes and Sharon Olds.  However, my mysterious attraction to my own photo of a fish, along with the humorous comment about it from Pasadena Adjacent at my last post,  have recalled for me a poem by Sylvia Plath.

Since Sharon Olds is sometimes discussed as Plath's psychic daughter, and Frieda Hughes is Plath's actual daughter, and William Logan writes about them all, and I write about William Logan writing about them all, a practice that William Logan has mockingly called Theory . . . well, all the stars seem in alignment for us to consider the three luminaries: William Logan, Sharon Olds, and now Sylvia Plath.

Here is "Mirror" by Sylvia Plath:  'Mirror' by Sylvia Plath

First, I'm interested in my own acceptance of Plath's bold, explicit, perhaps self-indulgent switch in speakers to open the second stanza (or verse paragraph): "Now I am a lake." Part of me wants to reply, "Really. You get to be what you want, when you want. Well, I'm an avalanche, baby, and I just crashed some boulders into your lake, just cluttered you up, just obliterated your arrogant damned lake."


Does she get to do that, simply change horses in midstream because she feels like it and then she can shout it from the rooftops? Doesn't that break some important rule? Is she thumbing her nose at old stuffed shirts, telling them (us? me?) to stuff it if we can't loosen up, can't take a joke? But this is no joke, is it? This is aging, this is shriveling, flesh-gone-to-scales mortality, isn't it?

I feel as if Plath has seized something of mine, and I've said that's okay, boss, go ahead, you can have it. Maybe I didn't want it anyway, though I wasn't sure yet. But go ahead, take it. It was only my cornucopia, my horn of plenty of male logic. It wasn't doing me much good, and your mood, or your mysterious . . . strategy . . .  is surely more important.


Secondly, I'm intrigued by the power of the poem's closing: "rises toward her . . .  like a terrible fish." Sometimes I have images, or personifying glimpses, of old age that are not unlike terrible fish. Yet I'd never have pinned them down and thought, "Oh, yeah, terrible fish, that's exactly what I saw-felt-imagined."  My images had nothing to do with fish, yet I'm perfectly satisfied with Plath's decision that a fish is what she and I both saw in the mirror.

Finally, I am thoroughly satisfied with her vague adjective, "terrible." Why?  Usually I'd ask for something more precise to describe the poem's most dominant image, the fish; but "terrible" seems not just acceptable, but perfect. Maybe it's because I don't usually think of fish as terrible; or maybe something more individualizing about this fish would distract and separate me from the real issue and its creator, while a "terrible" fish, rising at me, feels like just the right transmogrification to capture the universal insult of aging. From flesh to scales in the stroke of a pen. Or tick of a clock.


I wonder if William Logan would say that Plath has managed to capture an unflattering portrait of the human body without resorting to the peep show tactics he attributes to Sharon Olds.  I sure think such wondering is important fun, like a seventh grade dance, where we're all fools, and, whether we dance or stand against the wall with our hands folded, we're glad to be there. But don't tell a soul.

'Mirror' by Sylvia Plath

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Sex, Literary Criticism, William Logan and Sharon Olds, Part Two

Here is William Logan writing about Sharon Olds, who is one of America’s most popular headliners at poetry conferences and other readings. 

. . . part of the hypnotic fascination of Olds’s poetry is its headlong, hell-bent hubris.

She trades in shameless prose chopped up into lines of poetry, lurid as a tabloid, returning to the primal scene more often than a therapist: her cold, sadistic father; her cold, masochistic mother . . .

If someone is raped in her apartment building, we never hear about the victim. We’re told instead about Olds having sex the next day . . .

Everywhere brute shock is taken as a sign of honesty.

Olds has as many teases as a strip show, and the psychology that drives her poetry is dourly exhibitionist.

‘Look at me! Look at me!’ the poems say, poems of someone never loved enough.

She loves to rub your nose in it: if you look away, you’re a coward; if you keep looking, you’re complicit.

Olds is sometimes mistaken for a confessional poet, but she has nothing to confess: she never feels anything as subtle or scouring as guilt, and it’s hard to believe she’d recognize a sin if it bit her.

. . . for all her radical pretense, she’s a homely Redbook moralist, believing in motherhood, family, and honey on her nipples.

Well, that ought to offer some of the flavor of both William Logan and Sharon Olds, whose poetry has provoked almost identical reactions from me. I’m particularly concerned with the question of whether it’s prose or poetry (as I am with many of the celebrated poets out there), and it’s comforting to have an aggressive intelligence like Logan on my side.

Although I'm a blogger, I’m also impatient (to put it nicely) with narcissism and exhibitionism (if there’s a difference), whether in blogs or poetry or conversation. I’ve often recoiled from Sharon Olds’ recurring exposure of her body, others’ bodies, others' vulnerabilities, her sexuality, and some other inglorious concerns, like her obsessive, repetitive hatred toward her father and her invasion of her children’s privacy (which is the way I see some of her poems about them).



However, there’s a counter-argument that Logan has not mentioned. Americans and other humans are slow to see their own flaws. Without an honest, humble reckoning of how disappointing or downright disgusting we are—cosmetically, , domestically, politically, morally—how can we begin doing better as sharers of the planet? If everyone looked at himself in the mirror as frankly as Sharon Olds does, no matter how uncomfortable the sights there, we’d surely be prompted to behave better—or at least more humbly.  Or maybe we could simply get out of the paths of others who have found a better way to be.


Or would we? And that is one of Logan’s most important points:  Olds may be willing to examine herself and her loved ones in full view of us, but the flaws she sees tend strongly to be minor, brief, or attached to other people. I rarely hear her reprimanding herself or feeling a need to change.

As Logan says, she’s not really a confessional poet because she doesn’t own up to any sins or guilt, without which she is simply demanding attention: “Look at me,” says Sharon Olds (and that’s undeniable).  Logan replies, “Why should I? The only insights you offer are centered, microscopically, on your body, your psyche, and your very individual biography.” 

However, I’m not comfortable thinking that’s the end of the discussion, whereas Logan might be finished. Ever the moderate, caught in the complex middle, I think there might be value in Sharon Olds’ invitation to think about what makes us uncomfortable and why.  For one thing, it’s worth wondering about the undeniable centrality of sex in human lives. From burqas to strip joints to wondering whether less is more and bigger is better, we don’t seem to know what to do about this troublesome feature within us. Shall we try to smother it completely or give it free reign? How wide is the middle ground in between?

In any case, sex, along with war, will win out, however grotesquely we may twist and turn it in an attempt to wring out the hormones, control the thoughts and desires. Maybe Sharon Olds’ poetry is one small step toward getting the genie more happily out of the bottle. Logan himself makes an unconvincing attempt to state that he’s on the sex team:  “Poetry in our prudent hour needs more sex, not less . . . .” But that’s one drop of honey in a bucket of vitriol he’s hurled across the distance between himself and Sharon Olds.

Still, William Logan’s challenge is essential:  if we must be made uncomfortable by our intimate knowledge of Sharon Olds, and the part of her that's a part of us, what’s in it for us and the rest of the world? If we are not elevated by poetry, why not go straight to Hustler or petty Cosmo blurbs about starlets and their troubled lives?

Notice, by the way, all this presumes that the details of Olds’ life are factual. For a variety of reasons, I still insist on the traditional, valid distinction between poet and speaker. Olds’ poems certainly seem autobiographical, but we don’t know that, and we shouldn’t care.

I think you should love my fish, and I'm going to keep posting him until you do.

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SHARON OLDS: PERFORMANCE AND THE VIBE I SOMETIMES HEAR

In case I haven’t mentioned it, I’ve been leery of poetry readings for as long as I can remember. Both the performer and the audience conduct themselves, sometimes, in a manner more suited to a rock star and his groupies.

Listeners and readers can forget that the poem consists of its words, which must last and stay relevant long after the author's death. A skillful orator, a jazzy performer, can inflate those words by singing, chanting, whispering, shouting, or constructing improbable emphases and gestures that induce the audience to gasps—the famous “oooooooohh” after occasional, orgasmic lines. And those other forms of genuflection—“How many cloves do you put in your herbal tea? Do you pray for your pencil? What brand of computer? Boxers or briefs?” And the inverse: good or great poems reduced to mediocrity by a poet who’s not much of an oral performer or self-promoter.

So imagine my surprise at the 2010 Dodge Poetry Festival when I found myself won over by Sharon Olds, in spite of her cowboy boots, her de rigueur costume, maybe, though she's a longtime New Yorker. I don’t recall what she read that night, but I ended up surrendering to it. I laughed, I cried, I cringed because her poems’ words, delivered without histrionics, led me there. Brava.

The Introducer (Martin Farawell) was right. Sharon Olds looks into the eyes of scary beast-subjects, with a humor and an apparent honesty that the rest of us cannot muster. I surrendered.

It would have been false to resist, though I’m stuffy enough to be troubled by some elements of Ms. Olds’ work. Its leaning toward prose, its confessionalism, its exposure of mental and physical experiences that should perhaps remain private, its willingness to expose in detail the failures of a father, or the personal lives of her children (or “some poet’s children”?)—these are fair game as subjects, and now we add her odes to body parts such as the hymen, the clitoris, the penis . . .

Ms. Olds’ work is indeed ingenious and does indeed behold new frontiers, which she then crosses in ways that might be healthy for readers and all humans to witness, ponder, absorb.

But I need to say too that Sharon Olds’ poems sometimes make me feel like a big, old, empty box, some deserted trailer by the side of the road, beneath a hillside full of people laughing with their mentor, their guru, in a show of color and confidence about how in touch they are with each other and the universal tragicomedy of the human toilet and sex bed.



In the case of the four poems with links posted below, from the 2008 Dodge Festival, I laugh too. Although I am male and the poems often center on female physiology, this might be the openness I claim to wish for, to cut through our silos of isolation from each other. I would be a party-pooping drudge if I didn’t laugh at these hip poems about topics that make stuffy people squirm, a discomfort they deserve, because, after all, they bothered us with their stuffiness, stifled us, judged us—they were not hip in the least.

But sometimes I drift (against my will?) toward stuffy stuff, like wondering when it’s poem and when it’s pandering. Or, to repeat, when it’s poem and when it’s prose. Or when it’s poem and when it’s hootenanny. I'm pretty sure I've never asked these questions about Richard Wilbur or Robert Penn Warren or Yusef Komunyakaa or Karen Volkman or a host of others. I can forgive a bad poem; everybody's been there. But a piece that's faking poemhood feels like a larger violation.

I suppose I need to be more modern, go along to get along, laugh as directed (with an ironic, slanted half-grin that’s something like a sneer). After all, in my very presence, pointless Puritan taboos are being shattered and transformed by the group to gaiety, and we’re all just a big crowd of cool, knowing dudes and babes, gathered in kindly omniscience under a tent, where we can feel the autumn breeze ruffling our skirts and boxers and genitalia. We are the tender and adoring young, the new intellectuals who want it fast and easy. We gather now in fellowship under the big top, in the know.

YouTube - Sharon Olds Reading in the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival Saturday Night Sampler - 9/27/08

YouTube - Sharon Olds reading two poems at the Dodge Poetry Festival 9/26/08


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Yeats and Olds Continued, The Bird Lady, "Adam's Curse"

Maybe everyone has met a bird lady at least once in a lifetime. In a way, the woman in the photo doesn’t exactly qualify because feeding the pigeon nation was a first for her. She kept repeating, “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Cynics might urge her to get out of the house more, but I liked her delight in a simple pleasure. Pigeons are probably no one’s favorite animal, but the sheer numbers of greedy, gluttonous birds were impressive, and the woman became a girl again.

Then, behind me, I heard a gruff male voice, a stranger with a thick Brooklyn accent: “Those birds shit all over the place. Somebody oughta shoot ‘em all.”

“Shooting Pigeons in Brooklyn.” Sounds like a Mickey Spillane title. But that was the guy’s comment, and I wondered what I’d done to invite it.

There are certain kinds of tough-guy language and behavior that suck the joy right out of October blue and laughing children. Sometimes I worry about making such statements myself, just as I worry about being too sappy at the other end. Good writers have to walk that tightrope, among others, every time they put pen to paper. (By the way, I've just learned that Mickey Spillane briefly worked as a trapeze artist).

Somehow that’s the kind of decision I was asking for yesterday in comparing Sharon Olds’ “Sex without Love” to Yeats’ “When You Are Old.” Compared to honoring the Yeats, I can probably explain much more thoroughly what I like or respect about the Olds poem—its boldness and ingenuity in making serial sex a metaphor for our condition in the universe, its brazen repetition, its Oldsian decisions about line breaks, its mix of the trendy and the ontological, and on and on.

But “Sex with Love” also strikes me as a chunk of gravel shredding ancient parchment. Yeats and others have a feel for sacred documents; they know how to lay palms upon it, or gently unfurl it. I don’t know if Yeats could be crass if his life depended on it. But maybe that means he couldn’t be realistic either. He paid for that.

Perhaps it’s in this context that I offer Yeats’ “Adam’s Curse,” about work and beauty, poetry and love. The casual elegance of its language might cause readers to miss the fact that it’s written in rhymed couplets. Apparently the poet followed his own directions and labored so hard that we sense only the graciousness of his lines, not the labor that went into them. Isn’t that what he said he was going for, that illusion of naturalness? I wonder if he’s been to Brooklyn.



Adam’s Curse by William Butler Yeats : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.















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Sharon Olds, Anis Shivani, Romantic Love, and What Makes Poetry Good

If you're a regular here, please forgive my self-plagiarizing on the photos. Surely they are relevant.

As for text, here is Anis Shivani, positing at Huffington Post that 15 admired American authors are overrated. He’s hardly the first to try such a thing.

Anis Shivani: The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers (PHOTOS) - Thomas Pynchon, Books

Among Shivani's overrated writers is poet Sharon Olds. Here is a Sharon Olds poem that I find interesting in a number of ways.

Sex Without Love - Poem by Sharon Olds

After you've read both Shivani and Olds, please respond. Feel free to bring into the discussion Yeats’ poem “When You Are Old,” posted here on Monday: When You are Old- Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More.

Yes, I feel as if I’m dangling bait, but I'm not sure what I expect to catch or what I think myself.

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Dean Young, "Scarecrow on Fire," Part Two

FISHING




Dean Young, “Scarecrow on Fire,” continued . . .



I'm suspicious of Young's trail of associations, yet my instincts tell me to trust him, not necessarily because I agree, but because he more or less announces, "I'm guessing about some big things here. Come along and guess with me, if you wish." He's been simultaneously careful and strange enough to make me think, "Okay, I'll keep re-reading. For now, I believe you were being straight with me."

One spot where Young steps away from this credibility is the arbitrary and puerile use of “Hell” in “Hell, even now I love life.” There’s that excessive love of the casual and conversational again, this time barging in on a poem that is otherwise all poem, a hard slider down and away, despite its appearance of chat.

Some readers might also object to Young’s assuming the privilege of grand proclamations about life. In fact, the poem opens dangerously in such a vein: “We all think about suddenly disappearing.” Or in lines 11-12, “We all feel / suspended over a drop into nothingness.” And maybe, in lines 16 – 18, “Whenever you put your feet on the floor / . . . it’s a miracle.” However, those three lines are probably metaphorical enough to rise above didacticism.

A poet is always on a tightrope with declarations like these. Even if the statements are true, who is he to speak for us? But Young more or less gives us a drop of metaphysics, then jumps back to the specific and concrete world and its puzzles, as if he’s aware of how easy it would be to go too far, to step into presumption or pamphleteering.

Along these lines, I also think of Sharon Olds’ line in “On the Subway” (March 9): “I will never know how easy this white skin makes my life.” I think she and Young, among others, are saying things they know to be provocative; maybe they also think we need to hear these thoughts because we act as if they haven’t occurred to us, or we haven’t cared enough about them on our own.

Too many conversational or prosy poems of the last few decades fail to offer this gift-and-challenge package, which I also see as an oath of honesty: "This really is the way I see the world, and this is the only way I can say it. Anything else would be inaccurate or dishonest."

The absence of that oath and those gifts is what I was complaining about back in January and February. Everyone of us is guilty of posturing; that doesn’t mean we have to like or respect it, in ourselves or in a poem. It might mean we should admire poems that are free of it, poems whose voice is genuine, no matter how quirky.

And the wonderful problem is, we’ll never entirely agree on which poems, or even short passages, are the pretenders and which are the real article. Is there anything better than that to talk about, to fight about?

"On the Subway," 2. Visitor Comments. MishMash.

"You lookin' at me?"



poetrymagazines.org.uk - On The Subway

Concerning Sharon Olds' poem "On the Subway," I began with this response to visitors’ comments here on March 4: “If I try to do justice to these comments, I'll end up with another post that's a mish-mash of responses to visitors. That would be fine with me, but I don't know if anyone else is interested. So unless you ask to keep this going, I'll let your commentary here stand as is—meaty, good stuff that it is.”

Well, I kept going, let it grow into another MishMash, and it still only scratches the surface of your interesting comments.

I must say I'm surprised at the tepid (at best) response to the poem itself. I just read it one more time and continue to find both the ideas and the images pretty riveting. Yes, they tend toward stereotyping—of both characters—but which parts of the stereotypes are false in any important way?

There will be exceptions, of course, but isn't the overall pattern of black-white and male-female relationships laid out pretty accurately? “A stranger rode into town” has been called one of the only two plots in all of fiction, and that’s what we’ve got here, a stranger who seems the menacing outlaw rather than the savior on the white stallion. (For the life of me, I cannot find or remember that other plot, or the writer who made the comment; well, one is more than zero).

Also, as Paula points out about "church-think" (my term, don't blame her), don't we tend rather easily, instinctively, toward facile judgment, stereotyping, and therefore facile fear and hostility?

Isn't our first response to any of the many versions of "The Other" more or less fight or flight? Fear, judgment, aggression? I've heard that argument applied to evolution itself: if you don't first fear the unknown, then The Unknown, The Other, might eat you. Suspicion is healthy, intelligent. Trust is for babies. Something in our reptilian brains better recognize that we are not reptiles, or we might end up as breakfast for the crocodile we were trying to pet, with whom we wanted to become Best Friends Forever. I never like agreeing with a former colleague who was fond of saying, "If the lion's got to lie down with the lamb, I wanna be the lion." And yet . . . .

Of course, at the other end of that line of thought lie Hitler and his little friends, such as: Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Stalin, Genghis Khan, and the hundreds of their kind. (Why does Spell Check not recognize Idi Amin?).

But if someone wants to argue that a stranger who appears different—at least for a few seconds or maybe for decades—does not seem more threatening than strangers who appear similar to the perceiver . . . well, let's hear it.

What I'm talking about is not our good self, the self we want to be and in some areas do become. But to deny that this bad self sits in there, a lizard, is willful blindness as well self-destructiveness. And isn't that approximately the idea about which the poem is unusually candid? How many people can say aloud that they've never had this thought about some important Other: "I wish you well, but don't ask me to trust you"? Isn't Olds' poem a confession, at least by the speaker, of that unwanted, unseemly, but essentially human reflex? (Well, I suppose Beck, Limbaugh, Inc. wouldn't call it unwanted or unseemly. I find the thought or impulse sad and embarrassing, but I won't deny its existence.).

Now, as for that pesky poet-speaker distinction . . . How do we know if the events, thoughts and emotions in a poem have actually happened to the author? How many of the details must be proven accurate in order to declare that Sharon Olds is the speaker?

I think there's no verifiable answer to those questions, and that's the case with any piece of writing. We tend to think of Robert Frost as some avuncular agrarian, probably in even his most bitter poems. But from the bits I know of his biography, he was a pretty nasty guy, at least in some ways. One of the great ironies of art and of intellectual history is that we receive what we call wisdom from our lunatics. A line I’ve always loved is, “Society creeps ever forward on the backs of its neurotics.” Sorry, can’t remember or locate the source.

So, yes, we can probably get some overall sense of the soul or psyche of a writer, but in any one piece, looking for certifiably autobiographical info is perilous. Writers lie and writers die. Who knows how much of Poem X or Story Y is factual, or even what the writer thought about the experience a year after he wrote it down?

Hence The New Criticism's "Biographical Fallacy" and "Intentional Fallacy." (Banjo52, August 19, 20 and Nov. 3,4, 2009). We cannot know that this or that piece of an author's life has found its way into a story, no matter how similar the experiences are. And we cannot know what the writer intended; we can only try to interpret the words on the page and their relationship to each other as they build character, setting . . . and beauty, we hope, even if it’s tragic.

I doubt that Sharon Olds or her speaker is a racist, but in any case, she has captured some age-old responses about the history of race in America, even as the facts of the topic continue to change almost daily.

And by the way, do not try to argue that the U.S. is the only spot where tolerance of The Other is a problem.

And that, friends, was an attempt to avoid a lengthy piece . . . . Shall we continue?

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Sharon Olds, "On The Subway"

Sharon Olds' name has come up before here, and she is one of the best known living poets in the U.S.

Before we leave racial issues for awhile, let's have a look at "On the Subway," which appeared in her book The Gold Cell.

Click here. poetrymagazines.org.uk - On The Subway

         For now, I'll ask only three questions:

1. I've had students who said the poem itself--meaning Olds, not just her speaker--is racist. What do you think?

2. As for the speaker, is she racist, or just unusually honest about her preconceptions?

3. Can somebody explain Sharon Olds' line breaks? I've seen other poets handle lineation in a roughly similar way, but I do believe Olds is the champ at ending lines with articles, prepositions, and other relatively minor words in order to befuddle readers named Fiddlehead and Banjo.

A student once said Olds is putting the important words at the beginnings of new lines, rather than letting them sit at the ends of the old lines, and I was surprised at how much sense that made. I've also wondered if she's going for a bit of suspense by making us wait for the new line before we hear the next important word, usually a noun or verb.

In terms of our conversations here a few months ago about poetry versus prosaic conversation, I think Sharon Olds walks that line more successfully than most others who try it. "On the Subway" never leaves me doubting that it's a poem and deserves to be--in fact, needs to be--broken into lines, in spite of the fact that it's a somewhat narrative work.

poetrymagazines.org.uk - On The Subway

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Poem for a Day: "The One Girl at the Boys Party" by Sharon Olds

Before summer is so long gone that we forget what it felt
like . . .

It seems that a lot of parents don’t want to think about certain aspects of their offspring, their issue--that strange lawyer word. Their reluctance certainly includes the subject of their children’s sexuality.

Sharon Olds’ poetry doesn’t shy away from much, and I don't think she’s backing down from a delicate subject here. But her humor and the mathematics motif neutralize tensions in ways that keep Olds in acceptable, proper territory. Don’t they?

a wild multiplying . . . drops sparkling and falling . . . the power of a thousand . . .

To read the poem, copy and paste or click on one of the links below. I'm sorry to say the site works inconsistently. If you have trouble, you could simply google the poem title and see what happens.

http://www1.assumption.edu/users/ady/HHGateway/Etexts/oldsparty.html

www.assumption.edu/users/ady/HHGateway/.../oldsparty.html


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