Sharon Olds
American poetry in the latter half of the twentieth century underwent a sustained reckoning with private life, as writers turned their attention to the body, the family, and the textures of intimate experience. Sharon Olds emerged from this period as a poet whose work placed the personal at the center of her practice, rendering domestic and physical life in language that was direct and unsparing.
Born in San Francisco in 1942, Olds was educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. A citizen of the United States, she has worked as a poet, writer, and academic, and has also engaged with causes beyond the page, including climate activism and women's rights. These commitments run alongside her literary career rather than apart from it, shaping the terms in which she has moved through public life.
Her work in the English language has drawn sustained recognition from the institutions that track literary achievement in the United States and abroad. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, two of the most consequential honors available to an American poet. A Guggenheim Fellowship supported her work, and she also received the Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets. Further recognition came in the form of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Robert Frost Medal, and the T. S. Eliot Prize, a range that spans American and British literary culture alike.
The accumulation of those awards traces a career that has been assessed, repeatedly and across decades, as significant by the critics and committees charged with evaluating poetry in English. The T. S. Eliot Prize, awarded in the United Kingdom, extended that recognition across the Atlantic, while the Wallace Stevens Award, given by the Academy of American Poets, acknowledged the full arc of her contribution. Taken together, these honors mark Olds as a figure whose work has received consistent attention from the institutions that shape how poetry is read and valued in the English-speaking world.
Quotes by Sharon Olds
Sharon Olds's insights on:
Many poets write books. They’ll tell you: Well, I’ve got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me.
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.
I’m not sure that the benefit – as a writer and as a citizen – that I would get from reading at least the front page of the Times every day or every other day would outweigh the depression.
I didn’t have time to sit down and look at the work of a year and choose what to type.
Every poet I know – although there may be some I don’t know who lead very different lives, who maybe live in the country and don’t teach – tends to be just like the rest of us: just really busy, really overcommitted.
The decision for me was whether to have ‘The Father’ be a book that told a story – from the point of view of this speaker, the daughter – without, as in the earlier books, then having a section on something else and a section on something else.
I can tell you we were right, our bodies were right, life was really going to be that good, that pleasurable in every cell. Suddenly I remember the exact look of your body, but better than that the bright corners of your eyes, or the light of your face, the rich Long Island puppy-fat of your thighs, or the slick chino of your pants bright in the corners of my eyes, I remember your extraordinary act of courage in loving me.