National Poetry Month - Sharon Olds

For my National Poetry Month posts, I've decided that I want to focus on the work of women poets. Those who were and are considred "half cracked" are particular favorites. Half-cracked women poets are witches, bitches, feminists and madwomen. I say, thank god for us who partake of their intimacy, madness and sorcery.


Others, like Sharon Olds, tell their own truths about the body, sex, violence, death and family in stark language that is feared and criticized, I believe, because of their gender.

Here is Sharon Olds from her collection The Dead And The Living. Some critics of Olds have referred to her work as "pornographic", so be warned.

The Issues

(Rhodesia 1978)

Just don't tell me about the issues.

I can see the pale spider-belly head of the

newborn who lies on the lawn, the web of

veins at the surface of her scalp, her skin

grey and gleaming, the clean line of the

bayonet down the center of her chest.

I see her mother's face, beaten and

beaten into the shape of a plant,

a cactus with grey spines and broad

dark maroon blooms.

I see her arm stretched out across her baby,

wrist resting, heavily, still, across the

tiny ribs.

Don't speak to me about

politics. I've got eyes, man.

Also from The Gold Cell


Still Life


I lie on my back after making love,
breasts white in shallow curves like the lids of soup dishes,
nipples shiny as berries, speckled and immutable.
My legs lie down there somewhere in the bed like those
great silver fish drooping over the edge of the table
Scene of destruction, scene of perfect peace,
sex bright and calm and luminous as the
scarlet and blue dead pheasant all
maroon neck feathers, and deep body wounds,
and on the center of my forehead a drop of water
round and opalescent, and in it
the self-portrait of the artist, upside down,
naked, holding your brushes dripping like torches with light.


Open Letter To Laura Bush http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051010/olds

Salon interview with Sharon Olds