New York Poet Sharon Olds Gives Laguna Reading Tonight

Sharon Olds, a highly acclaimed New York writer, will read her poetry in Laguna Beach tonight. “As it happens, I’ve never read in Southern California before,” she said in a telephone interview. “This will be exciting for me; this will be a first.”

Although a prolonged bout with bronchitis and flu had forced her to cancel several recent East Coast engagements, Olds boarded a plane Wednesday morning to be poet-in-residence for three days at Westlake School in Los Angeles and to read for the Laguna Poets.

Olds’ poetry delves into the dark matrix of relationships within a deeply troubled family from the perspective of a younger daughter. She also writes poems that address societal issues and poems that celebrate a functional family from the mother’s point of view.

She has published three books. Her first, “Satan Says,” appeared in 1980 and won the 1981 San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Her second book, “The Dead and the Living,” was the 1983 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets and also won the 1984 National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Poetry. “The Gold Cell,” her third book, has also been highly praised.

She is now putting together two new collections and will read new poems tonight. “I really like reading work that’s pretty fresh,” she said.

Olds doesn’t have a set time of day for writing but waits until a poem “comes to me.” “It says to me, ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you,’ ” she said. “If I’m lucky, a poem will knock on the little door and say, ‘I’m ready to be born,’ and then I’ll write it down, I’ll take that dictation.”

Director of the creative writing program at New York University since 1988, Olds “apparently” lives in New York City with her husband, son and daughter. “Apparently” is a word that crops up frequently when the conversation turns to connections between her disturbing poetry and her life. Fiercely protective of her privacy, Olds doesn’t want to confirm even the existence of the spouse and children who enter so much of her writing. “I’ve reached a point of complete apparent separation between my actual life and my actual work,” she said.

Years ago, when she gave readings followed by question-and-answer sessions, “the first question would always be ‘How old are your children now?’ ” Olds said. “I noticed that I was getting irritated. I wanted to be asked about line breaks--or disarmament. I asked men poets what kinds of questions they were asked after readings, and they said, ‘Oh, line breaks. Disarmament.’ ”

The difference, Olds said, “has something to do with being a woman, and apparently a mother and a wife. I want to get the center of attention where it belongs,” on the poems themselves.

Her reticence about her personal life also extends to questions about her early family life, which she seems to describe in numerous poems about abusive parents and siblings.

“We don’t know where our poems come from. We don’t know what leads them to us, and what keeps them from us,” Olds said. “It’s a gift that’s not in our power, (although) we can do certain things to try to stay ready for our poems, to welcome them. For me, not talking about my life feels sort of superstitiously right. It feels like that’s part of my bargain, in a way--I don’t know exactly what I mean by that.

“I want to protect the poems from the people, and the people from the poems.”

Born in San Francisco in late 1942, Olds grew up in the Bay Area. She began writing poetry as a child. At 15, she was sent to an East Coast boarding school. Later, she earned a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University.

At 21, Olds moved permanently to New York City. “All my life I wanted to get to the Empire State Building and put my arms around it and hang on,” she said. “I’m in love with New York City. New York is so public. Every day you see a lot of strangers. And I like that. It’s the opposite of a little house in the woods.”

She earned a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University in 1972. During graduate school, Olds’ poetry suffered. “I was trying to write like other people,” she said. At 30, she found her own voice.

“I was walking away from Columbia with my Ph.D. in my pocket, and I was carrying a couple of children, and I was grinning from ear to ear. I had finished my degree, and I was free. I would never have to obey anyone again--I thought,” she said, laughing. “I made a vow to myself: I’ll give up all that I’ve learned, all that this degree represents, just to do my own work and lead my own life. What I wanted to do was not let the poem escape, whether it was right or wrong, nice or nasty.

“The next day I wrote several poems, and I hadn’t written for months. I had hit a streak that went on for about five years.” During that time, she also taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Brandeis University and Columbia, and--apparently--raised two children.

For the last five years, Olds has supervised a writing program at Goldwater Hospital on New York’s Roosevelt Island. There, she and a few NYU graduate students work with “the Golden Writers,” a small group of severely disabled poets.

Among the Golden Writers, “no one has the use of their legs; some have some use of their hands,” Olds said. “Many are quadriplegic, and in addition, some are non-speaking. They communicate with devices that range from very primitive to very sensitive.”

Two poets there can “type” with laser wands strapped around their foreheads and directed at light-sensitive computers; for others, the NYU students hold up alphabet cards, and the disabled poets indicate the letters of poems with eye movements.

“There’s lot of remarkable writing being done at Goldwater--so fearless and direct,” Olds said. The disabled writers, she said, are “people of very exceptional spiritual power. I did desire to learn about that from them.” The program, initiated by the Very Special Arts Foundation, is now supported through fund-raisers, donations from “Friends of the Golden Writers” and in-kind support from Very Special Arts, NYU and Goldwater.

Olds gives many readings of her work throughout the year. She also teaches at the Squaw Valley Poetry Workshop near Lake Tahoe each summer.

“I’ve been teaching without a semester off for 13 years,” she said. “I’m looking forward to sometime having what I would regard as an ideal writer’s life, having a year or a semester off to put the poetry at the center” of life, rather than always “fitting it in.”

Yet, she added, she enjoys traveling and meeting other poets. “I think I get to see the best of America, because I see the people who are interested in poetry--people who know they’re not going to be rich, but other things matter more to them,” Olds said.

Sharon Olds will read at 8 p.m. at the Laguna Beach Public Library, 363 Glenneyre St. Tickets are $10.

Penelope Moffet is a regular contributor to Orange County Life.

I GO BACK TO MAY 1937

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,

I see my father strolling out

under the ochre sandstone arch, the

red tiles glinting like bent

plates of blood behind his head, I

see my mother with a few light books at her hip

standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the

wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its

sword-tips black in the May air,

they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,

they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are

innocent, they would never hurt anybody.

I want to go up to them and say Stop,

don’t do it--she’s the wrong woman,

he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things

you cannot imagine you would ever do,

you are going to do bad things to children,

you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,

you are going to want to die. I want to go

up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,

her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,

her pitiful beautiful untouched body,

his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,

his pitiful beautiful untouched body,

but I don’t do it. I want to live. I

take them up like the male and female

paper dolls and bang them together

at the hips like chips of flint as if to

strike sparks from them, I say

Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

From “The Gold Cell,” by Sharon Olds, Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. Reprinted by permission.