OCTOBER 2005
She was invited by Laura
Bush to attend the National Book Festival, a
dinner at the Library of Congress, and a
breakfast at the White House. She declined the
invitation. Below is the text of her letter to
Laura Bush explaining why she can't attend. Laura Bush Dear Mrs. Bush, I am writing to let you know why I am not able to accept your kind invitation to give a presentation at the National Book Festival on September 24, or to attend your dinner at the Library of Congress or the breakfast at the White House. In one way, it's a very appealing invitation. The idea of speaking at a festival attended by 85,000 people is inspiring! The possibility of finding new readers is exciting for a poet in personal terms, and in terms of the desire that poetry serve its constituents - all of us who need the pleasure, and the inner and outer news, it delivers. And the concept of a community of readers and writers has long been dear to my heart. As a professor of creative writing in the graduate school of a major university, I have had the chance to be a part of some magnificent outreach writing workshops in which our students have become teachers. Over the years, they have taught in a variety of settings: a women's prison, several New York City public high schools, an oncology ward for children. Our initial program, at a 900-bed state hospital for the severely physically challenged, has been running now for twenty years, creating along the way lasting friendships between young MFA candidates and their students-long-term residents at the hospital who, in their humor, courage and wisdom, become our teachers. When you have witnessed someone nonspeaking and almost nonmoving spell out, with a toe, on a big plastic alphabet chart, letter by letter, his new poem, you have experienced, close up, the passion and essentialness of writing. When you have held up a small cardboard alphabet card for a writer who is completely nonspeaking and nonmoving (except for the eyes), and pointed first to the A, then the B, then C, then D, until you get to the first letter of the first word of the first line of the poem she has been composing in her head all week, and she lifts her eyes when that letter is touched to say yes, you feel with a fresh immediacy the human drive for creation, self-expression, accuracy, honesty and wit - and the importance of writing, which celebrates the value of each person's unique story and song. So the prospect of a festival of books seemed wonderful to me. I thought of the opportunity to talk about how to start up an outreach program. I thought of the chance to sell some books, sign some books and meet some of the citizens of Washington, DC. I thought that I could try to find a way, even as your guest, with respect, to speak about my deep feeling that we should not have invaded Iraq, and to declare my belief that the wish to invade another culture and another country - with the resultant loss of life and limb for our brave soldiers, and for the noncombatants in their home terrain - did not come out of our democracy but was instead a decision made "at the top" and forced on the people by distorted language, and by untruths. I hoped to express the fear that we have begun to live in the shadows of tyranny and religious chauvinism - the opposites of the liberty, tolerance and diversity our nation aspires to. I tried to see my way clear to attend the festival in order to bear witness - as an American who loves her country and its principles and its writing-against this undeclared and devastating war. But I could not face the
idea of breaking bread with you. I knew that if I
sat down to eat with you, it would feel to me as
if I were condoning what I see to be the wild,
highhanded actions of the Bush What kept coming to the fore of my mind was that I would be taking food from the hand of the First Lady who represents the Administration that unleashed this war and that wills its continuation, even to the extent of permitting "extraordinary rendition": flying people to other countries where they will be tortured for us. So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it. Sincerely, SHARON OLDS |
Sharon
Olds was born in 1942 in San Francisco. She was, in her
own words, raised as a "hellfire Calvinist."
After graduating from Stanford she moved east to earn a
Ph.D. in English from Columbia University. Olds describes
the completion of her doctorate as a transitional moment
in her life: standing on the steps of the library at
Columbia University, she vowed to become a poet, even if
it meant giving up everything she had learned.Olds’s
work is anthologized in over 100 collections, ranging
from literary/poetry textbooks to special collections.
Her poetry has been translated into seven languages for
international publications. Sharon Olds teaches poetry
workshops in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New
York University and helps run the N.Y.U. workshop program
at Goldwater Hospital in New York. She is the New York
State Poet Laureate for 1998-2000.
photo David
Bartolomi
The Borders
To say that she came into me,
from another world, is not true.
Nothing comes into the universe
and nothing leaves it.
My daughter did not
enter me. She began to exist
inside me
My mother——my mother did not enter me.
she appeared within me.
When she lay down, to pray, on me,
she was always ferociously courteous,
fastidious with Puritan fastidiousness,
but the barrier of my skin failed, the barrier of my
body fell, the barrier of my spirit.
She aroused and magnetized my skin, I wanted
ardently to please her, I would say to her
what she wanted to hear, as if I were hers.
I served her willingly, and then
became very much like her, fiercely
out for myself.
When my daughter was in me, I felt I had
a soul in me. But it was born with her.
But when she cried, one night, such pure crying,
I said I will take care of you, I will
put you first. I will not ever
have a daughter the way she had me,
I will not ever swim in you
the way my mother swam in me and I
felt myself swum in. I will never know anyone
again the way I knew my mother,
the gates of the human fallen.
From an
interview with Salon.com :
Thanks for the tea. Which reminds me that I once read somewhere that you don't smoke or drink coffee, and that you consume very little alcohol. Why is that?
Well, one thing I'm
really interested in, when I'm writing, is being
accurate. If I am trying to describe something, I'd like
to be able to get it right. Of course, what's
"right" is different for every person.
Sometimes what's accurate might be kind of mysterious. So
I don't just mean mathematically accurate. But to get it
right according to my vision. I think this is true for
all artists. My senses are very important to me. I want
to be able to describe accurately what I see and hear and
smell. And what they say about those things not being
good for one's longevity makes an impression on me also.
So I did quit coffee and I did quit smoking. But I
haven't managed that with drinking!
People who know
your work well might be surprised to know that you have
such a vigorous public life. Because your work is very
focused and often kind of quiet. It's hard to imagine the
narrator of one of your poems fending off multiple phone
calls.
But don't you think that every single one of us is leading a harried life? We're all taking on too much, we're all asking too much of ourselves. We're all wishing we could do more, and therefore just doing more. So I don't think my life is different from anybody else's. 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.
What did you mean when you once said that your poetry comes out of your lungs?
[Laughs] Well, you know, it's curious where different people think their mind is. I guess a lot of people believe that their mind is in their brain, in their head. To me, the mind seems to be spread out in the whole body -- the senses are part of the brain. I guess they're not where the thinking is done. But poetry is so physical, the music of it and the movement of thought. Maybe we can use a metaphor for it, out of dance. I think for many years I was aware of the need, in dance and in life, to breathe deeply and to take in more air than we usually take in. I find a tendency in myself not to breathe very much. And certainly I have noticed, over the years, when dancing or when running, that ideas will come to my mind with the oxygen. Suddenly you're remembering something that you haven't thought of for years.
......................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. But I think in another way I am like these poets: we like to get in the art's way as little as possible.
That's an interesting phrase, "not getting in art's way". Is that why you write your poems in a style that's somewhat accessible?
I think that it's a little different from that for me. I think that my work is easy to understand because I am not a thinker, I am not a .... How can I put it? I write the way I perceive, I guess. It's not really simple, I don't think, but it's about ordinary things -- feeling about things, about people. I'm not an intellectual, I'm not an abstract thinker. And I'm interested in ordinary life. So I think that our writing reflects us.
I was recently reading
in Des Moines with Yusef Komunyakaa and Philip Levine.
You listen to them and you're hearing a world-view, a
body-view, you're hearing a spirit of a person, and mind,
and heart, and soul. Their work is completely
distinctive; you know you're hearing a Komunyakaa poem
immediately. And I don't think they are trying to sound
one way or another -- it doesn't seem to me to be
something that comes from a conscious decision. Their
spirits and their visions are embodied in their craft.
And so is mine.
There are some things that have to do with art that we
can't control. This creature of the poem may assemble
itself into a being with its own centrifugal force.
That's what I'm thinking about when I'm trying to get out
of art's way. Not trying to look good, if a poem's about
me. Not trying to look bad. Not asking a poem to carry a
lot of rocks in its pockets. But just being an ordinary
observer and liver and feeler and letting the experience
get through you onto the notebook with the pen, through
the arm, out of the body, onto the page, without
distortion. And there are so many ways I could distort.
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. It's kind of like
ego in a way, egotism or narcissism. Where the self is
too active.
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