Freed up, she began to write about her family, abuse, sex, focusing on the work not the audience. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it".įollowing her Phd on Emerson's prosody, Olds let go of an attachment to what she thought she 'knew about' poetic convention. The letter closes: "So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. Olds responded, declining the invitation in an open letter published in the October 10th, 2005 issue of The Nation. In 2005, First Lady Laura Bush invited Olds to the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. She currently teaches creative writing at New York University. Olds has been the recipient of many awards including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the San Francisco Poetry Center Award. in English from Columbia University on the prosody of Emerson's poems. The four-beat was something that was just part of my consciousness from before I was born." She adds "I think I was about 15 when I conceived of myself as an atheist, but I think it was only very recently that I can really tell that there's nobody there with a copybook making marks against your name." After graduating from Stanford University she moved east to earn a Ph.D. She says she was by nature "a pagan and a pantheist" and notes "I was in a church where there was both great literary art and bad literary art, the great art being psalms and the bad art being hymns. She was raised as a “hellfire Calvinist”, as she describes it. Sharon Olds was born in 1942 in San Francisco.
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