Sharon Olds
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Sharon Olds
Sharon Olds: Thank you so much. For those generous welcoming
words, for your invitation. I thought that we could have a conversation
as well as a reading and a bit of description. So I’m going to stop
a few times and ask if there’s anything that you’d like to talk about
that’s come up because of something that I’ve read.
I think it would be a cool idea for you to have a poet here who
is also a scholar, who would be able to talk about the history of the
narrative in poetry. What I would have liked to be able to do is read
examples, over time, as the element of narrative in poetry has changed.
If and when that person comes here, I want to come and hear that
person speak! I’ll start with this poem.
Diagnosis
By the time I was six months old, she knew something
was wrong with me. I got looks on my face
she had not seen on any child
in the family, or the extended family,
or the neighborhood. My mother took me in
to the pediatrician with the kind hands,
a doctor with a name like a suit size for a wheel:
Hub Long. My mom did not tell him
what she thought in truth, that I was Possessed.
It was just these strange looks on my face—
he held me, and conversed with me,
chatting as one does with a baby, and my mother
said, She’s doing it now! Look!
She’s doing it now! and the doctor said,
What your daughter has
is called a sense
of humor. Ohhh, she said, and took me
Literature and Medicine 29, no. 2 (Fall 2011) 227–245
© 2012 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
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back to the house where that sense would be tested
and found to be incurable.
And I’ll read this one.
Everything
Most of us are never conceived.
Many of us are never born—
we live in a private ocean for hours,
weeks, with our extra or missing limbs,
or holding our poor second head,
growing from our chest, in our arms. And many of us,
sea-fruit on its stem, dreaming kelp
and whelk, are culled in our early months.
And some who are born live only for minutes,
others for two, or for three, summers,
or four, and when they go, everything
goes—the earth, the firmament—
and love stays, where nothing is, and seeks.
I know I would never have written that poem if my little godson had
not died when he was six and a half; he had been very sick since he
was born. It was maybe sixteen years after that that this poem came
to me. Unusual for me to think I can speak for other people: “many
of us are never conceived.” I’m happy to have that, that inclusiveness
in the poem. Though we know how hard it is to speak for anyone,
even ourselves, with any accuracy.
I’ve been thinking—because I was going to be here with you—
what is this “narrative poetry”? What is it to be a narrative poet, a
narrative autobiographical poet? Is it narcissism? Is it exhibitionism?
Is it the wish to describe from within what it is like to perceive this
earth and this life? Is it the wish to describe what it’s like as, in my
case, a woman? And I decided yes, it’s those four mostly.
Life with Sick Kids
One child coughs once
and is sick for eight weeks, then the other child coughs so
hard he nearly vomits, three weeks, and then
stops and then the first child coughs a first cough,
and then the other delicately and dryly begins to cough,
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illness taking them up and shaking them
as kids shake boxes at Christmas. So in bed on the
third day of the blood when it would be
almost safe to use nothing,
just a tiny door left open for a resourceful child,
I cannot see or feel or smell you, I keep
thinking I hear the unconceived one
cough a little introductory cough.
[Quiet Laughter]
And then there’s a book of mine called The Father, which is the story
of a father’s illness and death from the point of view of a daughter.
For so many years it was so important to me not to say whether my
poetry was autobiographical or not—partly not to have the focus of
any conversation there might be about it to be just on the biographical
facts. I wouldn’t say it was; I wouldn’t say it wasn’t. The truth is, it
never crossed my mind that anyone would think that anyone would
make up the stuff in my poems! So this is from the book The Father.
The Glass
I think of it with wonder now,
the glass of mucus that stood on the table
in front of my father all weekend. The tumor
is growing fast in his throat these days,
and as it grows it sends out pus
like the sun sending out flares, those pouring
tongues. So my father has to gargle, cough,
spit a mouthful of thick stuff
into the glass every ten minutes or so,
scraping the rim up his lower lip
to get the last bit off his skin, then he
sets the glass down, on the table, and it
sits there, like a glass of beer foam,
shiny and faintly yellow, he gargles and
coughs and reaches for it again,
and gets the heavy sputum out,
full of bubbles and moving around like yeast—
he is like a god producing food from his own mouth.
He himself can eat nothing, anymore,
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just a swallow of milk, sometimes,
cut with water, and even then
it cannot, always, get past the tumor,
and the next time the saliva comes up
it is ropey, he has to roll it in his throat
a minute to form it and get it up and disgorge the oval globule into the
glass of phlegm, which stood there all day and
filled slowly with compound globes and I would
empty it, and it would fill again,
and shimmer there on the table until
the room seemed to turn around it
in an orderly way, a model of the solar system
turning around the sun,
my father the old earth that used to
lie at the center of the universe, now
turning with the rest of us
around his death, luminous glass of
spit on the table, these last mouthfuls of his life.
I haven’t read that poem aloud in a long time, and it’s clear to me
now that it has to do with wanting to stay right beside someone who
is going through that, and I guess the word would be to witness it, not
turn away from it, to celebrate the beauty of someone still being alive.
I have been so fortunate in how my work has been received,
and at the same time, in the early years, I had very strong reactions
against it, very striking responses. I remember when I first read this
poem, around 1982 or 1983, some people in the audience left in the
middle of the poem. I guess it was just too gross, felt as if it harmed
their hearts, or harmed their idea of what poetry should be.
And when I would submit to magazines poems which had children in them, I would get back these rejection slips which said, “If
you wish to write about children, may we suggest the Ladies Home
Journal? We are a literary magazine.” Seriously! This is a long time ago,
of course, before we all got so much more intelligent about everything!
Now I’ll read a couple more poems from The Father, and then
we’ll see if there’s a conversation that you would like to have.
His Stillness
The doctor said to my father, “You asked me
to tell you when nothing more could be done.
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That’s what I’m telling you now.” My father
sat quite still, as he always did,
especially not moving his eyes. I had thought
he would rave if he understood he would die,
wave his arms and cry out. He sat up,
thin, and clean, in his clean gown,
like a holy man. The doctor said,
“There are things we can do which might give you time,
but we cannot cure you.” My father said,
“Thank you.” And he sat, motionless, alone,
with the dignity of a foreign leader.
I sat beside him. This was my father.
He had known he was mortal. I had feared they would have to
tie him down. I had not remembered
he had always held still and kept quiet to bear things,
the liquor a way to keep still. I had not
known him. My father had dignity. At the
end of his life his life began
to wake in me.
Maybe this would be a moment to say that I think poetry started as
a kind of prayer—“don’t let this child die.” I just learned that the
oldest physical archeological human finding that we now have is the
skeleton of a girl child, maybe six, seven years old, buried in a circle
of rams’ horns. That’s one of the first signs of our species. I just
heard that. It moved me so much, as if it said to me, “art matters.”
Making something, yes, that’s what we do. Prayer, and next maybe
praise song, a tribal pride: “Don’t let these genes be made extinct.”
And then love songs: “Don’t let my genes fail to be continued in the
company of this excellent person that I’m so interested in.” So prayer,
and then the narrative epic, the tribal epic, and after that the lyric.
I’d like to read you these six lines.
Some say horsemen, some, foot-soldiers, some, again,
maintain that the swift oars
of our fleet are the finest
sight on the black earth; but I say
that what one loves is the loveliest.
Sappho (from “To an army wife, in Sardis”)
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So, between “black earth” and “but I say,” there’s a semicolon. [laughs]
It looks like a little egg and sperm to me today, because I’m seeing
that the lyric in Western European tradition was born just as Sappho
said “but I say.” And I guess what I write is narrative lyric.
In the graduate poetry workshops I teach at N.Y.U., most of
the young poets are not writing narrative poetry. So I’ve had the
tremendous excitement, in the last twenty years, to see narrative poetry—apparently personal poetry—go out of fashion, and mysterious,
experimental, anti-narrative poetry come in, almost as if the young
have seen through the narrative and need to go beyond it, as if it’s
not real. It’s not true. Where did it get us? The hell with it. So they
are writing these strange gorgeous poems, and when I was thinking
about narrative rounds, narrative medicine, narrative poetry, I thought,
what about experimental rounds, experimental medicine, experimental
poetry! I’m happy to be an old warhorse—war and peace horse—of
narrative poetry. There’s nothing else I could have written. I somehow
felt it was possible to know what happened—but of course I didn’t
know what happened in a given day, or in a family, or anything. But
I felt it was possible to know it, and if I really tried to get it right,
that would be a song that I would like to make.
The Race
When I got to the airport I rushed up to the desk,
bought a ticket, ten minutes later
they told me the flight was cancelled, the doctors
had said my father would not live through the night
and the flight was cancelled. A young man
with a dark brown moustache told me
another airline had a nonstop
leaving in seven minutes. See that elevator over there, well go
down to the first floor, make a right, you’ll
see a yellow bus, get off at the
second Pan Am terminal, I ran, I who have no sense of direction
raced exactly where he’d told me, a fish
slipping upstream deftly against
the flow of the river. I jumped off that bus with those
bags I had thrown everything into
in five minutes, and ran, the bags
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wagged me from side to side as if to prove I was under the claims of the material,
I ran up to a man with a flower on his breast,
I who always go to the end of the line, I said
Help me. He looked at my ticket, he said
Make a left and then a right, go up the moving stairs and then
run. I lumbered up the moving stairs,
at the top I saw the corridor, and then I took a deep breath, I said
goodbye to my body, goodbye to comfort,
I used my legs and heart as if I would
gladly use them up for this,
to touch him again in this life. I ran, and the bags banged against me, wheeled and coursed
in skewed orbits, I have seen pictures of
women running, their belongings tied
in scarves grasped in their fists, I blessed my long legs he gave me, my strong
heart I abandoned to its own purpose,
I ran to Gate 17 and they were
just lifting the thick white
lozenge of the door to fit it into
the socket of the plane. Like the one who is not too rich, I turned sideways and slipped through the needle’s eye, and then
I walked down the aisle toward my father. The jet
was full, and people’s hair was shining, they were smiling, the interior of the plane was filled with a
mist of gold endorphin light, I wept as people weep when they enter heaven,
in massive relief. We lifted up
gently from one tip of the continent
and did not stop until we set down lightly on the
other edge, I walked into his room
and watched his chest rise slowly
and sink again, all night
I watched him breathe.
I think that’s a good place to wiggle around and breathe and stretch
and ask if there’s anything that you would like to say or ask about
our subject today. This will not be on the test! [laughter] There
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is no test. I do not understand poetry. Luckily I don’t have to. So if
there’s anything that you would be interested in us talking about a
bit. Yes, hi.
Male Speaker: [question about the visual creativity of the poem “His
Stillness”]
Sharon Olds: That’s so cool, right, I never thought of that. I like very
much your reading of those three “stills” and I love this idea that
the speaker of the poem is recognizing, or playfully doing something
about, the father making something. And of course the father and
mother made the life of this person who is speaking.
Male Speaker: [A question about the genesis of the poem “Everything”]
Sharon Olds: I was thinking of all the human beings who could ever
have existed, as if our tribe includes all of us who ever could have
existed—that’s a lot of tribe. And so many of the people who could
have existed had never been conceived, had never had a chance, had
not come one bit toward getting born. The poem has to do with the,
the death of children, the, just the unspeakable loss. And for some
reason, thinking about that, my mind, which is usually quite focused
in a good nearsighted way on what’s right here, my attention got
bigger, and drew back, the lens panned way back, and I, I thought
of all of us who could have been born.
Female Speaker: Hi. One of your poems that I love is [inaudible]
it’s about how amazing it is that you just happened to conceive your
daughter, nine months before she was born—that specific person—it
was just amazing, you know, that it just happened to occur.
Sharon Olds: Mm!
Female Speaker: And that, I think that about my own daughter.
Sharon Olds: Mm! Yes! O.K., one more and then I’ll read some more
poems. Hi. Call out!
Male Speaker: Can you hear large sections of the poem in your head
before you write it down? And while you are writing, are you writing for someone, or for the universe, or for your father? Who is the
audience in your own mind?
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Sharon Olds: Mm! Thank you. So. Do I hear large sections of a poem
before I write them down? Many poets do. Of course this is true at the
hospital for the physically challenged where I’ve worked in a workshop,
many of them—all those non-moving and non-speaking—have to write
their poems in their heads because their transcriber isn’t going to be
there for a week. And a lot of other poets, without that necessity, do
that. No, I don’t like to get started until I am sitting there with the
pen and the notebook. (The Bic™ ballpoint pen and the grocery store
notebook, wide ruled.) There is a certain sense in which the poem
seems to me to come into being by itself. Of course it doesn’t, I’m
writing it, but I don’t want it to get started until I can feed it out,
or watch the pen feed it out, and try to get the rate of it right, and
when I make a mistake go back a bit and then start from there. For
me, it seems to happen in the writing. Nor do I take notes and build
a poem from sections, as many of my friends do, so many poets do.
I feel as if I’m writing to try to get it right, as if without reference
to who might ever read it, but just between me and the experience.
Say I’m writing about something that actually happened—so there’s
me, there’s the lines on the notebook, there’s the dictionary over there
with how many words in it, and I could use any of them, there’s
the whole language. And for me, a narrative poet, there’s the truth
of the experience, the human ordinary facts. There’s so much to pay
attention to—as well as the internal rhyme, the rhythm. I didn’t mean
to write in four-beat lines, but I do. So, there’s also the turns of the
line endings—a lot is going on! I don’t have room in my attention to
think of who might read it. Though it’s true there is an underlying
hope that if the poem works, another person might read it. And an
underlying assurance that if it doesn’t work, no one will ever read it!
Now I’d like to read some newer poems. We’ve had some children and parents; here’s the self.
Self-Exam
They tell you it won’t make much sense, at first,
you will have to learn the terrain. They tell you this
at thirty, and fifty, and some are late
beginners, at last lying down and walking
the old earth of the breasts—the small,
cobbled, plowed field of one,
with a listening walking, and then the other—
fingertip-stepping, divining, north
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to south, east to west, sectioning
the little fallen hills, sweeping
for mines. And the matter feels primordial,
unimaginable—dense,
cystic, phthistic, each breast like the innards
of a cell, its contents shifting and changing,
streambed gravel under walking feet, it
seems almost unpicturable, not
immemorial, but nearly unmemorizable, but one marches,
slowly, through grave or fatal danger,
or no danger, one feels around in the
two tack-room drawers, ribs and
knots like leather bridles and plaited
harnesses and bits and reins,
one runs one’s hands through the mortal tackle
in a jumble, in the dark, indoors. Outside—
night, in which these glossy ones were
ridden to a froth of starlight, bareback.
I talked to someone who had seen the poem, and liked it, liked the
writing, and didn’t know what it was about. Was it about anything?
[laughter] And I said well, the way I saw it, was that it was
about a . . . a breast exam. [laughter] Oh, he said, but then he
didn’t understand the last two lines. I said well, I thought of them
as um, um, the atmosphere of a breast exam being different from the
atmosphere of, of sexual lovemaking. “Oh!” he said. That was that.
Something Is Happening
When it approaches, no one knows what it is—it is her
brain tumor, flaring up again.
My mother explains it to me—Something
is happening, and it is physical,
and medical, and emotional,
and spiritual. She’s so sheerly lonely
she is like the one member of a tribe.
When she hears the doorbell—when it has not rung—
and she runs to it, she is like an explorer
of unseen deserts, unscanned rivers of
asteroids. Her naked body is almost
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pretty, with its thousand puckers, maybe there’s a
planet somewhere which holds this beaten-tosoft-peaks egg-white stomach the most
desirable. It was painful to know her,
such a feral one, untrained, unmothered,
but now she is playing at the edge of some field,
absorbed. There is something big coming,
bigger than love, bigger than aloneness.
She’s staying up all night for it.
Something not an angel, not male or female,
is leaning on her brain. Up from within
the crease of the tumor, like the first appearance
of matter, something is arriving—not
her father, and not just death, but the truth,
her self, soon to be completed.
The Last Evening
Then we raised the top portion of the bed,
and her head was like a trillium, growing
up, out of the ground, in the woods,
eyes closed, mouth open,
and we put the Battle arias on, and when I
heard the first note, that was it, for me,
I excused myself from the death-room guests,
and went to my mother, and cleared a place
on the mattress, beside her arm, lifting
the tubes, oxygen, dextrose, morphine,
dipping in under them, and letting them
rest on my hair, as if burying myself
under a topsoil of roots, I pulled
the sheet up, over my head,
and touched my forehead and nose and mouth
to her arm, and then, against the warm
solace of her skin, I sobbed full out,
unguarded, as I have not done near her;
and I could feel some barrier between us dissolving,
I could feel myself dissolving it,
moving ever-closer to her through it, till I was
all there. And in her coma nothing
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drew her away from giving me the basal
kindness of her presence. When the doctor came in,
he looked at her and said, “I’d say
hours, not days.” When he left, I ate
a pear with her, talking us through it,
and walnuts—and a crow, a whole bouquet
of crows came apart, outside the window.
I looked for the moon and said, I’ll be right
back, and ran down the hospital hall,
and there, outside the eastern window,
was the waxing gibbous, like a swimmer’s head
turned to the side half out of the water, mouth
pulled to the side and back, to take breath,
I could see my young mother, slim
and strong in her navy one-piece, and see,
in memory’s dark-blue corridor,
the beauty of her crawl, the hard, graceful
overhand motion, as someone who says,
This way, to the others behind. And I went back,
and sat with her, alone, an hour,
in the quiet, and I felt, almost, not
afraid of losing her, I was so
content to have her beside me, unspeaking,
unseeing, alive.
Okay. We need a change of tone! I’ll read a couple of these newer
poems. I don’t know if it was a coincidence, but something changed
in my poetry shortly after I had said in an interview that yes, the I
in my poetry was I, and that I never made anything up, and that I
have no imagination. I might have felt that I had lost my, um, disguise, but I began to write a kind of poem which was new for me.
My boyfriend and I were traveling, we were in an old bookstore,
and an old book sort of appeared, and it was Pablo Neruda’s Odes
to Common Things.
For some reason, I had never become involved with them—and
now I was dazzled by how great they were. It was facing-page translation, too, and I had enough Italian that I could do a little of the
Spanish, and oh, I, it, I saw something new.
When a poem comes to me—I call it “when a poem comes to
me”—when the heart of a poem comes to me, I don’t know where
it comes from. I prefer not to take responsibility for it! It seems to
come from left field, and that was true of this poem.
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Neruda’s odes are like “Ode to Salt.” So I had been reading his
ode to the table, to dogs, and then this poem came to me. It’s called
“Ode to the Tampon.” [laughter]
Sharon Olds reads “Ode to The tampon”2
This was very exciting for me, because it wasn’t in 4/4 time, the
meter of my childhood fundamentalist hymns, which turned out to be
the meter of my poems—luckily I didn’t know that until I was fifty,
or I would almost have wanted to quit, I think! [laughter] And
in this new poem I had gone beyond sentences—here instead were
phrases, and I’d gone beyond meter, no de-dum, de-dum, de-dum, dedum. And there were almost no verbs, just the it-ness of something.
And I wasn’t trying to be shocking. It just came to my mind when I
was thinking about ordinary things, an ordinary thing in life.
So maybe something has been happening to give me the feeling
of being representative enough—that we are all enough like each other
that we can talk to each other and understand what we say. So let’s
talk a little more, and then I can close with a couple more of the
odes. Anything else? Anything else you’re thinking? Yes?
Male Speaker: Just a brief question, can you speak a little bit about
“Satan Says,” because, it goes way back, but it’s my favorite poem
of yours.
Sharon Olds: Thank you!
Male Speaker: In the poem “Satan Says,” maybe you—can you just
kind of talk a little bit about it?
Sharon Olds: Yes. The poem “Satan Says” became the first poem and
the title poem in my first book because, out of the blue, when it came
out in Kayak, a wild magazine out in California, George Oppen wrote
me a letter. Now, this is a great, great American poet. He wrote me a
letter about that poem, so it became for me some kind of center. So
let’s see, I don’t know what to say about the poem. I can say this.
I was raised to believe in Satan and to believe that I was going to
the Calvinist Hell. This was long before Charles Manson, long before
any of the more recent Satan-isms. When I wrote the poem, maybe
in 1970, I was just thinking of growing up, and Satan was one of the
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main characters in my early life. I don’t know what I really meant
by “Satan,” some aspect of the psychological self, something about
pain and anger.
I actually mis-titled the poem. I really meant “Mother May I” and
then I thought “Simon Says,” and then it came out “Satan Says”—like
a waking little vision or fantasy. It rolled easily out of my pen—and
as you can see, I don’t understand it, or really much of my work,
in a way, so I don’t know what more I can say than that—but thank
you, and thank you to George!
Female Speaker: I was just wondering, you said before that you
teach at N.Y.U. and a lot of them don’t write narrative. And I’m just
wondering are you seeing narratives sort of come back, or not really?
Sharon Olds: I don’t know if narrative is coming back. At the beginning
of each workshop I say that I believe that every poem is narrative,
and every poem is experimental. Every poem is exploratory, trying to
find its way, and in every poem I see a story, however little it was
meant to be there. I also have found that narrative poets think that
experimental poetry is king now, and the experimental poets think
that narrative poetry is king, so you know, we all like to feel we’re
in the less popular brand! I trust that a lot of young poets have left
the narrative behind because some people in my generation had done
with it—maybe in a sort of obvious or plain way—a lot of what it
seemed for now could be done. So to the young it would just sound
corny. And of course there are some wonderful narrative poets who
are young.
One way that being a teacher at the time of these changes of
style has helped me is that it’s asked of me that I learn to speak
about things I don’t understand—to be able to make explicit my lack
of traditional understanding of a line, or a poem—and the growth of
my less old-fashioned “understanding” of it. So I’ve been learning how
to communicate about these new ways in a new way.
Female Speaker: I’ve had a question this whole time on form—about
the difference between narrative or story as a fixed version, or a truth,
and the possibility for multiple meanings.
Sharon Olds: Right, right. We will ask each other around the workshop
table: do you want us all to have pretty much the same understanding
of what basically is going on in this poem—although then I apologize
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and I say I know “going on” is a passé way of talking—or are you
happy if everyone has a different interpretation in the back of their
mind? And most of them now are happy if everyone has a different
idea of what “the story” might be. Well, they’re the young. It’s their
world! It’s their turn. But as for me, in a poem of mine, I want no
question. I want every bit to be clear, like who did what to whom? I
don’t want it to be, “Well, maybe the child was beating up the parent.” I want that kind of narrative “fact” to be clear.
But of course in my poems there’s all this simile, so maybe
that’s where there’s some room for visionariness or weirdness, or the
non-accurate—that’s a kind of play. This is like that, this is like this,
this is like that, whoa, you could almost be in an experimental poem!
Male Speaker: I guess people have said in years past that poets went
to extreme lengths to talk about their emotions—the dying parents,
those moments where there’s a bursting through of crying . . . . I was
wondering if you could say a little bit about deep emotion in poems
and the balancing of that.
Sharon Olds: Yes. How do we represent truly, in anything—in something we say to our friend, or in a work of art—how do we represent
the precise intensity of feeling? How do we get it right? Writing about
parents, say, who are in some ways difficult. There’s surely in me an
element of peace, and happiness and relief that I’m an artist now, I’m
writing, I’m grown up. But at the same time the burden is on me—
well, it’s a joy to work to try to get it right. Here we are, an animal
that knows that it will die. I mean, what a situation, huh, to be in.
That’s something that I admire in a lot of writers—when they don’t
get too cold in order not to get all gooey and sentimental. I think
I go . . . I think I skate near the edge of gooey, because I . . . I’d
rather fall off once—often—than stay too far away from the edge of it.
Female Speaker: Because we’re here in The Narrative Medicine Program
here at Columbia, we want to hear some more about, or I’d love to
hear some more about the poetry teacher outside of the traditional
workshop, the poetry teacher or poet in a hospital, setting. Could
you speak to that?
Sharon Olds: Yes, with pleasure. Thank you so much for asking.
Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith, as a child, visited her sister in an
institutional setting, and her sister had no crayons, no dress-up, no
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anything, and so when Ambassador Smith grew up, she created Very
Special Arts (http://www.vsarts.org/), which takes the arts into hospitals all over the world. I was invited to do a poetry workshop at
Sigismund Goldwater Memorial Hospital on Roosevelt Island. Some of
the residents in the class were non-speaking and non-moving. I had
been invited to teach in prison, but I am afraid of being locked up.
I would say “Bring them out!” They would say, “No, Sharon, we’re
not going to bring them out.”
So when I got this call, this invitation, I was very glad. And
the Goldwater writers were very impressive people—talented, smart,
wise, humorous. I was the first teacher there, and now our writing
students at N.Y.U. are the teachers.
N.Y.U. has had outreach programs at Goldwater, and a writing
workshop in a women’s prison, and a program on a children’s oncology
ward. Here are our graduate students—some of them are twenty-two,
twenty-five—and they apply to be selected as the teachers. They go in,
and they are writing poems—they’re facilitating, and then they write
along, too—with children and their parents, and some of the children
aren’t going to make it. And this program—it’s called Starlight—lets
them make works of art together while they’re still here. There’s also
been a workshop in a special needs high school, and also in a gifted
high school, which I think of as a high school where they’re challenged by knowing they are the cream of the cream!
At the Hospital for the Paralyzed
If I were in the wheelchair next to Julia,
and I could not move, and I could not speak,
could I parallel her fierce, sexual poems
with my own, raising my eyes for yes
when someone with a cardboard alphabet card
eventually points to the letter that is
the first letter of the first word
of the first line of my poem? At the hospital,
I feel at home, everyone there
is any one of us, struck
by a stray bullet, or a virus, or a stroke,
or fallen in front of a subway, yet I feel somehow
safe, there. Suddenly,
I understand what I am saying: the patients
cannot move, they are paralyzed
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as if tied up, they could not hit me.
I have trusted only the helpless, and the only
voices I cannot bear not
to hear are those of the mute, as I was
not allowed, some days, to speak
and yet I speak—look, I walk, I’m like
a titan, at the hospital, as my parents were titans
to me when they had tied me to the chair.
Do you see me now, Julia?
When I see the buds of the morning glory
I see your forearms spiraled up
toward your face, your legs on the wheelchaise
with their integrity, like pulled-up roots.
When your daughter was born, your stroke took you
and threw you off the pinnacle.
I wanted to pick up my mother when she hit me
and hurl her down the rocks. When I touch you,
it is partly her blow, upside down
and inside out, but I am not entirely
blind, Julia, I also see
you, arrow of eros, once a deer-hunter.
I said to Julia, I have written a poem you’re in, and I can’t read it to
anyone unless you say it’s okay. Julia really tells you what she thinks,
and I took it in, and I read it to her, and then I took the alphabet
card and touched the A, then the B, then the C, and then I got to
the M and she looked up, for yes—so her response started with m.
I was there with Ambassador Smith and her daughter Amanda, and
there was a lot of suspense in the room as the word came out: m, a,
g, she spelled out magnificent.
There’s also an autobiography out from Penguin by Julia Tavalero.
She worked with the poet Richard Tayson, then an N.Y.U. graduate
student in poetry. Someone said that artists generally have both a
gift and a wound—the gift, which makes them able to write, and the
wound, which drives them to feel they have to do it. Some people
have the gift without the need, some the need without the gift. I think
this is true of every person on earth, whatever work we do—when
there is both the gift and the need, something is made.
Now I’ll read one more poem, and then we’ll eat! And I’m always happy to inscribe books, so feel free to ask me. And thank you
for your warm welcome!
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The Procedure
The mole wasn’t anything to worry about,
but we’d take it off, just to make sure.
This is all you’ll feel, he said, just a
pinprick. I felt it, and then it started
to ache, worse and worse, and just some
fullness. Oh sure, I thought, “fullness,”
but then it hurt less and less. Prone,
I watched the tray, where he opened packets
with a sterile flourish—scalpel, scissors,
needle, thread like a wild, alive-ish
thing. How deep do you go, an inch?
He laughed with amusement. No! Then we’d be
in your spine! I love Novacaine,
I said, wanting to converse like an equal,
and told him how nylon was named, after
New York and London, and he told me Nystatin
had been named after NY State. Then he carved a little
round of skin out of my back,
I saw the nubbin when he dropped it into the
biopsy vial, I felt him sew me
and sew me, and then ointment me,
and gauze me, and waterproof-adhesive me,
all to try to give me longer
life, and spare me pain. For horror, we had
reassurance; for agony,
anaesthetic; for filth we had
absolute cleanliness;
for damage, we had healing. I didn’t
think about torture, during the procedure,
but after, I thought about how slow we have been
to oppose it, because of how little we can bear
to imagine it.
Notes
1. This essay is a lightly revised and edited version of a talk Sharon Olds
gave as a Program in Narrative Medicine Narrative Medicine Rounds at the College
of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, New York City, on January 6, 2010.
2. This poem is not included because of a previous agreement with a different publisher.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Olds, Sharon. “At the Hospital for the Paralyzed.” Blood, Tin, Straw. New York:
Knopf, Borzoi, 1999, 95.
Olds, Sharon. “Diagnosis.” One Secret Thing. New York: Knopf, Borzoi, 2008, 24.
_______. “Everything,” One Secret Thing. New York: Knopf, Borzoi, 2008, 3.
_______. “Self-Exam,” One Secret Thing. New York: Knopf, Borzoi, 2008, 56.
_______. “Something is Happening,” One Secret Thing. New York: Knopf, Borzoi, 2008, 81.
_______. “The Last Evening,” One Secret Thing. New York: Knopf, Borzoi, 2008, 89.
Olds, Sharon. “Life with Sick Kids.” The Gold Cell. New York: Knopf, 1987, 88.
Olds, Sharon.“The Glass.” The Father. New York: Knopf, Borzoi, 1992, 7.
_______. “His Stillness,” The Father. New York: Knopf, Borzoi, 1992, 13.
_______. “The Race,” The Father. New York: Knopf, Borzoi, 1992, 26.