RATTLE Conversations

Sharon Olds

182 rattle conversations Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco on November 19, 1942. She earned a B.A. at Stanford University and a Ph.D. at Columbia University. Her first collection of poems, Satan Says (1980), received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Olds’s following collection, The Dead & the Living (1983), received the Lamont Poetry Selection in 1983 and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other collections include Strike Sparks: Selected Poems (2004, Knopf); The Unswept Room (2002); Blood, Tin, Straw (1999); The Gold Cell (1997); The Wellspring (1995); and The Father (1992), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Olds’s numerous honors include a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares, and has been anthologized in more than a hundred collections. Olds held the position of New York State Poet from 1998 to 2000. She currently teaches poetry workshops at New York University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program as well as a workshop at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York. She was elected an Academy Chancellor in 2006. She lives in New York City. Sharon Olds (photocredit: © Catherine Mauger) Sharon Olds November 15, 2001 Fox: When did you first consider yourself a poet? Olds: Last year. Fox: Tell me about that. Olds: Well, I figured, a plumber is a plumber. You don’t have to be a great plumber to call yourself a plumber, if you are a plumber each day. But what the word poet meant to me when I was a kid, those faces in the little portholes of the Oscar Williams anthology that I carried around with me—those creatures, those beings, were so special, they are so special, they are kind of like angels in some way, whose power of speech extended over time, who were helping us long after they had gone, and delighting us. So I didn’t feel comfortable using that word for myself. But then I figured, that’s what I do, that’s what I do, so that’s what I’m going to call myself. But if I’m ever asked, like, on an airplane or something, what do you do, I always say I’m a teacher. Fox: Because? Olds: I’m a teacher! [Fox laughs] And it’s an identity, I don’t know. That’s a good question. Maybe I’m more confident in myself as a teacher than as a poet. I haven’t worked harder on teaching than on poetry, it’s no easier to do, and it’s nothing less important to me. When I was a kid growing up, my teachers sort of saved my life. Fox: What is the most important thing you can teach your students? Olds: One of the most important things that I can do, I think, is keep them company as a fellow writer. Remind them that I do not speak as an authority, that we’re all in deep and anxious hope of the next day’s poem [Fox laughs, murmurs agreement], may it come to us from wherever it comes. We know 183 184 rattle conversations that hard work won’t do it; though we work very hard, hard work won’t do it. So I’m in the grip of magic and hope and prayer, and I love to have companionship along the way. That’s not really answering what can I teach them, but it’s more like the atmosphere that I feel is accompanying us. In the classroom, it’s my job to try to see that we take good care of each other. It’s nobody else’s job but mine, and they are so smart, and they are so sweet, and they are so gifted—what can I teach them. I love them. Is that a form of learning? Does that make sense to you, Alan, what I’m saying? Fox: Definitely, yes. How do you feel your reputation affects your students? Olds: [laughs] Do you have those things in the interview where you say “wild laughter.” [still laughing] Fox: Well, there is laughter and there’s more loud laughter. Olds: Well, I can’t laugh louder. [both voices blur in laughter] Olds: I don’t know, I have no idea. When...