Quotes by Sharon Olds
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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.
I'm not sure that the benefit - as a writer and as a citizen - that I would get from reading at least the front page of the Times every day or every other day would outweigh the depression.
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.
I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it's a poem, it's almost written in my head somewhere.
I didn't have time to sit down and look at the work of a year and choose what to type.
Their spirits and their visions are embodied in their craft. And so is mine. It's not Jane Saw Puff. But the clarity of Jane Saw Puff is precious to me.
The decision for me was whether to have "The Father" be a book that told a story - from the point of view of this speaker, the daughter - without, as in the earlier books, then having a section on something else and a section on something else.
My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.
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.
Everyone is so different. I sometimes wish I wrote in a different way. You know, that feeling of: So-and-so writes slowly, if only I wrote slowly.
Who wants to put together something that will bear some relationship to the vision or memory or experience or story or idea or dream or whatever.
When I quit all these things and said I didn't have any time, I meant I didn't have any time.
The amount of horror one used to hear about in one village could be quite extreme. But one might not have heard about all the other villages' horrors at the same time.
This creature of the poem may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force.
Well, "The Wellspring" was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others' experience.
The fact that there was a lot of anger and sorrow and a sense of connection to destructive feelings in "The Father" doesn't bother me.
I'm probably so out of it at my age that I don't know what people think.
I was very afraid that I wouldn't be able to do this job well. And the time never came back.
I wish I wrote more about the world at more distance from myself.
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.
Because a poem is not written while running or while answering the phone. It's written in whatever minutes one has. Sometimes you have half an hour.
I think this is true for all artists. My senses are very important to me.
At one point I took on a new job, and I just didn't have time to do anything but work.
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.
It might be a bad thing, not to know what's going on in the world. I can't say I really approve of it.
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