Understanding Sharon Olds

Russell Brickey

Description

A thorough examination of the author's deeply personal and often-controversial poetry

Understanding Sharon Olds explores this Pulitzer Prize-winning poet's major themes, characters, life, and career, including her often-controversial portrayals of family dysfunction, sexuality, and violence against women. In this first book dedicated entirely to the poetry of Sharon Olds, Russell Brickey examines how Olds approaches these difficult and complex topics with pathos and intimate, sometimes provocatively private, details through poetry that not all her critics appreciate.

Olds has never shied away from difficult subject matter. Her first award-winning book, Satan Says, is a feminist exploration of gender politics and adolescent discovery. The Father comprises a book-length elegy about cancer. Stag's Leap, Olds's Pulitzer Prize-winning volume, is a surprisingly tender look at divorce in modern American culture. Extremely personal, her poems often deal with the victories and contradictions of being a woman in the United States during a time when the country is often involved in racial upheavals and military conflicts overseas. She investigates the victories and contradictions of being a wife and mother during the era of feminism, as one of our most honest, most overt poets of female sexuality and its relationship to family life and its place within the history of humanity.

Brickey organizes each chapter around a theme or a persona within Olds's cast of characters. These include poems dedicated to mothers, fathers, children, and the arc of history. Through his close readings, Brickey shows how and where Olds has expanded the tradition of confessional poetry (literature that deals with psychology, family, love, and sexuality), a term Olds disdains but nevertheless expanded into commentary about the human condition in all its paradoxes.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Otra mujer
• América
• Electra complex
• Sympathetic character
• The New Mother
• Slow slicing
• Clytemnestra
• La petite mort
• Another Woman
• Sharon Olds
• Self-abasement
• Erudition
• Consummation
• Muriel Rukeyser
• Dulce et Decorum est
• General officer
• Simile
• Political correctness
• Poetry
• General
• American
• Adrienne Rich
• Anne Sexton
• Memento mori
• Lingchi
• Madame Bovary
• Orgasme

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 30 novembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611177121
• Langue: English

Extrait

UNDERSTANDING SHARON OLDS
UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE
Matthew J. Bruccoli, Founding Editor
Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
Volumes on
Edward Albee | Sherman Alexie | Nelson Algren | Paul Auster
Nicholson Baker | John Barth | Donald Barthelme | The Beats
Thomas Berger | The Black Mountain Poets | Robert Bly | T. C. Boyle
Truman Capote | Raymond Carver | Michael Chabon | Fred Chappell
Chicano Literature | Contemporary American Drama
Contemporary American Horror Fiction
Contemporary American Literary Theory
Contemporary American Science Fiction, 1926-1970
Contemporary American Science Fiction, 1970-2000
Contemporary Chicana Literature | Pat Conroy | Robert Coover | Don DeLillo
Philip K. Dick | James Dickey | E. L. Doctorow | Rita Dove | Dave Eggers
Louise Erdrich | John Gardner | George Garrett | Tim Gautreaux | William Gibson
John Hawkes | Joseph Heller | Lillian Hellman | Beth Henley | James Leo Herlihy
David Henry Hwang | John Irving | Randall Jarrell | Gish Jen | Charles Johnson
Diane Johnson | Edward P. Jones | Adrienne Kennedy | William Kennedy | Jack Kerouac
Jamaica Kincaid | Etheridge Knight | Tony Kushner | Ursula K. Le Guin
Jonathan Lethem | Denise Levertov | Bernard Malamud | David Mamet
Bobbie Ann Mason | Colum McCann | Cormac McCarthy | Jill McCorkle
Carson McCullers | W. S. Merwin | Arthur Miller | Stephen Millhauser | Lorrie Moore
Toni Morrison s Fiction | Vladimir Nabokov | Gloria Naylor | Joyce Carol Oates
Tim O Brien | Flannery O Connor | Sharon Olds | Cynthia Ozick | Chuck Palahniuk
Suzan-Lori Parks | Walker Percy | Katherine Anne Porter | Richard Powers
Reynolds Price | Annie Proulx | Thomas Pynchon | Ron Rash | Adrienne Rich
Theodore Roethke | Philip Roth | Richard Russo | May Sarton | Hubert Selby, Jr.
Mary Lee Settle | Sam Shepard | Neil Simon | Isaac Bashevis Singer | Jane Smiley
Gary Snyder | Susan Sontag | William Stafford | Robert Stone | Anne Tyler
Gerald Vizenor | Kurt Vonnegut | David Foster Wallace | Robert Penn Warren
James Welch | Eudora Welty | Edmund White | Colson Whitehead
Tennessee Williams | August Wilson | Charles Wright
UNDERSTANDING
SHARON OLDS
Russell Brickey

The University of South Carolina Press
2017 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-711-4 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-712-1 (ebook)
Front cover photograph by Antonio Olmos.
www.antonioolmos.com
CONTENTS
Series Editor s Preface
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Chapter 1 Understanding Sharon Olds
Chapter 2 Manifestos
Chapter 3 The Father Poems
Chapter 4 The Mother Poems
Chapter 5 Love, Good Sex, Bad Sex, Sex and Marriage, Divorce
Chapter 6 War, Suicide, Freaks: The Poet outside Herself
Notes
Bibliography
Index
SERIES EDITOR S PREFACE
The Understanding Contemporary American Literature series was founded by the estimable Matthew J. Bruccoli (1931-2008), who envisioned these volumes as guides or companions for students as well as good nonacademic readers, a legacy that will continue as new volumes are developed to fill in gaps among the nearly one hundred series volumes published to date and to embrace a host of new writers only now making their marks on our literature.
As Professor Bruccoli explained in his preface to the volumes he edited, because much influential contemporary literature makes special demands, the word understanding in the titles was chosen deliberately. Many willing readers lack an adequate understanding of how contemporary literature works; that is, of what the author is attempting to express and the means by which it is conveyed. Aimed at fostering this understanding of good literature and good writers, the criticism and analysis in the series provide instruction in how to read certain contemporary writers-explicating their material, language, structures, themes, and perspectives-and facilitate a more profitable experience of the works under discussion.
In the twenty-first century Professor Bruccoli s prescience gives us an avenue to publish expert critiques of significant contemporary American writing. The series continues to map the literary landscape and to provide both instruction and enjoyment. Future volumes will seek to introduce new voices alongside canonized favorites, to chronicle the changing literature of our times, and to remain, as Professor Bruccoli conceived, contemporary in the best sense of the word.
Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Quotations from the following sources are reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press:
Satan Says, Love Fossil, Tricks, Late, The Housewives Watching Morning TV, Republican Living Rooms from Satan Says by Sharon Olds, copyright 1980 by permission of The University of Pittsburgh Press.
Quotations from the following sources are reprinted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC:
Sex without Love, The Victims, The Guild, The Death of Marilyn Monroe, New Mother, The End, The Moment, Photograph of the Girl, The Connoisseuse of Slugs, The Pact, Ideographs, The Issues, Nevsky Prospekt, Absent One, Possessed, The Departure, Burn Center, The Ideal Father, Fate, My Father Snoring, My Father s Breasts, The Takers, Poem to My First Lover, The Line, Poem to My Husband from My Father s Daughter, Ecstasy, Exclusive, Six-Year-Old Boy, Eggs, For My Daughter, The Sign of Saturn, and Race Riot, Tulsa, 1921 from The Dead and the Living by Sharon Olds, copyright 1987 by Sharon Olds. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
I Go Back to May 1937, On the Subway, Summer Solstice, New York City, The Abandoned Newborn, The Girl, After 37 Years My Mother Apologizes for My Childhood, Why My Mother Made Me, Saturn, When, The Solution, In the Cell, The Twin, and The Meal from The Gold Cell by Sharon Olds, copyright 1987 by Sharon Olds. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
The Glass, Nullipara, His Terror, His Stillness, The Waiting, Wonder, My Father Speaks to Me from the Dead, The Pulling, Death and Morality, The Lumens, The Want, The Present Moment, Beyond Harm, My Father s Eyes, The Underlife, The Ferryer, When the Dead Ask My Father about Me, and Waste Sonata from The Father by Sharon Olds, copyright 1992 by Sharon Olds. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Visiting My Mother s College, Japanese-American Farmhouse, California, 1942, First Birth, Her First Week, Celibacy at Twenty, Socks, Bathing the New Born, Adolescence, May 1968, History of Medicine, Good Will, My Parents Wedding Night, 1937, The Swimming Race, First, Early Images of Heaven, The Source, Making Love, I Love It When, Milk-Bubble Ruins, Twelve Years Old, Lament, and Solo from The Wellspring: Poems by Sharon Olds, copyright 1996 by Sharon Olds. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Once, Take the I Out, Electricity Saviour, My Father s Diary, Animal Music, Aspic and Buttermilk, Poem to the Reader, The Bed, The Try-Outs, By Fire, and For and against Knowledge from Blood, Tin, Straw: Poems by Sharon Olds, copyright 1999 by Sharon Olds. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
The Learner, Sunday Night, His Costume, Directly, The Older, Fish Oil, Mother, and A Time of Passion from The Unswept Room by Sharon Olds, copyright 2002 by Sharon Olds. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Diagnosis, Satin Maroon, 1. Woman with the Lettuce, 2. Legless Fighter Pilot, 3. What Could Happen, 6. The Signal, 7. The Leader, 12. The Body, The Cannery, 1942-1945, At Night, Freezer, The Couldn t, Paterfamilias, Royal Beauty Bright, The Riser, Pansy Coda, The Dead, Good Measure, 2. The Music, 3. The Ecstatic, 4. Two Late Dialogues, 5. Warily, Sportsman!, 6. Little End Ode, 7. Something Is Happening, 8. Cassiopeia, Still Life, One Secret Thing, and To See My Mother from One Secret Thing by Sharon Olds, copyright 2008 by Sharon Olds. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Pain I Did Not, The Healers, While He Told Me, Unspeakable, The Flurry, Stag s Leap, Not Going to Him, Once in a While I Gave Up, French Bra, Not Quite Enough, Discandied, Bruise Ghazal, On Reading a Newspaper for the First Time as an Adult, Slowly He Starts, Red Sea, Poem of Thanks, Left-Wife Bop, Years Later, September 2001, New York City, and What Left? from Stag s Leap: Poems by Sharon Olds, copyright 2012 by Sharon Olds. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
ABBREVIATIONS FOR BOOKS BY SHARON OLDS
Blood, Tin, Straw ( BTS )
T