Getting ready to leave one job and to start another seems inevitably to mean you're caught up in strong currents, old and new, working hard to finish the present job properly and to extend and ready yourself for the new. Anyway, that's my excuse for a few days of silence. Plus, I've been reading a lot.
Tomorrow, Sharon Olds comes to Radley to run a couple of workshops and read her poetry. Then it's QI in the evening for her only Oxford reading of this UK tour. From the QI events calendar for October:
Tuesday 31 October - SHARON OLDS Poetry Night Club Rooms 7.30pm
John Mitchinson writes: ’Hot on the heels of another American legend, Richard Ford, we are thrilled to introduce our second QI exclusive. Sharon Olds is one of America’s most powerful, courageous and controversial poets, a Californian but until recently the Poet Laureate of New York State. She writes about sex, domesticity, family disharmony and violence with a directness and an intensity that shock and move simultaneously. Like Richard Ford, she does so in a way that is never squeamish or obscure. All you need is a pair of ears and an open mind. She is a brilliant reader of her own work. Expect to be changed by the evening. She visits the UK very rarely. This is her only Oxford gig. PLEASE DON’T MISS HER.' Tickets will be allocated on a first come first served basis, so to reserve seats please contact Victoria on either vdw@qi.com or 01865 261 501. Tickets £5 members and £7 non members.
Links …
- Modern American Poetry: Sharon Olds (1942–), About Sharon Olds, Online Interviews with Sharon Olds
- The Literary Encyclopedia
- New York State Writers Institute
- The Academy of American Poets
- The Nation — Open Letter to Laura Bush:
So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.
And one poem:
I Go Back to May 1937 (from The Gold Cell)
I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don't do it—she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don't do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.
