Sharon Olds — Odes to the *****

On Being with Krista Tippett

On Being Studios

Sociology, Spirituality, Religion & Spirituality, Krista Tippett, Arts, Culture, On Being, Society, Society & Culture, Science, Social Sciences

4.7 • 10.2K Ratings

🗓️ 14 March 2019

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When the wise and whimsical Sharon Olds started writing poetry over 40 years ago, she explored the subjects that interested her most — like diaphragms. “The politeness and the prudity of the world I grew up in meant that there were things that were important to me and interesting to me, [but] I had never read a poem about,” she once said. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013 for her collection Stag’s Leap about walking through the end of a long marriage. Her most recent book, Odes, pays homage to the human body and experience. Sharon Olds is the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University. She is the author of Satan Says, The Dead and the Living, Odes, and Stag’s Leap — for which she also won the T.S. Eliot Prize. She helped found NYU’s outreach program for residents of Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island and for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for on-being with Christa Tippett comes from the Fetzer Institute, helping build the
0:04.4	spiritual foundation for a loving world. Fetzer envisions a world that embraces love as a guiding
0:10.3	principle and animating force for our lives, a powerful love that helps us live in sacred
0:15.2	relationship with ourselves, others, and the natural world. Learn more by visiting Fetzer.org.
0:23.0	Sharon Oldt has written,
0:24.8	the politeness and the prudity of the world I grew up in meant that there were things that were
0:29.7	important to me and interesting to me, but I had never read a poem about. She's been writing
0:35.6	poems about all those things now for over 40 years. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her collection
0:41.6	Stags Leap about walking through the end of a marriage she had also praised and opened up to poetry.
0:48.4	Her most recent book, Oads, pays homage to aspects of the human body and experience
0:54.1	that get bleeped out on public radio to follow FCC rules, including ode to the
0:59.6	f*ing, ode to the p*s, and ode to the tampon. So the conversation you're about to hear has
1:05.5	parental advisories, but please don't let that stop you. It is a joy.
1:10.9	Maybe one reason I do not wear makeup is to scare people.
1:17.3	If they're close enough, they can see something is different with me, something unnerving,
1:23.7	as if I have no features. I am embryonic, pre-ibrow's, pre-i-lids, pre-mouth.
1:31.2	I am like a water bear talking to them or an amniotic traveler, a vitrious floater on their own
1:38.8	eyeball, human ectoplasm risen on its hind legs to discourse with them.
1:46.2	I'm Christa Tippett and this is on being.
1:48.9	This conversation unfolded in Newark, New Jersey, at the 2018 Geraldine Ardodge Poetry Festival.
2:00.3	This is a lively Sunday morning crowd. Which leads right into where I want to start.
2:09.0	Which is that you speak often about having had a hellfire in Brimstone Calvinist upbringing,
	...

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