[Unedited] Sharon Olds with Krista Tippett

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

⏱️ 69 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. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Sharon Olds — Odes to the *****.” Find more 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.
0:23.3	I'm Christa Tippett and this is On Being's Unheard Cut. Up next, my unedited conversation
0:29.3	with the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Sharon Olds. There is a shorter, produced version of this
0:35.6	wherever you like to listen. Good morning and welcome to Poetry and On Being at the Gerald
0:42.4	D.R. Dodge Poetry Festival. So we're delighted to have Christa Tippett and Sharon Olds with us
0:54.6	this morning to bring on being here to the Dodge Festival. I've been listening to the
0:59.2	On Being podcasts for years and for 15 years or more. Christa Tippett has been asking
1:06.4	essential questions on being human to people from all walks of life, from Zen monks to
1:15.4	astrophysicists and poets are on that list and they've started their own poetry project
1:23.7	on their website which you should visit. Sharon Olds is perhaps one of, if not the most,
1:33.6	singular identifiable recognizable voices to have emerged in my lifetime in poetry and I think
1:43.3	you're in for a fascinating conversation which you get to eavesdrop on. So this is a privilege
1:49.9	for all of us. Please help me welcome Sharon Olds and Christa Tippett.
2:00.4	This is a lively Sunday morning crowd which leads right into where I want to start. What does
2:10.0	is that you speak often about having had a Health Iron Brimstone Calvinist upbringing and then
2:16.9	your first book was called Satan Says. So I think that tells us where you went with that.
2:23.8	But I wonder how you would start to describe the religious and spiritual background of your childhood
2:32.8	as it appears to you now because I think like many things in childhood what we see changes
2:37.7	as we look back at it across time. Yes, thank you. Thank you for having me here.
	...

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