The ways in which personal life seeps into art has always been a subject that’s compelled me. This semester has granted the opportunity to study the work of authors participating in these veins. In light of the confessional and post-confessional poets we’ve read from, I’ve become even more intrigued by how our lives affect poetry and fiction alike, but also how the work might in turn affect our individual lives and, by extension, our family. Dawn Potter’s critical piece we read for this week’s class went so far as to echo Colm Tóibín’s assertion that “You have to be a monster to write,” to which she goes on to say that “selfishness walks in monstrous tandem with guilt and invention” (64). In conversation related to a piece by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s son after his father’s death, Potter observes, “Despite their honor and modesty, the words do not hide the fatal whirlpool. But even well-loved, well-matched partners, friends, parents, children carry the burden of one another’s art” (65).
This idea of families carrying the burden of an individual’s literary art is especially noteworthy in regards to post-confessional poetry. I wanted to hear more from one of the poets herself and whether, after having success in this particular school, she felt differently about having been so intimate with readers. For this contextual research, I chose Sharon Olds, whose poem “The Exact Moment of His Death” we read.
I found an online audio file of Eleanor Wachtel’s interview with her on stage at the Vancouver Writers Festival in October 2016, entitled “Sharon Olds on the joy and peril of writing deeply personal poetry.”
Wachtel opens the conversation by telling the audience that Olds is “famous for intensely personal, emotional scathing verse;” a much acclaimed poet with myriad recognitions, not the least of which is being the first American to win the prestigious T.S. Eliot award. She was also recently the recipient of a $100,000 Wallace Stevens award for “proven mastery in the art of poetry,” which stated that her “evocation of trauma or desire, in their grief or joy or comedy have opened up new possibilities for poetry in our time.” She has also received the San Fransisco Poetry Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Pulitzer Prize, among others.
Olds has clearly had a lustrous writing career. The distinguished endorsements of her work are proof enough of positive public reception and critical celebration of the type of poetry she produces. At the forefront of this interview lies a conversation about how literary writing offers revelations and insights for (in this case) the historically marginalized voice of women. However, the question remains — is there a cost to the individual and family that accompanies this kind of vulnerability?
Olds admits, “I used to avoid saying I was an autobiographical family poet, because I thought it was bad enough for families to be written about without someone going around saying yeah, it’s my actual family. So I don’t say that. One thinks about loyalty, and what is it. And is one a bit of a sociopath, does one lack loyalty? I began to think of loyalty as something that is learned…it’s a bit of a slithery area for me, wanting to be loyal to the truth. Especially with dysfunctional families. I was happy to write that poem (Ode of Broken Loyalty) as if one could sing about that problem. So many things complicate family life. And being a family poet would be one of them. Each one of us writers, by trial and error — often error — we find what we’re comfortable with, or what the people around us are comfortable with, or what the market will bear.”
She touches upon the question of loyalty to family versus loyalty to the truth, the answer to which isn’t an easy one. Writing seems to act as a way for Olds to work out her thoughts about a given experience or relationship. “It liberated my feelings and opinions,” she said, of her early poetry. Almost as though her existence became living art, observed by, and thus inspiring, her poetic works.
Her most recent book of poetry is entitled “Odes,” directly influenced by Pablo Neruda’s work of the same name. Here, she writes about the mundanity of life: “Ode to hip replacement, ode to withered cleavage – getting toward old age — an interesting visual and emotional image” in order “to reconcile myself and/or us, to go beyond the shame of age and of markings of age.” Again, we see Olds better understanding her reality through her art: “I wanted to know more about what I saw when I saw withered cleavage on an older woman, and myself, and then what it was like.” Here is the sense of observing her observing her own life, and drawing from it not only inspiration, but meaning from her work. Though these subject matters are not as intensely personal as her earlier work, Olds’s poetry still acts as a way for her to understand her own life experiences.
When asked about her previous, more intimate, subject matter, Olds says, “if I had the choice of being a great writer and a not-so-good mother, or a great mother and a medium-good writer, I would choose the latter. Duh. I mean, first things first. But for those of us who are family writers, I think some of our definitions of what’s okay… we squirrel around a bit, or slither around a bit. At the moment I can’t think of something I would change except that I would, from the beginning, have not used names. But I can’t think of anything besides the names that I would go back and change.”
She strives for her poetry to be accurate. Olds states, “I want the work of art to be a lot like the lived life behind it.”
Her conclusion on using family experiences to induce literary art? “The idea that the earth wanted there to be family poems, I like that idea…we are the singers in language of our planet, as well as — it looks like — the destroyers.”
Perhaps this question is an obvious one, but do you fall on a definite side of the conversation of intimate art from personal matters (i.e., the confessional and the post-confessional poets), or are you more aligned with T.S. Eliot’s assertion that “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates” (“Tradition and Individual Talent,” 1920)? (And how would T. S. Eliot react to Sharon Olds winning the award with his name on it?)
I love these questions posed at the end here. I wonder if something needs to be based in fact to capture the truth in the lives we live? While I certainly practice the art of using facts to make art and that art neceistates it on some level, the quesiton of complete honesty is an interesting, and I think offers two distinct conversations in regards to poetry and fiction respectively. I also responded Tóibín’s assertion that “You have to be a monster to write,” adn thought of Dr. Heinen’s comments last night about the inherent level of narcisim required to think you have something to say, something that’s worth reading. I think about this often, but I’m not sure I think about it as much as when I’m writing from the facts of my as when I’m writing fictions. What’s with that? It may have somethign to do with wow-factor in confessionalism and the removal of the doubt that you’ll sell your story, as it were.
When I first read Potter’s piece, I felt a bit underwhelmed by the focus on the poet’s literal family life and its consequences for all parties involved–especially in the very dramatic contexts here, which I don’t think are typical. I was drawn to how Orr describe the family in a lyric context amidst competing lyric strategies pulled between transcendence and contingency. The family seems like such an interesting formal constraint that I was not so eager to see it played out in, well, in reality.
But then when I read your account of this Olds interview, I was captured again by the life behind the poetry, and how many questions are involved–questions of loyalty, honesty, etc. In some ways, I like how poetry makes those family dramas representative rather than private: we can relate to levels of exposure, violence, lies, tenderness, etc. The focus on the family loses some of this magic to me, but it also reminds me of how essential and complex that grounding material–before it is worked up into the rarefied realm of poetry–can be.