The Unflinching Gaze: A Profile of Sharon Olds

In the landscape of American poetry, few voices are as immediately recognizable—and as physically arresting—as that of Sharon Olds. For over four decades, she has turned the poem into a site of radical intimacy, refusing to look away from the most private moments of human existence. If you are looking for a poet who writes with the precision of a surgeon and the confession of a sinner, you have found her.

Born in San Francisco in 1942 and raised in what she describes as a "hellfire Calvinist" household, Olds didn't publish her first collection, Satan Says, until she was thirty-seven. When she finally arrived, she arrived loudly. At a time when women's poetry was often expected to be polite or abstract, Olds was writing about the body with a shocking, granular specificity. She wrote about sex, childbirth, abuse, and the physical decay of aging parents, often using language that early male critics found "unladylike." One editor famously rejected her work by suggesting she try Ladies' Home Journal instead of a literary magazine.

They were wrong. Olds wasn't writing domestic fluff; she was revolutionizing the way we write about the physical self.

Take, for instance, her ability to mix the sacred and the profane. In her poem "The Pope's Penis," she creates an image that is at once humorous, tender, and deeply strange. Listen to how she describes it:

"It hangs deep in his robes, a delicate clapper at the center of a bell. It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in a halo of silver seaweed..."

This is Olds’s signature: the ability to take a taboo subject and render it with such lyrical precision that it becomes something else entirely—something almost holy.

Her innovation lies in her refusal to separate the emotional from the physiological. In her famous poem "Sex Without Love," she interrogates the mechanics of intimacy with a cold, beautiful curiosity:

"How do they do it, the ones who make love without love? Beautiful as dancers, gliding over each other like ice-skaters over the ice, fingers hooked inside each other's bodies, faces red as steak, wine, wet as the children at birth whose mothers are going to give them away."

But perhaps her greatest subject has been the family. In her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Stag's Leap (2012), Olds chronicled the end of her thirty-year marriage. The book is a masterpiece of grief, not just for its sorrow, but for its fairness. She doesn't just mourn; she examines the collapse of a life with startling clarity. An interesting fact about this collection is the restraint that preceded it: Olds promised her children she would not publish any poems about the divorce for ten years. She kept her word, waiting over a decade to release the work that would eventually win her both the Pulitzer Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize.

If you are new to Sharon Olds, the place to start is undoubtedly her poem "I Go Back to May 1937." It is a time-travel narrative where the speaker visits her parents before they are married, knowing the pain they will eventually inflict on each other and their children. She watches them on their college campus, innocent and young. The poem builds to a devastating choice: should she stop them? Should she save them from their future misery by preventing their union, thereby erasing her own existence?

Here is the unforgettable conclusion, where she decides to let destiny take its course:

"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."

"I will tell about it." That is the vow Sharon Olds has kept for her entire career. She tells the truth about the body, the family, and the heart, no matter how difficult that truth might be to hear.