Poetry Sunday
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I once engaged in a protracted argument with the editor of the Sharon Olds Wikipedia page. The source of the argument? He (it was clearly a man) included as a source some biased, dumb, lazy critique of the entirety of Olds’s work. I kept deleting it because it deserved deletion, and he kept re-adding it. We went back and forth, and the editor said, “these are the words of a respected critic with a good reputation!” I replied with a single word: “bullshit.” And that was the end of it—there truly are wikipedia gatekeepers.
I love Olds’s work. Sometimes the poems feel raw, even unfinished, which is something I am more than okay with. This is why I love Michelangelo’s “Prisoners.”
So here is a Sharon Olds poem for Sunday. It is one of her most well known, and as the father of two daughters, I feel it strikes a clean chord with me.
The One Girl at the Boys Party by Sharon Olds When I take my girl to the swimming party I set her down among the boys. They tower and bristle, she stands there smooth and sleek, her math scores unfolding in the air around her. They will strip to their suits, her body hard and indivisible as a prime number, they'll plunge into the deep end, she'll subtract her height from ten feet, divide it into hundreds of gallons of water, the numbers bouncing in her mind like molecules of chlorine in the bright blue pool. When they climb out, her ponytail will hang its pencil lead down her back, her narrow silk suit with hamburgers and french fries printed on it will glisten in the brilliant air, and they will see her sweet face, solemn and sealed, a factor of one, and she will see their eyes, two each, their legs, two each, and the curves of their sexes, one each, and in her head she'll be doing her wild multiplying, as the drops sparkle and fall to the power of a thousand from her body.
Olds is a great poet! I often remark that poetry is the most masturbatory of all the arts. Often we poets love to impress the right kind of people with our finesse. I think poetry criticism might be even worse than poetry about writing to impress rather than writing from the heart. Olds always seems to write in a way that makes me feel I’m in the room with her sharing our lives.