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Odes
‘Interspersed with acts of breathtaking linguistic daring.’
Charlotte Mendelson, Observer Book of the Year
Opening with a powerful and tender ‘Ode to the Hymen’, Sharon Olds uses this age-old poetic form to address many aspects of herself, in a collection that is centred around the female body and female pleasures, and touches along the way on parts of her own story which will be familiar from earlier works, each episode and memory now burnished by the wisdom and grace of looking back. In such poems as ‘Ode to My Sister’, ‘Ode of Broken Loyalty’, ‘Ode to My Whiteness’, ‘Blow Job Ode’, ‘Ode to the Last 38 Trees in New York City Visible from This Window’, Olds treats us to an intimate self-examination that, like all her work, is universal and by turns searing and charming in its honesty. From the early bodily joys and sorrows of her girlhood to the recent deaths of those dearest to her – the ‘Sheffield Mountain Ode’ for Galway Kinnell is one of the most stunning pieces here – Olds shapes her world in language that is startlingly fresh, profound in its conclusions, and life-giving for the reader.
Charlotte Mendelson, Observer Book of the Year
Opening with a powerful and tender ‘Ode to the Hymen’, Sharon Olds uses this age-old poetic form to address many aspects of herself, in a collection that is centred around the female body and female pleasures, and touches along the way on parts of her own story which will be familiar from earlier works, each episode and memory now burnished by the wisdom and grace of looking back. In such poems as ‘Ode to My Sister’, ‘Ode of Broken Loyalty’, ‘Ode to My Whiteness’, ‘Blow Job Ode’, ‘Ode to the Last 38 Trees in New York City Visible from This Window’, Olds treats us to an intimate self-examination that, like all her work, is universal and by turns searing and charming in its honesty. From the early bodily joys and sorrows of her girlhood to the recent deaths of those dearest to her – the ‘Sheffield Mountain Ode’ for Galway Kinnell is one of the most stunning pieces here – Olds shapes her world in language that is startlingly fresh, profound in its conclusions, and life-giving for the reader.
118 pages, Paperback
First published September 8, 2016
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2076 people want to read
About the author
Sharon Olds
86 books764 followersBorn in San Francisco on November 19, 1942, Sharon Olds earned a B.A. at Stanford University and a Ph.D. at Columbia University.
Her first collection of poems, Satan Says (1980), received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Olds's following collection, The Dead & the Living (1983), received the Lamont Poetry Selection in 1983 and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Her other collections include Strike Sparks: Selected Poems (2004, Knopf), The Unswept Room (2002), Blood, Tin, Straw (1999), The Gold Cell (1997), The Wellspring (1995), and The Father (1992), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
About Olds's poetry, one reviewer for the New York Times said, "Her work has a robust sensuality, a delight in the physical that is almost Whitmanesque. She has made the minutiae of a woman's everyday life as valid a subject for poetry as the grand abstract themes that have preoccupied other poets."
Olds's numerous honors include a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares, and has been anthologized in more than a hundred collections.
Olds held the position of New York State Poet from 1998 to 2000. She currently teaches poetry workshops at New York University's Graduate Creative Writing Program as well as a workshop at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York. She was elected an Academy Chancellor in 2006. She lives in New York City.
Her first collection of poems, Satan Says (1980), received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Olds's following collection, The Dead & the Living (1983), received the Lamont Poetry Selection in 1983 and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Her other collections include Strike Sparks: Selected Poems (2004, Knopf), The Unswept Room (2002), Blood, Tin, Straw (1999), The Gold Cell (1997), The Wellspring (1995), and The Father (1992), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
About Olds's poetry, one reviewer for the New York Times said, "Her work has a robust sensuality, a delight in the physical that is almost Whitmanesque. She has made the minutiae of a woman's everyday life as valid a subject for poetry as the grand abstract themes that have preoccupied other poets."
Olds's numerous honors include a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares, and has been anthologized in more than a hundred collections.
Olds held the position of New York State Poet from 1998 to 2000. She currently teaches poetry workshops at New York University's Graduate Creative Writing Program as well as a workshop at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York. She was elected an Academy Chancellor in 2006. She lives in New York City.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 144 reviews
October 2, 2018
Excerpt from "Ode with a Silence in it":-
Pink sky in the morning-a girls sky.
Slowly the trees become visible,
and the spaces between them. Imagine being,
able to walk into the woods,
without fear. If my classmate had not
been taken, and-
Leave a silence here-
and murdered, and buried in the woods near our houses,
Would I be as afraid?
This was an unapologetic self-examination work of poetry by Sharon Olds. It particularly addressed the experiences of being a woman with a strong look at harassment, the experiences of growing old, and changes in the female body and sexuality. This book of poems also contains an unfiltered look at the human anatomy with particular emphasis on sexual organs, as well as encompassing the "negatives" of fluctuating weight and stretch marks and finding beauty in these things. Olds also highlights the importance of being involved with activism and how this raises women's voices and a consciousness in society.
A strong feature in this book of poems is Olds critical analysis of the turbulent relationship with her mother. This reflected the abuse she suffered as a child, to ultimately still loving her mother despite this.
The reason why I am giving this 3 stars is that sometimes I found these poems quite difficult to follow along. I really had to analyse and dig deeper at some hidden meanings which I could not always grasp, which failed my enjoyment and appreciation of the poems.
Pink sky in the morning-a girls sky.
Slowly the trees become visible,
and the spaces between them. Imagine being,
able to walk into the woods,
without fear. If my classmate had not
been taken, and-
Leave a silence here-
and murdered, and buried in the woods near our houses,
Would I be as afraid?
This was an unapologetic self-examination work of poetry by Sharon Olds. It particularly addressed the experiences of being a woman with a strong look at harassment, the experiences of growing old, and changes in the female body and sexuality. This book of poems also contains an unfiltered look at the human anatomy with particular emphasis on sexual organs, as well as encompassing the "negatives" of fluctuating weight and stretch marks and finding beauty in these things. Olds also highlights the importance of being involved with activism and how this raises women's voices and a consciousness in society.
A strong feature in this book of poems is Olds critical analysis of the turbulent relationship with her mother. This reflected the abuse she suffered as a child, to ultimately still loving her mother despite this.
The reason why I am giving this 3 stars is that sometimes I found these poems quite difficult to follow along. I really had to analyse and dig deeper at some hidden meanings which I could not always grasp, which failed my enjoyment and appreciation of the poems.
August 5, 2018
“My partner says that what I write / about women is self-involved. You’re sixty / something years old,” he exclaims, “and still/writing about the first time you got laid!”
Olds has written openly and honestly about her body, about sex, about her family, her marriage, with much acclaim. Of her work she says, “I think that my work is easy to understand because I am not a thinker. How can I put it? I write the way I perceive, I guess. It’s not really simple, I don’t think, but it’s about ordinary things—feeling about things, about people. I’m not an intellectual. I’m not an abstract thinker. And I’m interested in ordinary life.”
When she says this, I think of the Odes to Common Things by Pablo Neruda, by which he means spoons and chairs and so on.
Olds, two years ago, at 73, and after the justifiable acclaim she received for Stag’s Leap, the book of poetry addressing the end of her decades long marriage, writes these odes to common things, too, to her sister, pine trees, trilobites. But as with the great love (and sex) poet Neruda, Olds still proceeds boldly and unapologetically regarding her body, in odes to the hymen, penis, vagina, clitoris, balls, her withered cleavage, fat, and so on. Yes, there’s a Blow Job Ode, too, in case you were hoping.
In general I like the non-body ones here a bit better, not to say I am prudish! My favorite poem was her poem for her dying friend Galway Kinnell, “Sheffield Mountain Ode.” But anyway, now you know enough to decide whether you want to squirm your way through these poems, but they are often funny, insightful, thoughtful. I have five or six volumes I much prefer to this collection, but I still liked it a lot, in part because it is now like talking with a friend.
Here’s a tamer, less squirmy one:
Ode of Girl things
I loved the things that were ours—pink gloves,
hankies with a pastoral scene in one corner.
There was a lot we were not allowed to do,
but what we were allowed to do was ours,
dolls you carry by the leg, and dolls’
clothes you would put on or take off—
someone who was yours, who did not
have the rights of her own nakedness,
and who had a smooth body, with its
untouchable place, which you would never touch, even on her,
you had been cured of that.
And some of the dolls had hard-rubber hands, with
dimples, and though you were not supposed to, you could
bite off the ends of the fingers when you could not stand it.
And though you’d never be allowed to, say, drive a bus,
or do anything that had to be done right, there was a
teeny carton, in you, of eggs
so tiny they were invisible.
And there would be milk, in you, too—real
milk! And you could wear a skirt, you could
be a bellflower—up under its
cone the little shape like a closed
buckle, intricate groove and tongue,
where something like God’s power over you lived. And it
turned out
you shared some things with boys—
the alphabet was not just theirs—
and you could make forays over into their territory,
you could have what you could have because it was yours,
and a little of what was theirs, because
you took it. Much later, you’d have to give things
up, too, to make it fair—long
hair, skirts, even breasts, a pair
of raspberry colored pumps which a friend
wanted to put on, if they would fit his foot, and they did.
Olds has written openly and honestly about her body, about sex, about her family, her marriage, with much acclaim. Of her work she says, “I think that my work is easy to understand because I am not a thinker. How can I put it? I write the way I perceive, I guess. It’s not really simple, I don’t think, but it’s about ordinary things—feeling about things, about people. I’m not an intellectual. I’m not an abstract thinker. And I’m interested in ordinary life.”
When she says this, I think of the Odes to Common Things by Pablo Neruda, by which he means spoons and chairs and so on.
Olds, two years ago, at 73, and after the justifiable acclaim she received for Stag’s Leap, the book of poetry addressing the end of her decades long marriage, writes these odes to common things, too, to her sister, pine trees, trilobites. But as with the great love (and sex) poet Neruda, Olds still proceeds boldly and unapologetically regarding her body, in odes to the hymen, penis, vagina, clitoris, balls, her withered cleavage, fat, and so on. Yes, there’s a Blow Job Ode, too, in case you were hoping.
In general I like the non-body ones here a bit better, not to say I am prudish! My favorite poem was her poem for her dying friend Galway Kinnell, “Sheffield Mountain Ode.” But anyway, now you know enough to decide whether you want to squirm your way through these poems, but they are often funny, insightful, thoughtful. I have five or six volumes I much prefer to this collection, but I still liked it a lot, in part because it is now like talking with a friend.
Here’s a tamer, less squirmy one:
Ode of Girl things
I loved the things that were ours—pink gloves,
hankies with a pastoral scene in one corner.
There was a lot we were not allowed to do,
but what we were allowed to do was ours,
dolls you carry by the leg, and dolls’
clothes you would put on or take off—
someone who was yours, who did not
have the rights of her own nakedness,
and who had a smooth body, with its
untouchable place, which you would never touch, even on her,
you had been cured of that.
And some of the dolls had hard-rubber hands, with
dimples, and though you were not supposed to, you could
bite off the ends of the fingers when you could not stand it.
And though you’d never be allowed to, say, drive a bus,
or do anything that had to be done right, there was a
teeny carton, in you, of eggs
so tiny they were invisible.
And there would be milk, in you, too—real
milk! And you could wear a skirt, you could
be a bellflower—up under its
cone the little shape like a closed
buckle, intricate groove and tongue,
where something like God’s power over you lived. And it
turned out
you shared some things with boys—
the alphabet was not just theirs—
and you could make forays over into their territory,
you could have what you could have because it was yours,
and a little of what was theirs, because
you took it. Much later, you’d have to give things
up, too, to make it fair—long
hair, skirts, even breasts, a pair
of raspberry colored pumps which a friend
wanted to put on, if they would fit his foot, and they did.
March 10, 2017
I've always enjoyed the poetry of Sharon Olds. One reason is she's sexually frank. Here, too, as she writes odes to body parts and birth control aids, so that the hymen, clitoris, penis, condom, and tampon each are represented by an ode. I honestly think the volume contains better odes to buttermilk, pine trees, the wind, and trilobites. But all to me read a little flat. For all their edgy content, the poems didn't interest me. Odes, I think, can be lyrical, and a little lyricism here would have helped to hone these odes into an edge and make them able to cut deep into the reader's emotions.
December 19, 2020
Este libro contiene, literalmente, odas al himen, al clítoris, a la mamada, a la sangre menstrual o a la prótesis de cadera. Y que no confunda la oda al pene o al glande, porque sorprendentemente son odas feministas. Sharon Olds es una Diosa de la palabra, tal cual. Poemas o narraciones que surgen del estómago y que son abiertas, sin censura ni miedo. Habla de la violencia doméstica, la política, las relaciones familiares, el sexo, el amor y el dolor. Creo que leer a Sharon es una experiencia enriquecedora; cada poema es complejo, vibrante y apasionado. No sabía cual reproducir para que os picase la curiosidad, así que espero que cuando estéis en una librería le echéis un vistazo al libro, os vais a quedar como yo; enamoradas de su fuerza.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Oda a la vulva
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
«Querida palabra, siento por ti lo que siente la niña pequeña
por la suya a medida que se le alargan los brazos.
Estás en las mismas páginas que vulgar y que la palabra
latina Vulgata. Pero también aparece vocal,
y vano, del latín: hueco, vacío, apertura
en una superficie. Me gusta la etimología
de tu nombre, *wel-, volver, enrollar,
liar, envolver; eres como un conjunto
de crepes (palabra latina para rizado u ondulado),
o un envase plegado; no para llevar,
sino para guardar. Hay mucha lengua oficial
en tu definición -como en un caso judicial-
externa, genital, femenina, mamífera,
mayores, menores, pero todos sabemos que eres el montículo
que resbala hacia el lugar que guarda los afinados tonos
musicales que permiten emprender el vuelo hacia el mundo
del que proviene el que ha de nacer,
ese ser que se pone tu vestido por un momento,
tu solapa alrededor del cuello,
la última palabra que define la moda en el vestir
de los seres humanos cuando el niño asoma
por la doble escotilla que lo lleva al futuro.
¡Vulva! Adoro tus dos uves,
boca dentro de otra boca, adoro
la música que hacemos al pronunciarte
con los labios, la lengua y los alvéolos dentarios,
me gusta porque procedes de nuestro planeta formado
por átomos de polvo y estrellas, como la Vía Láctea,
como la constelación Vulpecula
(la Zorra), entre las del Delfín y la Cruz del Norte»
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Oda a la vulva
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
«Querida palabra, siento por ti lo que siente la niña pequeña
por la suya a medida que se le alargan los brazos.
Estás en las mismas páginas que vulgar y que la palabra
latina Vulgata. Pero también aparece vocal,
y vano, del latín: hueco, vacío, apertura
en una superficie. Me gusta la etimología
de tu nombre, *wel-, volver, enrollar,
liar, envolver; eres como un conjunto
de crepes (palabra latina para rizado u ondulado),
o un envase plegado; no para llevar,
sino para guardar. Hay mucha lengua oficial
en tu definición -como en un caso judicial-
externa, genital, femenina, mamífera,
mayores, menores, pero todos sabemos que eres el montículo
que resbala hacia el lugar que guarda los afinados tonos
musicales que permiten emprender el vuelo hacia el mundo
del que proviene el que ha de nacer,
ese ser que se pone tu vestido por un momento,
tu solapa alrededor del cuello,
la última palabra que define la moda en el vestir
de los seres humanos cuando el niño asoma
por la doble escotilla que lo lleva al futuro.
¡Vulva! Adoro tus dos uves,
boca dentro de otra boca, adoro
la música que hacemos al pronunciarte
con los labios, la lengua y los alvéolos dentarios,
me gusta porque procedes de nuestro planeta formado
por átomos de polvo y estrellas, como la Vía Láctea,
como la constelación Vulpecula
(la Zorra), entre las del Delfín y la Cruz del Norte»
Read
June 24, 2023actually I don't think it's very controversial that sharon olds is one of the best poets alive writing in English, and here she is, doing it. a sharon-binge is a worthwhile endeavour. every poem has the zing, it's a collection on the longer side & what I really admire here is this use of technical term, plenty words I did not know but did not harm the meaning nor felt like I was being patronised for not knowing.
So , Odes, in the contemporary. What are they doing. When a contemporary poet writes an ode, assuming they're not completely delusional & imagining we live in a wordsworthian cloud, they're doing it with some degree of irony. To write an ode is one of the most self-conscious things you can do as a poet, it's like the piece is there yelling Look at me! I"m a poem! typing 'ode' into the poetry foundation website, you find 'Ode to Gossips', 'Ode to the Tiniest Dessert Spoon in all Creation', 'Ode to the Electric Fish that Eat Only the Tails of Other Electric Fish,'. These are cool, I like these poems (first two a little more than the last, sorry.
With Olds, it's a little different, I think. Appropriately enough, we open with 'Ode to the Hymen', 'Ode to the Clitoris', 'Ode to the Penis', 'Ode to My Whiteness', 'Ode of Withered Cleavage', 'Ode to Menstrual Blood', 'Blow Job Ode', 'Merkin Ode'. It's flagrant, it's excitable, yes, abject is a term we think of pretty immediately. I don't know if I could even pin it down, it's so excitedly unselfconscious and yet obviously she knows exactly what she's doing. Post-earnestness
So , Odes, in the contemporary. What are they doing. When a contemporary poet writes an ode, assuming they're not completely delusional & imagining we live in a wordsworthian cloud, they're doing it with some degree of irony. To write an ode is one of the most self-conscious things you can do as a poet, it's like the piece is there yelling Look at me! I"m a poem! typing 'ode' into the poetry foundation website, you find 'Ode to Gossips', 'Ode to the Tiniest Dessert Spoon in all Creation', 'Ode to the Electric Fish that Eat Only the Tails of Other Electric Fish,'. These are cool, I like these poems (first two a little more than the last, sorry.
With Olds, it's a little different, I think. Appropriately enough, we open with 'Ode to the Hymen', 'Ode to the Clitoris', 'Ode to the Penis', 'Ode to My Whiteness', 'Ode of Withered Cleavage', 'Ode to Menstrual Blood', 'Blow Job Ode', 'Merkin Ode'. It's flagrant, it's excitable, yes, abject is a term we think of pretty immediately. I don't know if I could even pin it down, it's so excitedly unselfconscious and yet obviously she knows exactly what she's doing. Post-earnestness
October 22, 2018
A tour-de-force of bold and candid poems, most of which investigate the female body as it's passing through its senior phase of physiology, while still remaining as endlessly fascinating as the body of a younger woman. For the poet/speaker, the body's organs, skin, hair, joints, etc. are all specimens to be examined with scientific precision as they transform not only the woman herself, but also her family members. Are all these poems "odes" in the classical sense? No. But in the sense that an aging poet is able to continue writing with astonishing power and wit, these odes sing the praises of human creativity, perseverance, and nimble adaptation.
October 5, 2016
Typically, I love reading Sharon Olds, but this collection just didn't do it for me. Nothing against the "bawdy" subject matter - I just felt like these poems felt more like someone going through the motions (if that makes any sense).
If you haven't read Olds yet, I recommend it wholeheartedly. I just wouldn't say to start with this collection.
If you haven't read Olds yet, I recommend it wholeheartedly. I just wouldn't say to start with this collection.
April 5, 2017
I am such a fan of Stag's leap by Sharon Olds. Those poems about her own divorce are vibrant and heartbreaking.
This new collection has almost exactly the opposite effect on me. It is so stupid, so silly.
I just can't believe nobody (including herself) in the Publishing House told her to try something else because Odes to a tampon, Ode to a blowjob, Ode to the word vulva or Ode to a condom do not and can never work. Even superbly written they remain ridiculous.
For example this expert from Ode to a penis to prove my point. (if one does like this, send me a PM and you'll receive this almost virginally untouched collection in your mail for free)
O general idea of the penis, do you mind
being noticed? You who stand, in the mind—
erect and not, old and young—
for all your representations, O abstract
principle, haven’t you maybe been
waiting for your turn to be praised?
Btw. Update : the book has already found another owner by now
This new collection has almost exactly the opposite effect on me. It is so stupid, so silly.
I just can't believe nobody (including herself) in the Publishing House told her to try something else because Odes to a tampon, Ode to a blowjob, Ode to the word vulva or Ode to a condom do not and can never work. Even superbly written they remain ridiculous.
For example this expert from Ode to a penis to prove my point. (if one does like this, send me a PM and you'll receive this almost virginally untouched collection in your mail for free)
O general idea of the penis, do you mind
being noticed? You who stand, in the mind—
erect and not, old and young—
for all your representations, O abstract
principle, haven’t you maybe been
waiting for your turn to be praised?
Btw. Update : the book has already found another owner by now
February 6, 2019
Sharon Olds is such a fox ! She uses the Ode to address things people don’t like to talk about . In a way, her use of form brings much needed humor. I speculate it was used as a method of self- preservation as well. The ode is her back-door entrance into subjects like sex, queerness, abuse, child rearing, rape, and menstruation, etc.
Poems to look for include “Douche Bag Ode” and “Victuals Dream Ode”
I want to be her when I grow up.
Poems to look for include “Douche Bag Ode” and “Victuals Dream Ode”
I want to be her when I grow up.
June 19, 2019
In 2010, the poet, critic, and blogger Anis Shivani wrote on the Huffington Post of Sharon Olds:
"she writes about the female body in a deterministic, shamanistic, medieval manner. Infantilization packaged in pseudo-confession is her specialty... Her poetry defines feminism turned upon itself, chewing up its own hot and bothered cadaver, exposed since the 1970s. Female poets in workshops around the country idolize her, collaborate in the masochism, because they say she freed them to talk about taboo subjects, she 'empowered' them... [Olds] Has given confessionalism such a bad name it can't possibly recover."
There was certainly a large segment of the [mostly male] literary establishment who felt similarly about Olds, at least at that time. But Olds did go on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 2013 for her book Stag’s Leap, her chronicle of the myriad emotions involved in the breakup of her thirty-year marriage, finally published some 15 years after the divorce. Stag’s Leap also made her the first American woman to receive the T.S. Eliot Prize, and she has since won the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry (2014) as well as the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets (2016). It could be said with some confidence that at last, after a good deal of controversy about her work prior to Stag’s Leap, Sharon Olds had finally reached a level of unassailable stature as an American poet of significance.
And then came Odes. Odes is a collection of sixty-four poems that seem at times to border on self-parody as they focus on and celebrate the body—the body as aging, the body as personal and intimate, and especially the body as sexual—in ways that don't so much push the envelope of acceptable poetic subject matter, but rip it apart altogether. The poet who previously shocked readers with poems on such topics as “The Pope’s Penis” and “Diaphragm Aria” here lets it all hang out in poem after poem, ranging from “Ode to the Hymen” and “Ode to the Clitoris” to “Ode to the Tampon” and “Ode to the Condom,” as well as the amusingly contemporary “Douche-Bag Ode” and the aptly named “Blow Job Ode.”
If to us these themes seem, perhaps, unexpected in a book of poetry from a revered and acclaimed woman of letters, consider what her current partner is quoted as saying in the book: “‘You’re sixty / something years old,’ he exclaims, ‘and still / writing about the first time you got laid!’” “Second Ode to the Hymen,” (p. 91). So I guess it’s not just us.
Hence the irony of the use of the term “Odes” to describe the form of this collection of poems. An Ode, traditionally, is a long lyric form that is written in an elevated style, serious in tone, dignified in manner, and using an elaborate stanzaic structure. It deals with a single purpose or theme, and often is written to eulogize some person (for Pindar it was an Olympic athlete), or praise for some work of art (like Dryden’s “Alexander’s Feast” or Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”), or a consideration of some emotional problem or human condition (like Coleridge’s “Dejection An Ode” or Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” ode).
Such a poetic form seems incongruous with Sharon Olds at her most intimately personal, as in these poems. Olds has always been more in the tradition of Walt Whitman, with his open forms and personal subject matter, or even Baudelaire with his disregard for traditional boundaries. For her Odes, though, Olds has another source altogether: In a recent interview, Olds describes the inspiration she took from Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda:
"I had read a book by Pablo Neruda called Odes to Common Things and while I was reading it I wasn’t thinking, “Oh, I could do this as well,” but I was thinking, “This is cool, this is so cool.” When something then came into my head and I started writing, it was one of these odes, to my common things — a lot of them, it turned out, were things that were common to girls when I was 15, that were not common to boys, or to poetry, or to culture. They would have been outside of poetry — over in hygiene or something. ….[T]he 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. And then those subjects started to come into me in a burst of girl feelings — girl feelings is definitely one way to put it, and also womanly happiness. And then there’s a side of me that’s just so excited thinking about things that haven’t necessarily been talked about. They are the things I’ve always been interested in." (https://wwd.com/fashion-news/street-s...)
Hence Olds’ very own Odes to common things, which include her breasts, her clitoris, and her hymen. And far from being addressed in heightened language or complex verse forms, they are addressed in amused colloquialism and Whitmanesque free verse.
I suppose it is because I am not a woman myself that, though amused, I’ve never felt personally moved by Olds’ more intimate poems that could have been written only by a woman. My favorite Olds poems have always been those that put her outside of herself (like “The Death of Marilyn Monroe” or “The Signal”), or those that portray the turmoil of human relationships (like “I Go Back to May, 1937” or “Stag’s Leap” itself). Thus in reading this book I was most taken by poems like her “Ode of Broken Loyalty,” in which Olds recalls the moment she felt free from loyalty to her family and therefore open to any poetic subject, when she declares “Once torn / away, once shunned and shunning, it seemed there was / little I could not write about” (p. 10). And one of the shortest poems in the collection, her “Ode to Dirt”—the least elevated of all possible subjects—in which she finally perceives a family relationship: “but now I can see us all, made of the / same basic materials—/ cousins of that first exploding from nothing—/ in our intricate equation together” (p. 94). And a poem about burgeoning social awareness, the “Secondary Boycott Ode,” about a political act that, Olds-like, she sees largely in terms of the body: “I had never seen anyone / saying no with their body, with their feet” (p. 35).
Of the more personal poems, the ones I related to most were those that dealt with aging, most surely because of my own aging body. Olds has often been called a “confessional” poet, a term that puts her in a box with the Anne Sextons or the Sylvia Plaths. But when Olds looks into a mirror, it is not to see with a kind of horror, like Plath (who doesn’t speak from experience, since she of course never reached that age herself), “an old woman / Ris[ing] toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.” What Olds sees amuses her, and she embraces it. In her “Ode to Wattles,” she proclaims “I love to be a little / disgusting, to go as far as I can / into the thrilling unloveliness / of an elderwoman’s aging” (p. 78). In her “Ode of Withered Cleavage,” she confesses “I want to live to an age when I look / hardly human, I want to love them / equally, birth and its daughter and /mother, death” (p. 27).
This is a remarkable collection of poems, in which Olds mixes a kind of girlish wonder and curiosity with the wisdom of age, and the linguistic adeptness and confidence of a master craftswoman. If you like your poetry with a dash of spice and a glass of well- matured wine, you shouldn’t miss this book. And look forward, with me, to Olds’ next collection, called Arias, coming out later this year.
(check out my own most recent book here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...)
"she writes about the female body in a deterministic, shamanistic, medieval manner. Infantilization packaged in pseudo-confession is her specialty... Her poetry defines feminism turned upon itself, chewing up its own hot and bothered cadaver, exposed since the 1970s. Female poets in workshops around the country idolize her, collaborate in the masochism, because they say she freed them to talk about taboo subjects, she 'empowered' them... [Olds] Has given confessionalism such a bad name it can't possibly recover."
There was certainly a large segment of the [mostly male] literary establishment who felt similarly about Olds, at least at that time. But Olds did go on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 2013 for her book Stag’s Leap, her chronicle of the myriad emotions involved in the breakup of her thirty-year marriage, finally published some 15 years after the divorce. Stag’s Leap also made her the first American woman to receive the T.S. Eliot Prize, and she has since won the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry (2014) as well as the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets (2016). It could be said with some confidence that at last, after a good deal of controversy about her work prior to Stag’s Leap, Sharon Olds had finally reached a level of unassailable stature as an American poet of significance.
And then came Odes. Odes is a collection of sixty-four poems that seem at times to border on self-parody as they focus on and celebrate the body—the body as aging, the body as personal and intimate, and especially the body as sexual—in ways that don't so much push the envelope of acceptable poetic subject matter, but rip it apart altogether. The poet who previously shocked readers with poems on such topics as “The Pope’s Penis” and “Diaphragm Aria” here lets it all hang out in poem after poem, ranging from “Ode to the Hymen” and “Ode to the Clitoris” to “Ode to the Tampon” and “Ode to the Condom,” as well as the amusingly contemporary “Douche-Bag Ode” and the aptly named “Blow Job Ode.”
If to us these themes seem, perhaps, unexpected in a book of poetry from a revered and acclaimed woman of letters, consider what her current partner is quoted as saying in the book: “‘You’re sixty / something years old,’ he exclaims, ‘and still / writing about the first time you got laid!’” “Second Ode to the Hymen,” (p. 91). So I guess it’s not just us.
Hence the irony of the use of the term “Odes” to describe the form of this collection of poems. An Ode, traditionally, is a long lyric form that is written in an elevated style, serious in tone, dignified in manner, and using an elaborate stanzaic structure. It deals with a single purpose or theme, and often is written to eulogize some person (for Pindar it was an Olympic athlete), or praise for some work of art (like Dryden’s “Alexander’s Feast” or Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”), or a consideration of some emotional problem or human condition (like Coleridge’s “Dejection An Ode” or Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” ode).
Such a poetic form seems incongruous with Sharon Olds at her most intimately personal, as in these poems. Olds has always been more in the tradition of Walt Whitman, with his open forms and personal subject matter, or even Baudelaire with his disregard for traditional boundaries. For her Odes, though, Olds has another source altogether: In a recent interview, Olds describes the inspiration she took from Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda:
"I had read a book by Pablo Neruda called Odes to Common Things and while I was reading it I wasn’t thinking, “Oh, I could do this as well,” but I was thinking, “This is cool, this is so cool.” When something then came into my head and I started writing, it was one of these odes, to my common things — a lot of them, it turned out, were things that were common to girls when I was 15, that were not common to boys, or to poetry, or to culture. They would have been outside of poetry — over in hygiene or something. ….[T]he 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. And then those subjects started to come into me in a burst of girl feelings — girl feelings is definitely one way to put it, and also womanly happiness. And then there’s a side of me that’s just so excited thinking about things that haven’t necessarily been talked about. They are the things I’ve always been interested in." (https://wwd.com/fashion-news/street-s...)
Hence Olds’ very own Odes to common things, which include her breasts, her clitoris, and her hymen. And far from being addressed in heightened language or complex verse forms, they are addressed in amused colloquialism and Whitmanesque free verse.
I suppose it is because I am not a woman myself that, though amused, I’ve never felt personally moved by Olds’ more intimate poems that could have been written only by a woman. My favorite Olds poems have always been those that put her outside of herself (like “The Death of Marilyn Monroe” or “The Signal”), or those that portray the turmoil of human relationships (like “I Go Back to May, 1937” or “Stag’s Leap” itself). Thus in reading this book I was most taken by poems like her “Ode of Broken Loyalty,” in which Olds recalls the moment she felt free from loyalty to her family and therefore open to any poetic subject, when she declares “Once torn / away, once shunned and shunning, it seemed there was / little I could not write about” (p. 10). And one of the shortest poems in the collection, her “Ode to Dirt”—the least elevated of all possible subjects—in which she finally perceives a family relationship: “but now I can see us all, made of the / same basic materials—/ cousins of that first exploding from nothing—/ in our intricate equation together” (p. 94). And a poem about burgeoning social awareness, the “Secondary Boycott Ode,” about a political act that, Olds-like, she sees largely in terms of the body: “I had never seen anyone / saying no with their body, with their feet” (p. 35).
Of the more personal poems, the ones I related to most were those that dealt with aging, most surely because of my own aging body. Olds has often been called a “confessional” poet, a term that puts her in a box with the Anne Sextons or the Sylvia Plaths. But when Olds looks into a mirror, it is not to see with a kind of horror, like Plath (who doesn’t speak from experience, since she of course never reached that age herself), “an old woman / Ris[ing] toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.” What Olds sees amuses her, and she embraces it. In her “Ode to Wattles,” she proclaims “I love to be a little / disgusting, to go as far as I can / into the thrilling unloveliness / of an elderwoman’s aging” (p. 78). In her “Ode of Withered Cleavage,” she confesses “I want to live to an age when I look / hardly human, I want to love them / equally, birth and its daughter and /mother, death” (p. 27).
This is a remarkable collection of poems, in which Olds mixes a kind of girlish wonder and curiosity with the wisdom of age, and the linguistic adeptness and confidence of a master craftswoman. If you like your poetry with a dash of spice and a glass of well- matured wine, you shouldn’t miss this book. And look forward, with me, to Olds’ next collection, called Arias, coming out later this year.
(check out my own most recent book here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...)
June 20, 2023
I've spent nine months -- on and off -- with six of Olds's collections, and while I think Olds would appreciate the significance of that timeframe, perhaps, after our summer travels, I'll come back to her in August to round out a full year -- and fill in some notable gaps. In the later years of her life, for example, I've (now) read Odes (to -- among dozens of subjects -- the Hymen, the Clitoris, the Penis, Broken Loyalty, Wind ... a scathingly sequenced series) and
Balladz
(about art, bears, the pope, her father) but am missing Arias, which came in between. And how can I say I know Olds without knowing what it is she sees herself as singing? Similarly, can my time with Olds be complete without knowing the vulnerability of her first published collection Satan Says, published over thirty years before this one? I've read that her subject matter was considered too personal, too domestic, too of (as my father-in-law might say) the "other species" from the start, but what did that start look like? Has she grown into herself, or has she always been as brash and gorgeously riotous as she is here where, in one poem -- the SECOND ode to the hymen, she admits,
What I'm trying to say is that I will be lucky to have even the smallest bit of the power and the poise Olds has twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years from now.
A few favorites: "Sexist Ode" (47), "Ode to My Living Friends" (26), "Ode to Wattles" (78), "Donner Party Mother Ode" (107)
My partner says that what I writeAnd this seems to be Sharon in a nutshell. Truly. Why the f*ck not?
about women is self-involved -- "You're sixty
something years old," he exclaims, "and still
writing about the first time you got laid!"
But it isn't just my hymen --
people get to talk about Beauty and Truth,
why not address, directly, the human
maidenhead, the Platonic form
of her
What I'm trying to say is that I will be lucky to have even the smallest bit of the power and the poise Olds has twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years from now.
A few favorites: "Sexist Ode" (47), "Ode to My Living Friends" (26), "Ode to Wattles" (78), "Donner Party Mother Ode" (107)
April 7, 2019
I read most of this in a bubble bath. Wow! I think this is my new favorite Sharon Olds book, even more than Satan Says. “Ode to Wattles” alone is my new mantra: “My crone beauty, in its first youth.”
December 12, 2023
Qué gamberra, me encanta.
Read
July 22, 2023Imagine if Mary Oliver had had sex, a sense of humor, and dazzling wordplay. I literally can't recommend these odes enough!!
September 4, 2016
Defamiliarised looks and paeans to what some may call low brow or bawdy or not-ok-for-polite-conversation topics. Vaginas, wrinkled cleavage, fat, vulvae, penises, decrepit bodies, etc are some of the subjects of these amusing, insightful, clever poems. A collection I know I'll return to sooner than later.
May 6, 2019
Pink sky in the morning—a girl's sky.
Slowly the trees become visible,
and the spaces between them. Imagine being
able to walk into the woods,
without fear. If my classmate had not
been taken, and −
leave a silence here −
and murdered, and buried in the woods near our houses,
would I be as afraid?
Slowly the trees become visible,
and the spaces between them. Imagine being
able to walk into the woods,
without fear. If my classmate had not
been taken, and −
leave a silence here −
and murdered, and buried in the woods near our houses,
would I be as afraid?
November 10, 2016
Ms. Olds is a skilled at her craft. But if you are going to write odes to vaginas and penises and compost toilets, shouldn't there be at least a little humor? Do the odes have to be actual ode odes?
May 17, 2020
This was witty and clever and surprising and funny and reaching and piercing and I really enjoyed it.
November 26, 2016
In 1855, a new poet introduced himself to the world: “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos / Disorderly, fleshly, sensual…eating drinking and breeding.” Experimental in its use of free verse; progressive in its treatment of race, gender, and sexuality; and above all democratic in its politics and its spirituality, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass stoked a vast fire that swept through world poetry, consuming and altering all the landscape before it.
One-hundred sixty years later, we have confirmation that Whitman’s poetic wildfire is finally under control. Sharon Olds’s new volume Odes is the firebreak we’ve been waiting for, the clearing across which we can safely watch Whitman’s flames dim to embers. Where Whitman burned in the open, writing about “The smoke of my own breath,/ Echoes, ripples, and buzzed whispers…loveroot, silkthread, crotch and vine, / my respiration and inspiration,” Olds scribbles “the book of my flesh” in poems whose shock value (evident in titles like “Ode to the Clitoris,” “Ode to the Tampon,” “Merkin Ode,” “Celibate’s Ode to Balls,” etc. ) is mitigated by their conventional mores, though they do feature some of the most un-unforgettable lines in recent poetry, like her admission that “Part of the beauty of male genitals, to me, / was that they were not anything like my mother’s.”
The seven sections of Odes follow a loose arc from paeans to incipient sexuality to reflections on death and dying, reflecting constantly on female identity, sexual experiences, love, beauty, and aging (culminating in Olds’s fey-ghoulish expression of filial love in “Donner Party Mother Ode,” when she imagines telling her mother “I / think I’d start with your earlobes.”) Almost every poem features language at once medical (in “Ode to Stretch Marks,” she asks “Do you gather, over nine months, in the / endometrium, the mucous / tunic of the uterus?”), portentous (she apostrophizes the hymen as “little night blood sister, / picnic basket of pain and free will”), and daintily goofy (the clitoris is a “weentsy Minerva who springs / full-armored, molten”). Almost every poem refers, at one point or another, to bodily processes, genitalia, or the reproductive system, most often Olds’s own, but sometimes those of her lovers and family. And almost every poem smacks of a naughty schoolgirl’s delight in the cloacal poetics of those nasty little boys: “I / want to bring poetry into the bathroom.”
Perhaps somewhere in America there’s a reader who’ll be shocked to hear menstrual blood described as “hardy / elixir, transparent manna.” Perhaps somewhere there’s a reader who blushes at Olds’s thoughts on old age and sex in “Ode to Wattles”:
I love to be a little
disgusting, to go as far as I can
into the thrilling unloveliness
of an elderwoman’s aging. It is like daring
time, and the ancient laws of eros,
at once.
Perhaps. But in 2016, given the Internet, I seriously doubt it.
The problem with Odes is Olds herself, who has made a career of poems that strive for shock in their treatment of subjects like her religiously conservative and often abusive upbringing in San Francisco; her experience of her own body and its processes, as well as her fascination with the bodies of others; and her view of history as a text written on the body of the conquered. Much of Odes is derivative of this work and shows Olds’s worst qualities as a poet: a weak sense of the free verse line, with haphazard line breaks suggestive of Bukowski at last call; a tendency to treat every experience, no matter the significance, in thirty to forty lines; and a tiresome, unexamined use of music as a trope for transcendence. Certainly there are moments of playfulness and insight in Odes, especially about the costs of old age, as in “Legs Ode,” where Olds, recovering from hip surgery and ordered not to cross her legs, remarks:
I had not know how vain I was
of my gams, until I had to still them—no
semaphoric waving, no
Rockette Rockette-flanked.
Olds shows off a jazzy linguistic play at times, especially in the poems where she explores etymology (she rhapsodizes about the vulva, “you’re on the page with vulgar, and Vulgate / Latin. But there is vowel as well, and / vugg, Cornish for a hollow in a lode”), but these are offset by moments of deadly earnestness (“Rape is rape / which alters where it alteration finds”) and by genuine lapses in poetic speech, as in this clunky evocation of her own conception in “Victuals Dream Ode” (which itself rips off her celebrated poem “I Go Back to May 1937”): “(T)hen his matter bumped / her matter and they creatored my spirit.”
Olds herself senses her derivativeness in “ Wild Ode,” where, having first meditated upon the subject of female flatulence, she compares herself to a barn spider weaving a web and asks, “Have I gone as far as I can / go, on these lines I pull out of my ass?” It was my favorite moment in the book, the “lines” suggesting both silk and verse, and the whole image alluding to Whitman’s “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” where Whitman depicts the soul as a spider that “launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself.” In the spinnerets of a wittier poet, one more in love with her weaving than with the flies she hoped to catch, the image might have shone from all points, like a star. But having seized the reader’s attention, Olds resorts to her old shock peddling: “Women smoked cigarettes / with the delicate circular lip of their sex.” This is trivial stuff.
The truly democratic poet must contain all things; that is the source of his power. Whitman can both offend and exalt because he can say, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well, I contradict myself, / (I am vast, I contain multitudes).” Olds seeks to offend and exalt in Odes, but struggles to do so, because her “I” never ceases insisting that we revere it as a singular self, as the special one who will “bring poetry into the bathroom.” Ultimately, her poems are but modest receptacles, striving but failing to contain the multiplicity of our finite, bodily experience.
One-hundred sixty years later, we have confirmation that Whitman’s poetic wildfire is finally under control. Sharon Olds’s new volume Odes is the firebreak we’ve been waiting for, the clearing across which we can safely watch Whitman’s flames dim to embers. Where Whitman burned in the open, writing about “The smoke of my own breath,/ Echoes, ripples, and buzzed whispers…loveroot, silkthread, crotch and vine, / my respiration and inspiration,” Olds scribbles “the book of my flesh” in poems whose shock value (evident in titles like “Ode to the Clitoris,” “Ode to the Tampon,” “Merkin Ode,” “Celibate’s Ode to Balls,” etc. ) is mitigated by their conventional mores, though they do feature some of the most un-unforgettable lines in recent poetry, like her admission that “Part of the beauty of male genitals, to me, / was that they were not anything like my mother’s.”
The seven sections of Odes follow a loose arc from paeans to incipient sexuality to reflections on death and dying, reflecting constantly on female identity, sexual experiences, love, beauty, and aging (culminating in Olds’s fey-ghoulish expression of filial love in “Donner Party Mother Ode,” when she imagines telling her mother “I / think I’d start with your earlobes.”) Almost every poem features language at once medical (in “Ode to Stretch Marks,” she asks “Do you gather, over nine months, in the / endometrium, the mucous / tunic of the uterus?”), portentous (she apostrophizes the hymen as “little night blood sister, / picnic basket of pain and free will”), and daintily goofy (the clitoris is a “weentsy Minerva who springs / full-armored, molten”). Almost every poem refers, at one point or another, to bodily processes, genitalia, or the reproductive system, most often Olds’s own, but sometimes those of her lovers and family. And almost every poem smacks of a naughty schoolgirl’s delight in the cloacal poetics of those nasty little boys: “I / want to bring poetry into the bathroom.”
Perhaps somewhere in America there’s a reader who’ll be shocked to hear menstrual blood described as “hardy / elixir, transparent manna.” Perhaps somewhere there’s a reader who blushes at Olds’s thoughts on old age and sex in “Ode to Wattles”:
I love to be a little
disgusting, to go as far as I can
into the thrilling unloveliness
of an elderwoman’s aging. It is like daring
time, and the ancient laws of eros,
at once.
Perhaps. But in 2016, given the Internet, I seriously doubt it.
The problem with Odes is Olds herself, who has made a career of poems that strive for shock in their treatment of subjects like her religiously conservative and often abusive upbringing in San Francisco; her experience of her own body and its processes, as well as her fascination with the bodies of others; and her view of history as a text written on the body of the conquered. Much of Odes is derivative of this work and shows Olds’s worst qualities as a poet: a weak sense of the free verse line, with haphazard line breaks suggestive of Bukowski at last call; a tendency to treat every experience, no matter the significance, in thirty to forty lines; and a tiresome, unexamined use of music as a trope for transcendence. Certainly there are moments of playfulness and insight in Odes, especially about the costs of old age, as in “Legs Ode,” where Olds, recovering from hip surgery and ordered not to cross her legs, remarks:
I had not know how vain I was
of my gams, until I had to still them—no
semaphoric waving, no
Rockette Rockette-flanked.
Olds shows off a jazzy linguistic play at times, especially in the poems where she explores etymology (she rhapsodizes about the vulva, “you’re on the page with vulgar, and Vulgate / Latin. But there is vowel as well, and / vugg, Cornish for a hollow in a lode”), but these are offset by moments of deadly earnestness (“Rape is rape / which alters where it alteration finds”) and by genuine lapses in poetic speech, as in this clunky evocation of her own conception in “Victuals Dream Ode” (which itself rips off her celebrated poem “I Go Back to May 1937”): “(T)hen his matter bumped / her matter and they creatored my spirit.”
Olds herself senses her derivativeness in “ Wild Ode,” where, having first meditated upon the subject of female flatulence, she compares herself to a barn spider weaving a web and asks, “Have I gone as far as I can / go, on these lines I pull out of my ass?” It was my favorite moment in the book, the “lines” suggesting both silk and verse, and the whole image alluding to Whitman’s “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” where Whitman depicts the soul as a spider that “launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself.” In the spinnerets of a wittier poet, one more in love with her weaving than with the flies she hoped to catch, the image might have shone from all points, like a star. But having seized the reader’s attention, Olds resorts to her old shock peddling: “Women smoked cigarettes / with the delicate circular lip of their sex.” This is trivial stuff.
The truly democratic poet must contain all things; that is the source of his power. Whitman can both offend and exalt because he can say, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well, I contradict myself, / (I am vast, I contain multitudes).” Olds seeks to offend and exalt in Odes, but struggles to do so, because her “I” never ceases insisting that we revere it as a singular self, as the special one who will “bring poetry into the bathroom.” Ultimately, her poems are but modest receptacles, striving but failing to contain the multiplicity of our finite, bodily experience.
November 14, 2017
🙌 🙏
"I want to thank my sister for loving me, which taught me to love. I'm not sure what she loved in me, besides my love for her - maybe that I was a copy of her, half-size - then three-quarters, then size. In the snapshots, you see her keeping an eye on me, I was a little wild and I said silly things, and she would laugh her serious laugh. My sister knew things, sometimes she knew everything, as if she'd been born knowing."
"And if anything had happened to me, I think my sister would not have known who she was, I was almost as essential to her, as she to me. If anything had happened to her, I think I would not be alive today..."
"Rumi said it - the price of a kiss is your life."
"Sometimes I could hardly believe how long I might have to last with that craving. Sometimes I regretted that I could not dally, but I tried it once, when I was a fresh left wife, to go with a man who was not into love, it nearly killed me, my heart is my body, the price of a kiss is your life."
"I want to thank my sister for loving me, which taught me to love. I'm not sure what she loved in me, besides my love for her - maybe that I was a copy of her, half-size - then three-quarters, then size. In the snapshots, you see her keeping an eye on me, I was a little wild and I said silly things, and she would laugh her serious laugh. My sister knew things, sometimes she knew everything, as if she'd been born knowing."
"And if anything had happened to me, I think my sister would not have known who she was, I was almost as essential to her, as she to me. If anything had happened to her, I think I would not be alive today..."
"Rumi said it - the price of a kiss is your life."
"Sometimes I could hardly believe how long I might have to last with that craving. Sometimes I regretted that I could not dally, but I tried it once, when I was a fresh left wife, to go with a man who was not into love, it nearly killed me, my heart is my body, the price of a kiss is your life."
June 9, 2017
The first volume of poetry by a single poet I ever purchased, a few months after I first fell head-over-heals-in-love with poetry in the mid 1980's, was Sharon Olds's The Dead and the Living. What I loved about her poetry then is the same thing I love about this newer collection (published 2016) -- she doesn't soft-soap the gritty reality of life's pain while she lauds the amazing grace and beauty of life.
An ode is a poem full of praise. These odes are also full of pain. Sharon Olds's odes make me want to be a better person: more honest about my hurt and anger and simultaneously less inclined to hold on to resentment; more compassionate and less judgmental; more spiritual and less pious; and even when suffering the effects of heartache and grief, more aware of and grateful for all of life's little miracles.
An ode is a poem full of praise. These odes are also full of pain. Sharon Olds's odes make me want to be a better person: more honest about my hurt and anger and simultaneously less inclined to hold on to resentment; more compassionate and less judgmental; more spiritual and less pious; and even when suffering the effects of heartache and grief, more aware of and grateful for all of life's little miracles.
March 25, 2017
3.5. First book of poetry I've read cover to cover in a long time, maybe ever actually. I like the conceit of odes; it created a constant hum through the collection. Some poems I didn't like at all but I feel that's to be expected. I most enjoyed the poems regarding aging and her relationship with her mother. I'm a sucker for poetry that explores filial ties.
My favorites:
Ode to the Hymen
Ode of Withered Cleavage
Celibate's Ode to Balls
San Francisco Bay Dawn Ode
Donner Party Mother Ode
I didn't love Ode to Vagina but I loved these lines:
"...when you're scared. There is so much pain, in bathrooms, / sometimes to make me pray / or weep, and then there is all the blood and the / not blood, all the not / motherhood and the motherhood, / and now I understand I need not / apologize, I can say vagina"
As a woman, I feel I had so many formative moments in bathrooms. I would actually like to write an Ode to Bathrooms.
My favorites:
Ode to the Hymen
Ode of Withered Cleavage
Celibate's Ode to Balls
San Francisco Bay Dawn Ode
Donner Party Mother Ode
I didn't love Ode to Vagina but I loved these lines:
"...when you're scared. There is so much pain, in bathrooms, / sometimes to make me pray / or weep, and then there is all the blood and the / not blood, all the not / motherhood and the motherhood, / and now I understand I need not / apologize, I can say vagina"
As a woman, I feel I had so many formative moments in bathrooms. I would actually like to write an Ode to Bathrooms.
February 19, 2019
Sharon Olds can seem crude if you read her Table of Contents - a list of odes to various genitalia, tampons, douches, wattles, blow jobs, menstrual blood... but also her whiteness, sickness, a composting toilet? She's actually elegant and profound, with a few duds. I love how she can make language wrap itself around the body and show you something you'd never thought of but you think "true, true, true." She demystifies and makes sacred at the same time.
May 11, 2022
Sen dúbida, o libro de Olds que máis me aburriu e menos me gustou. Aínda así, segue a haber poemas para enmarcar.
August 15, 2022
Beautiful poetry (albeit some very uncomfortable gender essentialism)
March 10, 2021
Raro este de Olds. Hay poemas enormes y otros que parecen deberle demasiado al oficio (que lo tiene y en cantidad). Se me ocurre que una colección más corta me habría gustado más.
July 9, 2022
re-upping to 4 stars bc i love sharon
<3 ode to the hymen + san francisco bay dawn ode
<3 ode to the hymen + san francisco bay dawn ode
August 2, 2023
an original collection of odes to the intricacies of the body and the personal stories it carries !
February 16, 2021
A lovely collection of poetry. There are a lot of repeated images throughout, which had me between 4 and 5 stars. Could Olds not come up with more things to say? Or does the repetition of certain images unify the collection? I guess in the end i decided upon the latter.
October 15, 2020
I knew about Sharon Olds before I read this book of hers as a writer of daringly intimate verse, but this is the first collection of hers I have read. I am always interested in odes as a class, whether by Pindar or Neruda or the 19th century English romantics - lyrical poems of praise. There is a lot of fun to be had praising the subject for soe aspect not often considered to be praiseworthy, or of choosing a subject with taboos or social anxiety attached, or of giving an ironic twist to the sentiment, and all of these are in evidence here. These are not formal poems beyond the way they stick to the act of praising, and they mostly make an effort to find praiseworthy qualities without being ridiculous, but their sensibilities are up to date. Maybe a quarter or a third of them are sexual or have a bearing on sexual relationships, in some cases even when the thing being praised isn't sexual (such as in New England Camping Ode), while others reflect on subjects like aging, childhood, and family. Readers looking for decorum might have some rough moments.
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