Audio Clips

Olds was born in November 1942 and raised in Berkeley California. She got her BA at Stanford University and continued her education at Columbia University with a PhD in English. Olds 66 years of age, divorced after being married to a psychologist for 32 years, has two grown children, lives in New York and teaches creative writing at the New York State University. Olds is also the co-founder of The NYU Goldwater Memorial Hospital Writing Project. Olds was the poet laureate{state poet}for New York from 1998 - 2000. Olds has published over seven books and has had her work translated into seven different languages. She is known as one of our greatest modern day poets.

From the time Olds published her first book "Satan Says" in 1980, she was 37 years of age and extremely careful to not state that her work was audio biographical." I've never talked about actual biography - it just seems to me like the right thing to do when you look at the poems I write." Just recently Olds has decided that she did not need to hold this stance any longer. "My vow may be wearing thinner than I thought" she states in an interview and continues on to say that a student from a highschool she had visited stated that if he found out that what she had written was not true, that he would be mad and she agreed that she would feel the same if in his shoes. .Then while at The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival Olds was asked about the persona in her poems and her response, "Yes, my work is audio biographical, because I do not have an imagination" she relpies with a hint a laughter.

Self-Exam

They tell you it won't make much sense, at first

you will have to learn the terrain. They tell you this

at thirty, and fifty, and some are late

beginners, at last lying down and walking

the bright earth of breasts- the rounded,

cobbled, ploughed field of one,

with listening walking, and then the other-

fingertip-stepping, divining, north

to south, east to west, sectioning

the low, fallen hills, sweeping

for mines. And the matter feels primordial,

unimaginable- dense,

cystic, phthistic, each breast like the innards

of a cell, its contents shifting and changing,

streambed gravel under walking feet, it

seems almost unpicturable, not

immemorial, but nearly un-

memorizable, but one marches,

slowly, through grave or fatal danger,

or no danger, one feels around in the

two tackroom drawers, ribs and

knots like leather bridles and plaited

harnesses and bits and reins,

one runs one's hands through the mortal tackle

in a jumble, in the dark, indoors. Outside-

night, in which these glossy ones were

ridden to a froth of starlight, bareback.

When reading through all of Olds poems, I could not find one that I disagreed with. I either agree with her thought of the poem if it was on a social level or the poem was on a personal level in which I could not argue the point. I also did not read I poem that I disliked. When asked to speak of a poem that I disagreed with I had a hard time, so I give you the poem Self-Exam for the mere fact that I did not find passion within myself about the issue, perhaps because I have not had to live it or experience the scare of it.