NCTE Verse - Sharon Olds

Poetry highlights in honor of National Poetry Month!

Poet of the Day: Sharon Olds

Sharon Olds is a previous director of the Creative Writing Program at NYU. Her first book of poetry, Satan Says , received the San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Her second book, The Dead and the Living , was both the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983 and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of The Gold Cell; The Father ; The Wellspring ; Blood, Tin, Straw ; The Unswept Room ; Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980–2002 ; One Secret Thing ; and most recently, Odes . In 2012 her collection Stag's Leap was awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. She received a Lila Wallace-Readers' Digest Grant in 1993, part of which was designated for the NYU workshop program at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island. In 1997, she received the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award. From 1998–2000 she was the New York State Poet Laureate. Professor Olds holds the Erich Maria Remarque Professorship at NYU.

This poet belongs in our classrooms because . . .

"Sharon Olds is enormously self-aware," wrote David Leavitt in the Voice Literary Supplement . With whole child and social-emotional learning (SEL) as a focus for many schools, the poetry of Sharon Olds may provide students and teachers with an access point to have discussions and work on SEL skills like self-awareness, while also analyzing grade-level complex texts.

A Poem by Sharon Olds

" I Go Back to May 1937 "

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,

I see my father strolling out

under the ochre sandstone arch, the

red tiles glinting like bent

plates of blood behind his head, I

see my mother with a few light books at her hip

standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks,

the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its

sword-tips aglow in the May air,

they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,

they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are

innocent, they would never hurt anybody.

I want to go up to them and say Stop,

don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,

he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things

you cannot imagine you would ever do,

you are going to do bad things to children,

you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,

you are going to want to die. I want to go

up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,

her hungry pretty face turning to me,

her pitiful beautiful untouched body,

his arrogant handsome face turning to me,

his pitiful beautiful untouched body,

but I don’t do it. 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.

Other poems:

" The Fear of Oneself "

" The Guild "

" Song for Gabriel Hirsch "

" The Task of Naming Me "

Visit Sharon Olds's page at the Poetry Foundation and the Academy of American Poets .

Classroom Connections

" The Fear of Oneself " provides a provocative look at our deepest fears. It allows readers to look inward and enhance social-emotional learning in the classroom to promote self-awareness skills.

" I Go Back to May 1937 " provides a realistic view of how the actions of others impact ourselves. The content can be a springboard for the concept of being a bystander and how or why we allow others to make bad decisions because of deeper self-desires or social conformity.

" The Guild " provides a way for students to understand why people become who they are and how we define our personal identities through the use of language as a medium for self-discovery.

" Are You the New Person Drawn Toward Me? " by Walt Whitman and other work by Walt Whitman may be used as a juxtaposition with the poetry of Sharon Olds.

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Kelly Schultz has 10+ years of experience as a teacher, instructional coach, MTSS Coordinator, and state-level consultant. Kelly holds an M.Ed. in Secondary English from DePaul University and a BS in English, Creative Writing from Central Michigan University. Kelly has a strong belief in high-quality, standards-based instruction for all students. Follow her on Twitter @kel_schultz .