Dear Friend,
When Sharon Olds appeared on State of the Arts in February 1997, host Amber Edwards introduced her by saying, “Home and family are the well-travelled terrain of poet Sharon Olds, but a comfortable and familiar world it is not. Her poems create a shock of recognition in the reader, and sometimes the thrill of enjoying something that perhaps you shouldn’t.”
While on set, Sharon read her searing classic, “I Go Back to May 1937,” and “First Birth,” from her then just-published collection Wellspring. She speaks candidly with Amber about what drew her to topics that were, when she began writing, dismissed as “women’s issues.” In 2012, Sharon Olds was awarded England’s T.S. Eliot Prize, and in 2013 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she teaches at the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University.
Every week, we look through our archives (dating back to the mid-1980s!) and find stories, performances, and interviews that have a continuing relevance to today’s world. This week, we feature one of America’s great poets in celebration of National Poetry Month.
