Sharon Old Research Paper

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Jessie Norman April 28, 2015 English 330 Dr. Little-Sweat Sharon Olds Research Paper Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco on November 19, 1942. She earned a BA at Stanford University and a PhD at Columbia University. Sharon Olds didn’t have an easy childhood. Her father was abusive and an alcoholic. As a child she remembers very vivid memories of being tied to a chair for hours by her father. Sharon Old’s mother apologized to her years later for the terrible childhood that Sharon had to grow up in. Her grandfather was abusive; the father suffered from alcoholism, and her sister was also abusive. These horrible memories can be described in some of her poetry. Olds divides her time by living in New Hampshire and New York. She teaches in the…show more content…
She often writes in first-person narratives. Her poetic voice is known for both its precision and versatility. The colorful events of the poems are always rendered in sharply realized images that cut quickly from the gory to the beautiful and back again. In the later poem My Father she describes the anguish and trauma she has dealt with from her abusive father even into her adult years. Abuse and mentally, physically, and emotionally is not something that disappears overnight. In interviews she has been reluctant to talk about her childhood and especially her father. It takes years if not longer for a person someone for treating them very harshly. In the last three lines of the poem she states that she has forgiven her…show more content…
Olds has won numerous awards for her work: Including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her collection Satan Says received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Her other collections include Stag’s Leap, is the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize (Poet Sharon Olds). It included poems that explored details of her divorce. The chair of the final judging panel, said: “This was the book of her career. There is a grace and a strong passion in her grief that marks her out as being a world-class poet. I always say that poetry is the music of being human, and in this book she is really singing. Her journey from grief to healing is so beautifully executed (Poetry Foundation). In 2005, Laura Bush invited Sharon Olds to the National Book Festival in Washington to read some of her poetry in front of thousands of people. Olds responded by writing in an open letter, that it would be condoning the Iraq war and "the current regime of blood, wounds and fire". During Sharon Olds career she has proven to be somewhat political by blatantly expressing her opinion and writing on political topics from around the
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