I have been thinking about Sharon Olds ever since reading a bad review of her new book in the New York Times. In rebuttal I said to myself: Well we must remember The Dead and the Living. How much that book seemed to change everything in the 80s. Perhaps I was merely young. But at the time it riveted me with its fearlessness and its forthright voice.



So I went to my storage locker to find the book because I was going to post something here that would solidify my rebuttal--some superbly crafted small thing that was not about the self. I couldn't find the book, so the posting on that score will have to wait. But my thinking about Olds also made me think of Anne Sexton, who, it seems to me, is a grandmother to many of us no matter if we renounce her or not. I think all the charges of self-indulgence that have been lobbed at her make us forget the early work, which is tightly constructed and not at all hobbled by the poet's autobiographical life. So I'll post one that I mean to memorize, and I think it's a testament to the poem's craft that I can recall it so well even though I've never thought about it much.



(By the way, I did memorize the Logan.)



(Also: I just went to get this poem out of the Norton Anthology but there were no entries at all for Sexton--very surprising.)



HER KIND



I have gone out, a possessed witch,

haunting the black air, braver at night;

dreaming evil, I have done my hitch

over the plain houses, light by light:

lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.

A woman like that is not a woman, quite.

I have been her kind.



I have found the warm caves in the woods,

filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,

closets, silks, innumerable goods;

fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:

whining, rearranging the disaligned.

A woman like that is misunderstood.

I have been her kind.



I have ridden in your cart, driver,

waved my nude arms at villages going by,

learning the last bright routes, survivor

where your flames still bite my thigh

and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.

A woman like that is not ashamed to die.

I have been her kind.