Someone asked that I write more here. All right! I'm shooting for twice a week to keep myself reading/memorizing. I still have to work on the Swenson, though.



So I was thinking of Sharon Olds, a popular poet, and as I said her book The Dead and the Living changed the poetic landscape for me. Now that book has come to me from the library because I couldn't find it in my storage locker, and I've been re-reading, and I see that where its flaw lies (besides in the eccentric line breaks) is in how it juxtaposes the sexual with...well, things that seem to be demeaned by the juxtaposition (a starving woman/her eggs in her ovaries dropping.) There was a time that sexual juxtaposition was revolutionary I suppose. It seems dated now, though, when it is used to elevate a poem's ability to startle (when there's nothing else startling or even happening particularly.) Or maybe it is indicative of a youthful period in a writer's life. I know I juxtaposed the sexual shamelessly. In my case I think this was indicative of a complete lack of taste. Someone, I forget, maybe Eliot, or Auden, talks about how taste should be a hallmark of a poet's merit. But I think that's wrong: bad taste is not irrelevant Or else what do we do with Whitman? Larkin? In certain ways I wish my taste had matured earlier in my life. But bad taste taught me things too. It can make a person fearless.



But I think the thing about Olds that was revolutionary was the forthright way in which she proceeded. Nothing arty-farty to jazz the poems up in a false way (this would be Sexton's flaw.) So here's a good example from Dead and Living, which came out in the eighties and is still in print.



THE ISSUES

(Rhodesia, l978)



Just don't tell me about the issues.

I can see the pale spider-belly head of the

newborn who lies on the lawn, the web of

veins at the surface of her scalp, her skin

grey and gleaming, the clean line of the

bayonet down the center of her chest.

I see her mother's face, beaten and

beaten into the shape of a plant,

a cactus with grey spines and broad

dark maroon blooms.

I see her arm stretched out across her baby,

wrist resting, heavily, still, across the

winy ribs.

Don't speak to me about

politics. I've got eyes, man.