Sharon Olds in Conversation

Speaking of Galway Kinnell the other day, his good friend Sharon Olds was interviewed by the Independent (UK) in yesterday's issue. Olds is one of the leading poets of the last half of the 20th century, and she's not going quietly into that good night as we enter the 21st.

Here is the introduction to the conversation:

When Sharon Olds was a child, she was told she was going to hell. "I did worry," she confesses, "that if a beam of eyesight is made of dust, me looking at a flower would get some of the dust of my sinful nature on the flower." It's an unlikely start, perhaps, for a poet who went on to write some of the most sexually explicit poems of the 20th century, one who has won an international following for her celebrations of the human as animal. In Olds's poems, we are creatures who bleed, suck, give birth and - to use her uncompromising word - fuck. "Sexual love," says Olds, "is a subject that moved me immensely. Talk about a total challenge to one's descriptive powers!"

Read the rest of the article here.