Twenty some odd years ago, Olds made a vow never to speak publicly about her family. She often encounters people who don't "get" that the speakers in her poems are not supposed to be representative of her own life experiences...or, so she claims. (I have a lot of issues with the way Olds has addressed the questions about what relationship, if any, exists between her art and her personal life.) She calls what she has written "apparently personal poetry," and has intimated that it has no literal connection to her personal experiences.
Here's one interview which sums up what is still (I believe) Olds' official position on the subject:
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/olds/excerpt.htmYou don’t talk about your family at all in public, yet your poems seem to be a lot about them. What is the distinction?
I guess I'm trying to lead two lives, the life of art and the life of life, and to keep them as separate as possible from each other. Emily Dickinson talks somewhere about the "someone" in her poems. That seems to me a useful way to think about it.I thought when Robert Lowell wrote the poems in The Dolphin about his former wife and daughter, quoting verbatim from their letters, for instance, that he had cleared the way for almost anything.
Those are not, for me, his strongest poems. And I would wonder, when does the poet ask the bearers of the names about the appearance of the names in the poems?
This is part of what I have come to think of as the spectrum of loyalty and betrayal. On the loyalty side is silence, and out toward this end of the spectrum is absolute silence, the poems not written, the thoughts not even thought, a kind of spiritual suicide of the writer and, perhaps, therefore, in a way, of a part of the culture. On the other side of the spectrum is song, and out at the far end perhaps very little consideration for other people's privacy—even, at the extreme, a kind of destructiveness or spiritual murder. The way we learn our place on the spectrum seems to be the usual way of learning—by making mistakes.Where do you fit on the spectrum?
Names are a big concern for me and for a lot of poets, I think, perhaps especially children's names. I have gone back and taken names out of the next printings of two books. Another concern is for clarity. I discovered, from an introduction at a reading, for instance, that a poem of mine, "What if God," which I had thought to be partly metaphorical, had been read by at least one reader as completely literal. Understandably, in a writer who is often apparently literal. So I rewrote it for the next printing. Sometimes language comes to us that is partly literally physical and partly a physical image for a spiritual or psychological reality.
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