The Books: The Gold Cell, by Sharon Olds

Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry. Next book on the shelf:

The Gold Cell, by Sharon Olds

Her poems are pure fire in the hands. – Michael Ondaatje

I only have one volume of Sharon Olds’ work, this one (her third), and I bought it in 1996 (I always put the date on the front page of any book after I buy it). I’m not sure why I bought it, but I think my sister Jean might have referenced her to me, and so I decided to check her out. I remember just where I bought it too – at the old awesome Coliseum Bookstore in Manhattan. God, I miss that place. My favorite bookstore in the city. I had recently moved to New York, and was living in a state of upheaval, crashing at my brother’s place, then moving in with two ballet dancers for a time, before finally hooking up with my friend Jen, and we lived together for nine years in a succession of apartments. But I had left Chicago, I was living on the Upper West Side, I was rattling off to my dance classes at Alvin Ailey, and all my other classes down in the Village, and my entire life was new. Had I ever lived in Chicago? Where the hell was I? But I threw myself into the whole thing with abandon. Somehow, I associate reading Sharon Olds’ slim intense volume with that crazy time. The poems are clearly the voice of a middle-aged woman. She speaks of her teenage children, domestic life, marriage … nothing that had anything to do with where I was at, and what my life was about. However, the deep emotion inherent in every one of these sometimes searing poems somehow really got through to me, really spoke to me. I have written before about my sense of nostalgia, and how sometimes it is misplaced. I have a long-view, I get the sense that this is transitory and will pass, and even while it is happening I already miss it. It’s a sometimes-delicious sometimes-awful ache, and I will say that in the times in my life when I lost the track, when the darkness got me (three times in total), it was when I lost that sense of nostalgia. The nostalgia can also be the terrible “I miss what will never be”, which is what I am living in right now. But that’s just reality. It should be faced, and whether or not you want to face it, it will rise up and ambush you anyway. So you might as well not fight it. It’s hard to explain what it means to be a nostalgic 8-year-old, someone who knows that time is flying by, but that’s what it was like for me. Sharon Olds’ memories are encapsulated in the senses, which is true for all of us. That might have also been the gripping appeal of her book at that time in my life, when I was spending all of my time at The Actors Studio, taking classes in sense-memory. That work must be specific or it doesn’t work. The beginning exercise is to “create a breakfast-drink”. Orange juice, coffee cup, whatever. You work on that breakfast drink for 2 hours. The misunderstanding is that this work is all about bringing up huge emotions. Not true at all. The work is about grounding yourself in a reality that you can see and touch and taste. Why is it that you see a play with a brilliant performance and you would SWEAR that the actor/actress is actually sweating from the humidity, or actually drunk, or actually freezing cold? It’s because the actor has done his work to make that specific, so specific that we out there in the dark seats get it. We might even start to feel sweaty/cold too – just from watching them. Work like this is rare, but you know it when you see it. It is the nuts and bolts of the craft.

You can read more about these exercises in this excerpt from Ellen Burstyn’s memoir.

Sharon Olds’ poems in The Gold Cell were constant reminders to me, at that time, to stay specific in my work. And to be honest, that was never really a huge challenge for me as an actress. I had other challenges, but sense-memory wasn’t one of them – this made taking classes in the stuff an agony sometimes because I could do it in an instant. I live almost primarily in a fantasy world anyway, where imaginary objects take on reality – You tell me I’m holding a champagne flute, or a battered tin mug, and I immediately feel its shape in my hands. The imagination is a funny thing. There were other things I found difficult in my study, but sense-memory wasn’t one of them. It’s always good to practice, and it’s very good training, but it can be quite boring. I read Sharon Olds’ book over and over my first year in New York, diving into her images, images that could only come from something deeply personal and unique.

She can be startlingly honest. You feel her courage. She’s sharing that?? You think that perhaps Sylvia Plath had to be an influence, but on deeper examination, I would say No. Sylvia was personal, yes, but I think she was more of a myth-maker. She created a persona for herself, in those final years, a terrifying laughing rotting persona, a Death Angel, beyond the cares of this world. There are personal elements there, of course, but by the end, she was twirling around all of her energies to make a gigantic perfect Myth. Sharon Olds doesn’t do that. Her poems are often about something small, eating breakfast, making out with her first boyfriend, her kids going off to school. She emerges as a very real woman, a real person, and her voice is almost casual, although, as I mentioned, so so specific, which was the main appeal to me at the time I was reading them. Memories are not general, memories are not about feelings – or they are not primarily about that. They are about what you see, touch, hear, smell, taste. It is through THOSE things that entire memories/worlds/pasts crack open. I mean, that’s what Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is all about. That’s what Tennessee Williams writes about. The music playing through Glass Menagerie is not meant to be a present-day sound, the victrola in the other room. It is meant to come from the far past, similar to the waltz that haunts Blanche Dubois. We all know that experience, of walking along, minding our business, and a song comes on that suddenly catapults us back in time. And it’s not a calm or neat experience, it’s not a nice little memory presenting itself to us in a perfect little picture – it can be a bombardment of sensations that can even stop you in your tracks. THAT is how memory works. And that is what actors call upon, that’s how they do it, “sense-memory” or no. Their imaginations and emotional apparati are porous, things are allowed to flow in and out, actors are highly suggestible. (The talented ones, anyway). That’s why improv is a great tool. “Okay, you’re struggling to make a tent in a raging Arctic blizzard. Go.” Acting is the ability to come to life believably under imaginary circumstances. Period. However you get there is irrelevant.

And I found my sense-memory classes crashingly boring (I had a bad teacher too), but Sharon Olds’ book kept me operating in that world, where memories have specificity – where memories don’t have a meaning – or at least not the meaning you have assigned it, which can lead you into very general waters. “This is the moment I lost my innocence.” “This is the moment I was first betrayed.” Yawn. How about how the sun looked coming in through the curtains on that day? How about the song you were listening to at that moment? Were you eating something at “the moment you were first betrayed”? What was it? Can you taste it? It’s incredible what can happen when you try to “re-enter” a memory THAT way, rather than in a more literal “this is what I felt” way.

I don’t know much about Sharon Olds. She is notoriously private. Her poems are so personal that she made a conscious decision a long time ago to not give too many interviews. She’s a poet, not a journalist, so the assumption that what she writes must be true, in a literal sense, is often a misunderstanding of what writers actually do. She wrote a book about her father which was very controversial and got a lot of criticism. The response to it appears to have been polarized. She was airing her dirty laundry, and people didn’t like it – or they were amazed by her honesty, and skill, in writing about such a difficult subject. (Her father was an abusive alcoholic).

I haven’t read that book, but I can see from the poems here in this volume that there appears to be nowhere she is afraid to go. She does not protect herself. She looks at the people in her life (kids, her parents, her lovers, her husband) and she looks at them from her own very unique perspective. The “I” in Sharon Olds’ poems is clearly HER. When she says “I”, for better or worse, we feel we know who she is talking about (whereas, with someone like Plath – the “I” in her poems is fluid, scarily so, and comes from a nightmare of morphing shapes and figures – where identity is not set, where everything is in flux). But Sharon Olds’ “I” is way more stable. (I’m not saying one way of writing is right and the other is wrong, I am just making the distinction between the two poets. I often hear them compared, and I think it is a totally inaccurate comparison. The only thing they have in common is that they are “confessional” and they are both women. But there the similarity ends. Sylvia Plath can be quite forbidding. Her poems act as dares. “I dare you to follow me. I dare you to read this.” It’s a child having a long-delayed tantrum. Sharon Olds has plenty of drama (as we all do), and things that trouble her, and haunt her, and so she tackles these things in verse. She seems to address problems directly.)

Olds has said about all of this:

Poems like mine – I don’t call them confessional, with that tone of admitting to wrong-doing. My poems have done more accusing than admitting. I call work like mine ‘apparently personal’. Or in my case apparently very personal.

There are poems in this volume that have brought me to tears (especially the poem I excerpt today). Loss vibrates through the volume, and yet you also get the sense that this is a poet who cherishes life. Writing an experience down means you have captured it, for safekeeping. Even the pain, even the loss … all of it is valuable.

In 2005, I did a play here in New York. It was written by a famous poet (more famous every year, I see his name everywhere now), and I had one big scene in the play. There are many reasons I love my experience in that play, but I will always remember it because that was the play I finally joined Actors Equity with. You never forget that play. I was a late-bloomer. I had many “points”, but had never joined. Anyway, it was a nice long run, right in midtown, a great experience. One night, we had a QA with the audience after the show, with director and playwright/poet up on stage with us. My brother and his girlfriend Melody were there that night for the QA. I came out into the lobby after the show to find them, and a woman came up to me, and said, “Oh my God. You. You.” I had a small part in the play, just one big scene, but the way she came up to me made me feel like she had been waiting to see if I, specifically, would come out afterwards. Just the way she said, “You. You.” That was all she could get out. I wrote about the whole thing here. As I am sure is now obvious, that woman was Sharon Olds. I didn’t even know it until the next day, when someone said, “Sharon Olds was here last night …”

I almost wish I had known it was her, because then I could have told her how much The Gold Cell meant to me, in my early days in New York, tromping off to the Actors Studio, and how I always had it with me, as a reminder to stay specific, stay grounded, don’t worry about emotion, what do you see, touch, taste, feel …. But I am not sure I could have gotten any of that out. I’m not quick on the draw. I’m not eloquent when I am surprised or moved. I just knew that this really nice grey-haired woman had gushed at me after the show, and all she kept saying was, “You … You!” And that was Sharon Olds.

I’m still rather pleased and happy with that memory, and I am happy to share it now again. For safekeeping.

Here is a poem from The Gold Cell. It is addressed to her boyfriend at Harvard, years after his death in a car crash. When I first moved to New York, I was dealing with a pretty bad broken heart. I had left someone behind in Chicago, and it had killed me to leave him. It would be years (literally) before I sorted it all out, and accepted what happened. And the same was true for him, let’s just say that. We tormented one another for years. Moving on was incomprehensible, because I had been so sure … so sure … that he was the guy … but when it became clear that he wasn’t, I felt more baffled than anything. The hurt would come later. He didn’t die, the way Sharon Olds’ boyfriend in the poem dies, but the sensation of confused moving-on, and trying to make sense of it, really resonated with me during that crazy time.

The moment when she calls him “Ave”, his nickname, always takes my breath away.

Cambridge Elegy
(for Henry Averell Gerry, 1941-60)

I hardly know how to speak to you now,
you are so young now, closer to my daughter’s age
than mine — but I have been there and seen it, and must
tell you, as the seeing and hearing
spell the world into the deaf-mute’s hand.
The tiny dormer windows like the ears of a fox, like the
long row of teats on a pig, still
perk up over the Square, though they’re digging up the
street now, as if digging a grave,
the shovels shrieking on stone like your car
sliding along on its roof after the crash.
How I wanted everyone to die I if you had to die,
how sealed into my own world I was,
deaf and blind. What can I tell you now,
now that I know so much and you are a
freshman still, drinking a quart of orange juice and
playing three sets of tennis to cure a hangover, such an
ardent student of the grown-ups! I can tell you
we were right, our bodies were right, life was
pleasurable in every cell.
Suddenly I remember the exact look of your body, but
better than the bright corners of your eyes, or the
puppy-fat of your thighs, or the slick
chino of your pants bright in the corners of my eyes, I
remember your extraordinary act of courage in
loving me, something no one but the
blind and halt had done before. You were
fearless, you could drive after a sleepless night
just like a grown-up, and not be afraid, you could
fall asleep at the wheel easily and
never know it, each blond hair of your head — and they were
thickly laid — put out like a filament of light,
twenty years ago. The Charles still
slides by with that ease as your death was hard,
wanted all things broken and rigid as the
bricks in the sidewalk or your love for me
stopped cell by cell in your young body,
Ave — I went ahead and had the children,
the life of ease and faithfulness,
the palm and the breast, every millimeter of delight in the body.
I took the road we stood on at the start together, I
took it all without you as if
in taking it after all I could
most honor you.