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The amount of horror one used to hear about in one village could be quite extreme. But one might not have heard about all the other villages' horrors at the same time.

Sharon Olds

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Sharon Olds
Age: 54
Climate Activist
Feminist
Poet
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Heard
Horrors
Used
Village
Might
Extreme
Time
Extremes
Horror
Amount
Hear
Quite
Villages

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Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown.
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.. to a poet, the human community is like the community of birds to a bird, singing to each other. Love is one of the reasons we are singing to one another, love of language itself, love of sound, love of singing itself, and love of the other birds.
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There is something in me maybe someday to be written now it is folded, and folded, and folded, like a note in school.
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If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it's really not right for that poem, but I wanted it, that would be distorting.
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I did not deceive him, he did not deceive me, I did not leave him, he did not leave me, I freed him, he freed me.
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I'm not asking a poem to carry a lot of rocks in its pockets. Just being an ordinary observer and liver and feeler and letting the experience get through you onto the notebook with the pen, through the arm, out of the body, onto the page, without distortion.
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The decision for me was whether to have 'The Father' be a book that told a story - from the point of view of this speaker, the daughter - without, as in the earlier books, then having a section on something else and a section on something else.
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This creature of the poem may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force.
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Maybe in order to understand sex fully/one has to risk being destroyed by it.
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Many poets write books. They'll tell you: Well, I've got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me.
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Because a poem is not written while running or while answering the phone. It's written in whatever minutes one has. Sometimes you have half an hour.
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I think this is true for all artists. My senses are very important to me.
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Once you lose someone it is never exactly the same person who comes back.
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I did not know him, I knew my idea of him.
Sharon Olds
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Maybe we can use a metaphor for it, out of dance. I think for many years I was aware of the need, in dance and in life, to breathe deeply and to take in more air than we usually take in.
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Poems come from ordinary experiences and objects, I think. Out of memory - a dress I lent my daughter on her way back to college a newspaper photograph of war a breast self-exam the tooth fairy Calvinist parents who beat up their children a gesture of love seeing oneself naked over age 50 in a set of bright hotel bathroom mirrors.
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Take your vitamins. Exercise. Just work to love yourself as much as you can - not more than the people around you but not so much less.
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I'm not sure that the benefit - as a writer and as a citizen - that I would get from reading at least the front page of the Times every day or every other day would outweigh the depression.
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The older I get, the more I see the power of that young woman, my mother.
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I didn't have time to sit down and look at the work of a year and choose what to type.
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