Podcast #94: Sharon Olds and Cynthia Nixon on Dickinson, First Drafts, and Selfhood
Sharon Olds is the winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award. The author of twelve collections of poetry, including Stag's Leap and Satan Says, Olds served as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2006 to 2012. Recently, she was joined at the Library by Cynthia Nixon, the Tony, Emmy, and Grammy-winning actress best known for her role as Miranda on Sex and the City. This week for the New York Public Library Podcast, we're pleased to present Sharon Olds and Cynthia Nixon discussing Emily Dickinson, first drafts, and selfhood.
Nixon began the event by asking whether Olds remembered the first time she read an Emily Dickinson poem.
"I think," Olds said, "I don't. But I'm sure that it was in an old-fashioned school book with commas instead of the dashes, so I wouldn't really have been reading an Emily Dickinson poem at all really yet until I saw a page with that swoosh swoosh swoosh, that rush of passion."
Nixon's introduction to the poet was somewhat different, mediated through the performances of Julie Harris:
"I think I was exposed to it very early, of course in school, but also Julie Harris played Emily Dickinson on stage and then on television in The Belle of Amherst, this one person play about Emily Dickinson which now seems a little dated when you watch it even though Julie Harris is wonderful. But we also a record at home of Julie Harris reading selected poems and letters of Emily Dickinson."
Olds explained that when she writes, she attempts precision immediately. When precision isn't possible, for example when a word can't be recalled, she omits rather than using a placeholder, which can alter the course of the poem:
"Freewriting: I don't do that. I like to get the right words, if I can, the first time, so I cross out while I'm writing, because if I put in a word to hold the place of another word, the music of the word I've just used, it does something slightly different from that which is that it calls to all the words that rhyme with it to come to the poem. It just has its own life, like things in biology just have their own species... [I put] a line underneath if I just can't think of the word when I know I need a word there. The sound of it, the musicality. Many poets are just so, so musical. I'm not the most musical, but I am somewhat so that I don't try to rhyme, but my poems have a lot of rhyme inside them, so that if later I think, 'That's not the right word at all,' I take it out and later in the poem there are all these words that say, 'You called us to you with that word!' and then the whole thing's just tragic."
In response to an audience question about the personal and public, Olds described her poetic practice as a form of self inquiry rather than a simple representation of a monolithic self:
"I think that I've written a lot to find out who I am and to try to pile up evidence that I'm not that sinner who was going to go to hell. So it's partly as if I'm a persona poet all along in a way. I do want to tell the truth, and I do want to come out of that oppressive religious, patriarchy etc... I'm trying to be accurate, but I also am hoping that it will turn out when I'm accurate that I'm an ordinary enough, good enough person."
You can subscribe to the New York Public Library Podcast to hear more conversations with wonderful artists, writers, and intellectuals. Join the conversation today!