January 1, 2025: Sharon Olds, "Ideographs," "I Resolve"

Welcome to the Year of Sharon Olds on Saint Marty.

When I was a teenager, Sharon Olds made me want to be become a poet.  My first encounter with her work was when I was sixteen or seventeen--a tiny little poem titled "The Pope's Penis."  It dazzled me with its audacity and made me realize I could write about anything at all.

Around 20 years ago, I had the great fortune of being a part of a weeklong poetry workshop that Olds led in Big Sur, California.  It was amazing to climb the hill to her cabin every day and sit in a room with her while she shared her poetic advice and wisdom.  I sort of felt like Moses on Mount Sinai, getting the Ten Commandments.

So, be prepared to be challenged and surprised this year.  Because that's what Sharon Olds does.

Tonight, Olds meditates on suffering . . . 

Ideographs

by: Sharon Olds

(a photograph of China, 1905)

The small scaffolds, boards in the form of

ideographs, the size of a person,

lean against a steep wall of

dressed stone.  One is the simple

shape of a man.  The man on it

is asleep, his arms nailed to the wood.

No timber is wasted; his fingertips

curl in at the very end of the plank

as a child's hands open in sleep.

The other man is awake--he looks

directly at us.  He is fixed to a more

complex scaffold, a diagonal cross-piece

pointing one arm up, one down,

and his legs are bent, the spikes through his ankles

holding them up off the ground, 

his knees cocked, the folds of his robe flowing

sideways as if he were suspended in the air

in flight, his naked leg bared.

They are awaiting execution, tilted against the wall

as you'd prop up a tool until you needed it.

They'll be shouldered up over the crowd and

carried through the screaming.  The sleeper will wake.

The twisted one will fly above the faces, his

garment rippling.

Here there is still the backstage quiet,

the dark bottom of the wall, the props

leaning in the grainy half-dusk.

He looks at us in the silence.  He says

Save me, there is still time.

As I said above, Sharon Olds doesn't shy away from difficult, controversial, or painful topics.  Rather, she embraces them.  This poem, from her collection The Dead and the Living, is all about the nature of suffering and violence.  The two condemned men are described in physically explicit terms, and their impending executions really call into question the nature of humanity.

I know, I know.  That's pretty serious shit for the first day of a new year.  However, I think it's appropriate to examine the barbarity of state-sanctioned murder at this particular moment in history when hatred/wars are rampant while empathy/understanding are in short supply.  The final line--a plea for mercy and salvation--is heartbreaking.  

For me, and hopefully for you, too, dear disciple, Olds' words are powerful reminders of the need for forgiveness and the possibility of redemption.  People should never be defined by their worst actions.  I know I wouldn't want to be defined by my biggest mistakes.

Perhaps that's a New Year's resolution we should all make:  to erase violence and hatred with love and understanding.

Another thing I plan to do in each post this year is write a new poem.  I'm using a really wonderful book called The Daily Poet by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano to accomplish this.  In it, there are 365 poetry prompts, one for each day of the year.

Tonight's challenge was pretty simple:  write a poem containing a list of New Year's resolutions that are ridiculously hard, if not impossible.

Saint Marty wishes all of his faithful disciples love and understanding this coming year.

I Resolve

by: Martin Achatz

January 1, 2025

to stop global warming by standing with the refrigerator door open while deciding what to have for dinner

to end world hunger by always leaving food on my plate to send to the starving children of Africa, as my mother taught me

to combat institutional racism by making everyone read Charlotte's Web and imagine Charlotte is Aretha Franklin or Morgan Freeman

to save the Amazon rain forest by changing it's name to something friendlier--the Eugene or Patty or Willy rain forest

to save polar bears from extinction by creating an International Polar Bear Preserve somewhere.  How about Greenland?

to bring about world peace by sending homemade chocolate chip cookies to every leader with a note attached:  Please play nice

March 8: Gratitude Number Four, a Friend, Sharon Olds, "Photograph of the Girl," New Cartoon

Yeah, I know the title to this post is really long, but I have to include a lot of material today.  I have to talk about Charlotte's Web and do my next Lenten gratitude post.  I also have to include a poem, since it's Saturday, and, finally, there's a new Confessions of Saint Marty cartoon.  I'm going to try to do all of this quickly, because I'm tired.

So, first let me share this little passage from E. B. White's book:

...You can imagine Wilbur's surprise when, out of the darkness, came a small voice he had never heard before.  It sounded rather thin, but pleasant.  "Do you want a friend, Wilbur?" it said.  "I'll be a friend to you.  I've watched you all day and I like you."

Charlotte is, more than anything else, a good friend.  She cares deeply for Wilbur, and she spends most of her life trying to save her friend from a untimely end in Zuckerman's smokehouse.  Charlotte is self-sacrificing, generous, and loving.

We have a neighbor who has many of Charlotte's qualities.  He watches over our house, loves talking to our five-year-old son.  Even if he's busy painting his garage, he'll stop what he's doing to yell out a greeting to us.  He's a really decent man.

This morning, my wife and I were shoveling our driveway.  The snow caught me by surprise.  I didn't watch the weather forecast last night, so, when I stepped outside, the new layer of white made me swear under my breath.  I dragged out my shovel and started clearing it away.  My neighbor was in his driveway with his snowblower, doing the same thing.

The next thing I knew, he was standing by my wife, talking to her.  Then, he called out for me to move my car, and he brought his snowblower over and cleared our driveway and front yard.  He saved us a good half hour's worth of labor.

That's what I'm grateful for this evening.  A good, kind neighbor.

As for today's poem, I'm falling back on Sharon Olds, one of my favorite writers.  This poem comes from her early collection The Dead and the Living:

Photograph of the Girl

The girl sits on the hard ground,
the dry pan of Russia, in the drought
of 1911, stunned,
eyes closed, mouth open,
raw hot wind blowing
sand in her face.  Hunger and puberty are
taking her together.  She leans on a sack,
layers of clothes fluttering in the heat,
the new radius of her arm curved.
She cannot be not beautiful, but she is
starving.  Each day she grows thinner, and her bones
grow longer, porous.  The caption says
she is going to starve to death that winter
with millions of others.  Deep in her body
the ovaries let out her first eggs,
golden as drops of grain.

That's the kind of poem that makes me want to give up writing poetry because it's so beautiful, so perfect.

But it also inspires Saint Marty to be a better poet, the way Saint Marty's neighbor inspires him to be a better person.

Confessions of Saint Marty

November 24: Haunted, Good Reads, "The Dead and the Living," New Cartoon

"You will be haunted," resumed the Ghost, "by Three Spirits."

Scrooge is a haunted man.  He's haunted by his past.  He's haunted by his present.  He's haunted by his future.  He's haunted by his dead sister, Fan.  He's haunted by his lost love, Belle.  He's haunted by beggars and debtors, a whole army of the poor and destitute.  Scrooge has so many ghosts in his life that Marley and the Christmas Spirits are small potatoes, just four in a long line of specters.

The good read I'm going to tell you about today is my favorite collection of poems.  It's the book that made me decide to become a poet.  It's full of ghosts, from the poet's past, present, and future.  There are hosts of children and mothers, fathers and lovers.  There are ghosts of race riots and Marilyn Monroe.  It is one of the most haunted books I have ever read.

The book I'm talking about is Sharon Olds' The Dead and the Living, which won the 1984 National Book Critics' Circle Award for Poetry.  I first read this collection around 1990 or 1991, when I was a graduate student in college.  At the time, I was finishing my Master's in fiction writing, dreaming of being the next John Irving or Raymond Carver.  And then I took a class in Contemporary American Poetry, where I ran into this:

Photograph of the Girl

The girl sits on the hard ground,
the dry pan of Russia, in the drought
of 1921, stunned,
eyes closed, mouth open,
raw hot wind blowing
sand in her face.  Hunger and puberty are
taking her together.  She leans on a sack,
layers of clothes fluttering in the heat,
the new radius of her arm curved.
She cannot be not beautiful, but she is
starving.   Each day she grows thinner, and her bones
grow longer, porous.  The caption says
she is going to starve to death that winter
with millions of others.  Deep in her body
the ovaries let out her first eggs,
golden as drops of grain.

That is Sharon Olds.  She left me stunned, breathless.  I wanted to read more of her.  Each of her poems taught me something about myself and the kind of writer I wanted to be.  In a weird way, I wanted to be Sharon Olds, the way I wanted to be J. D. Salinger when I was a teenager.  Great writers do that to me.  The make me want to be better than I am.  I admired the raw honesty of Olds' poetry.  She didn't shy away from painful or private subjects.  She dissected them, in all their physical complexity.  The girl in the poem above is dying, and yet, within her body, is the golden promise of new life.  The juxtaposition of these two images is thrilling and heartbreaking.

About fifteen years after I first encountered Sharon Olds on the page, I had the privilege of attending a week-long writing workshop taught by her.  Every morning and afternoon, for two hours, I sat in a circle of poets and listened to Olds speak about the hard work of poetry.  She was the den mother to our group of Girl Scout poets.  It was one of the best writing experiences I have ever had.

I brought my copy of The Dead and the Living to that workshop with me.  At the end of our five days, I asked her to autograph it for me.  She didn't write anything special or earth-shattering in it.  It was a standard kind of autograph, "For Marty, with warm best wishes from Sharon, Big Sur, May 2005."  But it is proof that I met her, that she read my poetry and, for five days, knew who I was.

The Dead and the Living still haunts me.  Ghosts from my past and present haunt its pages.  I still want to be Sharon Olds.  I want her courage in choosing subject matter.  I want her gift of image and free association.  I want her ability to constantly surprise with each and every line of poetry she writes.

Saint Marty is going to let Sharon Olds have the last word tonight.

Blue Son

All day with my blue son,
sick again, the blue skin
under his eyes, blue tracing of his
veins over the bones of his chest
pronounced as the ribs of the dead, a green
vein in his groin, blue-green as the
numbers on an arm.  His eloquent face
grows thinner each hour, the germs use him
like a soap.  Exhaustion strips him, and under each
layer of sweetness a deeper layer of
sweetness is bared.  His white skin,
so fine it has no grain, goes blue-
grey, and the burning blue of his eye
dies down and goes out, it is the faded cobalt on the
side of a dead bird.  He seems to
withdraw to a great distance, as if he is
gone and looking back at me
without regret, patient, like an old
man who just dug his grave and
waits at the edge, in the evening light,
naked, blue with cold, in terrible
obedience.

Confessions of Saint Marty