Life & Wisdom Quote by Sharon Olds

The dash after "My poems" is Sharon Olds catching herself in the act of possession, wincing at the little ego-flare in that phrase. She’s a poet whose work is famously intimate, but here intimacy is treated less like a brand than a problem to manage. "I don't even like the sound of that" isn’t coy modesty; it’s a critique of the way authorship can turn lived experience into property, a product with a neat label. The syntax performs discomfort: halting, qualifying, correcting. The voice is mid-thought because the ethics are mid-negotiation.

Then comes the pivot: "Not that anyone else wrote them". Olds refuses the false humility trap. She’s not disowning her labor; she’s suspicious of the cultural script that asks poets to stand up and sell the self. In a literary economy that often rewards confession as spectacle, she’s drawing a boundary between writing from life and turning life into content.

The sting is in the last sentence: "only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience". It’s bracing because it’s probably true, and because it runs against the marketing copy we attach to art - that the particular automatically becomes universal. Olds isn’t denying that poems can move strangers. She’s warning that the raw biography behind them is not inherently interesting; what earns attention is the transformation. The subtext is a dare: don’t confuse your diary with a poem, and don’t mistake an audience’s appetite for intimacy for actual closeness.