Life & Wisdom Quote by Sharon Olds

Olds imagines a poem not as a polished object but as a living thing that, once set in motion, starts resisting its maker. Calling it a "creature" is a deliberate demystification: the poem is born from the body, appetite, fear, tenderness - the messy materials Olds has spent a career refusing to sanitize. The line’s sly power is that it grants the poem agency without romanticizing the poet as a magician. The creature "may assemble itself": the poet isn’t so much inventing as midwifing, watching language click into place in ways that feel half-willed, half-inevitable.

Then comes the physics metaphor, and it’s doing real cultural work. "Centrifugal force" implies outward drive, the tendency to fling away from the center. Olds is gesturing at the moment when a poem stops orbiting the author’s intention - confession, explanation, self-defense - and starts pushing outward into the reader’s world. It’s a quiet rebuke to the idea that autobiographical poetry is merely diary-on-display. Yes, the poem starts in the self, but its successful form creates distance from the self: it spins free.

Context matters: Olds emerged as a major voice in late-20th-century American poetry when "confessional" was often treated as either brave authenticity or embarrassing overshare. This line threads that needle. The poem’s independence is the ethical claim: once it has its own force, it’s not just your story anymore. It becomes a thing that can collide with strangers, provoke them, even contradict you. That risk is the point.