Life & Wisdom Quote by Sharon Olds

Olds is quietly demystifying authorship, and in doing so she reveals one of her core engines: permission. By naming the years (1983 to 1986), she pins the work to labor and time, not inspiration-as-lightning-bolt. It’s a modest factual detail that doubles as a rebuke to the romantic myth of the poet as pure conduit. The book was made, revised, lived into.

Then she slips in the more volatile admission: the beginning contained poems that “began from others’ experience.” That phrasing matters. “Began from” is a careful hedge, an ethical breadcrumb trail. She’s not claiming to ventriloquize other people whole; she’s acknowledging origin points, the sparks that weren’t hers. It’s an artist’s way of saying: I stole responsibly, or at least consciously. In the 1980s, when confessional poetry’s legacy was still being litigated and feminist writing was pushing private life into public language, Olds is positioning herself inside a debate about who gets to speak, and at what cost.

The subtext is also about craft: experience isn’t a sealed container with a single owner once it becomes material. Olds suggests a transformation pipeline - listening, absorbing, re-seeing - where the poem’s authority comes less from biographical purity than from what the poet can make audible. She’s claiming lineage with the domestic and the intimate while admitting the porousness of the self, a move that is both ethically charged and artistically strategic.