In an already intimate art, she is still willing to go the furthest, the deepest, and unflinchingly claims what is so often used to shame women and celebrates it. It is that first word-brave-which is most often leaned on when speaking of Olds’ work. “The poems are generous,” Jeffrey Eugenides has written about them, “brave, witty, and beautiful.”

I once stood in a room of Pulitzer-, Booker- and Nobel Prize-winning writers-“Is that Sharon Olds?” was the question I kept hearing the novelists under 50 asking of the woman with long grey hippy hair tied up in pigtails. (“Do what you are going to do, / and I will tell about it” is a popular line). They were and still are taped to the inside of dorm rooms, copied down into notebooks, covered in songs, even tattooed onto readers’ bodies. Thousands of copies, her poems were viral before there was an internet. ‘We are a literary magazine.’ Very snooty, very put-me-down… women, you know… poems about children?”Ī season later, even if bragging about grabbing women by the genitals did not derail a presidential campaign, Olds’ poems about children and desire, about so-called women’s issues-family, and how the complications of loving what can nearly break you-continue to make her one of Americas’s most beloved poets. “They used to say, ‘Why don’t you try the Ladies Home Journal?’ she continues, her face now crinkling into a frown. Wearing sweats and a hand-me-down t-shirt, her face sculpted by curiosity, Olds is illuminated, patient and quick to praise: a benevolent siren on an island as a storm approaches in the distance. For two hours, however, the future president’s name doesn’t pass either of our lips. This memory of hers stirs up bewilderment like a warning.

We’re speaking on a warm afternoon last summer, before the news blossomed into an ongoing outrage. “They came back often with very angry notes,” the 74-year-old poet says, sitting in her small, light-filled apartment overlooking NYU’s campus in Greenwich Village. Sharon Olds can still remember how furious editors became when she started submitting her poems, 40 years ago.

Only the brave bodies