Grand Rapids Poetry — Sharon Olds & Sonia Sanchez [!]
Personal Letter No. 3
(Sonia Sanchez)
nothing will keep
us young you know
not young men or
women who spin
their youth on
cool playing sounds.
we are what we
are what we never
think we are.
no more wild geo
graphies of the
flesh. echoes. that
we move in tune
to slower smells.
it is a hard thing
to admit that
sometimes after midnight
i am tired
of it all.
In case you haven't heard, the poets Sharon Olds and Sonia Sanchez will be this year's Fall Arts Celebration-Poetry Night tomorrow at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids.
When: October 11, 2006 7:00 p.m.
Where: L.V. Eberhard Center, Second Floor Robert C. Pew Grand Rapids Campus Followed by reception and book signing
Cost: Event is free and open to public.
GVSU's flyer reads as follows:
Sharon Olds, the award-winning author of eight volumes of poetry - most recently Strike Sparks, is a professor and permanent faculty member in New York University's Graduate Creative Writing Program. Sonia Sanchez is the author of more than a dozen book of poetry, including "Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems" and "Does Your House Have Lions?," which was nominated for both the NAACP image and national Book Critics Circle Awards.
What I like about their poetry is not just their personal themes and/or subject matter they focus in on, but how the various issues each poet burns with are represented and explored. It is poetry that echoes Allen Ginsberg's line from his book "Howl:" [To] stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head …
I find that fascinating.
Virginal Orgy
(Sharon Olds)
In our Sophomore year, Solomon Wheat,
a Senior, Captain of the high school team,
carried us to the Tournament of Champions,
and we won. I left the game with my friend
the hourglass beauty, and her friend the President
of the Sophomore class. He put an arm
around each of us, as if there were two of him,
one for her one for me, and I felt,
through him, linked to her long, tilted
eyes and Scythian-bow lips
and cinched waist and the large globes of her
breasts. It was almost as if I could look
into a mirror held by Mike
and see myself as Liz, the way we had
seen ourselves as Solomon Wheat.
I felt that Mike was hugging me
partly so he could hug Liz,
as if I were a moderate price
he was paying for embracing her glory. But mostly
I felt his warm, male, popular
arm around me, it was April, we were walking near
a low, flowering tree, and he steered us
into, and under, and up inside it,
and he kissed Liz, I looked into the maze
of the living stems of the wild nosegays,
and then he turned, and kissed me,
and his lips were so much bigger and more tender
than my mother's, each of his lips was larger
than her whole mouth, and the skin of his lips was like
a newborn's skin, and the flesh of his mouth,
underneath, was so liquid that each lip
seemed, to be splashing like a bucket inside.
The back of my head got faint, early
Communion on an empty stomach, and that central
core, down inside me, did
the thing like a heavy gulp, with the rings
of hotness circling out. And then
he was kissing Liz, I was standing within
the standing bouquet, the orb of the tree not
estranged to me, the tightness and loose
burstness of its crowded petals
not unknown to me, and then
he kissed me again, and this time
I had forgotten my mother — this was my first
return, to him, my mouth already
wise in its hunger, feeling as if nothing
it would wish would be forbidden to it.
When he kissed Liz, I stood aside
enchanted in cherry-trance, waiting for what
was promised and would return, as if
by vow of the corporeal, the little central
throat gulping in emotion as if swallowing
tears. I would gaze, in the bower, and see
the twigs and branches of our canopy —
its angles, isosceles and right, and the dropping
down of a tryst hypotenuse —
in the cone of the tree I understood
Geometry, the Trinity,
Triune Love, and the fierce tingle
of the triangle I had whirl-struck
as a child. And now I knew the kiss,
and from it the hour when the other woman
would go her way, and his other arm
would come around, like the other half
of the sky, and all the angles would close, and the
wings of the sphere open, slowly burst open.