The Flurry by Sharon Olds (1997; Published in 2012)

Olds is a champion of “confessional poetry,” and she has won a helluva lot of awards for it, including the Pulitzer for her collection Stag’s Leap, wherein this poem is found.

Did her renown as a writer stop me from, after a few beers, emailing her and telling her that I might pee my pants if she actually responded? And also that I would make Tiff bake cookies or a loaf of bread for her if she wanted?

Reader, it did not. I did, in fact, send that email. But as my friend pointed out the next morning, after I frantically texted her about what I’d done and also that I’d realized that the email I sent had TWO typos, “Well, nobody knows what amuses a Pulitzer winner except a Pulitzer winner.”

Anyway, Sharon Olds and I have a deep and abiding friendship that she will, I’m sure, recognize at some point.

Stag’s Leap is a collection of poetry surrounding her divorce and its aftermath. I was already a fan of Olds’s work, but once finding myself also going through a divorce, I sought out this collection specifically.

I eventually found it at Prairie Lights in Iowa City, a city more magical than its name would suggest. Once back in Oregon, I spent my evenings in Stag’s Leap‘s pages, and…let’s just say, I agree with the Pulitzer panel. What an incredible work of art.

The Flurry is not the poem I wanted to include in my blog series, but I couldn’t find the right one, Last Look, published online. Out of respect for my (best?) friend Sharon and copyright laws, I instead decided to post one that is already publicly available.

I have some tips for reading it. Pay attention to the details. Look at the conversation and the similes. See where sentences end and begin, where line breaks happen. (This is harder to do while reading on a phone, so, if possible, come back to it on a computer or switch over to your desktop view.) Why did she pick a comma instead of a period? What movements did she include and why? They are all a part of the story.

Finally, a thought to consider: One of the more interesting conversations I’ve had in a counseling session revolved around my slowness to, or complete lack of arriving at, anger. We (people, but especially women) are taught to avoid it. But anger serves a purpose. Rather than avoiding it, we ought to be learning how to handle it. Sometimes, owning and handling our rage can become an unexpected source of strength and hope.

Short Stuff:

• When Laura Bush invited Olds to read at the National Book Fesitval in D.C., Olds responded thusly: “So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it”.
• She writes an awful lot in her famous confessional style about s-e-x, so if that interests you, I’d definitely check out some of her other poems.

Topics

divorce; love; anger

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The Flurry

When we talk about when to tell the kids,
we are so together, so concentrated.
I mutter, “I feel like a killer.” “I’m
the killer”—taking my wrist—he says,
holding it. He is sitting on the couch,
the old indigo chintz around him,
rich as a night sea with jellies,
I am sitting on the floor. I look up at him,
as if within some chamber of matedness,
some dust I carry around me. Tonight,
to breathe its Magellanic field is less
painful, maybe because he is drinking
a wine grown where I was born—fog,
eucalyptus, sempervirens—and I’m
sharing the glass with him. “Don’t catch
my cold,” he says, “—oh that’s right, you want
to catch my cold.” I should not have told him that,
I tell him I will try to fall out of
love with him, but I feel I will love him
all my life. He says he loves me
as the mother of our children, and new troupes
of tears mount to the acrobat platforms
of my ducts and do their burning leaps.
Some of them jump straight sideways, and, for a
moment, I imagine a flurry
of tears like a whirra of knives thrown
at a figure, to outline it—a heart’s spurt
of rage. It glitters, in my vision, I nod
to it, it is my hope.

—Sharon Olds