Birdhouse (a collection of poetry), and The Daughter: the roles of the father, the speaker and the reader in the work of Sharon Olds Anna Woodford This thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Newcastle University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2008 NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY ---------------------------- 207 32611 6 ---------------------------- Contents Abstract Acknowledgment Birdhouse, a collection of poetry 1-41 Dissertation: The Daughter: the roles of the father, the speaker and the reader in the work of Sharon Olds Abbreviations 43 I ntrod uction 44-50 Chapter One: Introducing Sharon Olds 51-79 Chapter Two: The Living Father 80-103 Chapter Three: The Dying Father 104-127 Chapter Four: The Posthumous Father 128-140 Chapter Five: The End Of The Father 141-143 Linking Piece: 'Sharon Says': Sharon Olds's influence on my poetry 144-148 Select Bibliography 149-153 Abstract The thesis comprises a collection of poems, a dissertation and a linking piece. Birdhouse is a portfolio of poems concerned with themes of sex, the body and private and public loss. It also experiments with the first person voice of its own speaker. Birdhouse includes familial elegies, amatory poems and commissioned work. The dissertation represents the first study of length of the father in the American poet Sharon Olds's work. Olds's oeuvre from 1980 to 2004 is examined through close-reading of the poems. It is argued that a reflective reading reveals the intentional subjectivity of the speaker, but should not discount the na'ive reading the poems prompt which is part of their aesthetic experience. The centrality of the father is challenged, and it is argued that it is the daughter-speaker of the poems who is their hidden subject. The speaker asserts her happiness but uses ambiguity and suggestion to invite a reader to condemn the father. The father is an archetype, as are Olds's other familial characters, and a literary descendant of fathers in the poetry of confessional predecessors, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. The lack of specificity surrounding the father's crimes is used to demonstrate his archetypal depiction, and the speaker's focus on her survival narrative. The dissertation contends that the latent subject of Olds's book of elegies The Father is the speaker's prolonging of her father's suffering in poems which enact a literary killing, The dissertation concludes that the poems present a version of a family history spoken by a daughter who survives her archetypal presentation and valorises the role of poetic speaker. It is argued the relationship between the speaker and the reader is more significant than the filial relationship depicted throughout. The linking piece explores Olds's influence on my poetry, which prompted the research. Acknowledgment I am grateful to my supervisor Professor WN Herbert for his insight and expertise which was invaluable in shaping the creative and research element of the thesis. 1 Birdhouse (a collection of poetry) Contents 4. Birdhouse 5. Epithalamium 6. Trying 7. Two Up Two Down 8. Desk 9. Take Two 10. Singing in the Bath 11. The Goldilocks Variable 12. The Dead Are Always Looking Down On Us They Say 13. Recovery 14. Guernica 15. Six Weeks 16. Relic 17. Party Piece 18. In Passing 19. Going Underground 20. Darling 21. Gran's Diary 22. Gran's Parting Shot 23. Gran's Death 24. Grandfather Once Removed 25. Bookcase 26. Violins 27. Portrait Of The Magenheims 28. Gran's Pantry 29. Naturalization 30. Memento Mori 31. After You 32. Trailer 33. My Legs 34. Grounded 35. Sex Education 36. La Donna 37. Burden 38. Arbour 39. Bait Shed 40. Summer Cold 41. The Tree ...., Acknowledgements Acknowledgments are due to the following: 14, North, Magma, Magnetic North, Mslexia, New Writers' Magazine, The Poem website, Poetry Ireland Review, The Reader, The Reater, Rialto, the SHOp, Times Literary Supplement and Tower Poetry. Some of these poems first appeared in the anthologies The Body and the Book: Writings on Poetry and Sexuality (Editions Rodopi B.V., 2008), Ten Years of the Northern Writers' Awards (New Writing North 2008), Gategate (ed. Linda France, The Northern Writers' Centre 2007) and on the CD Words From The Garden (cawrecords 2007). A selection of these poems also appeared in the pamphlet Trailer (Five Leaves, 2007). 'Trailer' was the Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice in Spring 2008. The author received an Eric Gregory Award and an Arvon Jerwood Apprenticeship in 2003. The author received a Hawthornden Fellowship and residencies at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Ireland and Blue Mountain Center, USA in 2002/3. Birdhouse You fiddle with the catch between my legs until my mouth springs open and I am crowing like an everyday bird that has entered the heights of an aviary. I am scaling the bars, wide- spreading my common or garden fan while your beady eye hangs over my body. My voice goes flying in our feathered bed from your forefinger and thumb, my next cry rests on the tip of your tongue. ) Epithalamium I will stand at the foot of the umpteen steps to the church among the mucky doves, I wi!! bring your letters, shredded into confetti, when the bells spill over with your joy, with your joy, I will wrap my arms around myself and dance: no one will mind me when your bride comes down the steps. The sky will fall in after her like a train. 6 Trying You are trying to be a father, rubbing my breast's beauty spot, I arch my back for a girl, baby-cries escape my mouth. We are months, maybe years ahead of the midwife who will pull the child out of her sack like a rabbit. All night you sleep foetal in my arms, your body just within reach, just out of reach. I am beginning to dream daily now, of a room full of globes lit up and spinning and a cot that can hardly contain its e'normity. One morning I will slip out of bed, into that room. Everything in the old world will have inched over slightly. Our child will be breathing. 7 Two Up Two Down In a terrace house in Murton, a bust of Beethoven is arranged in a living room window. Behind drawn curtains, Annie is letting down a mini-skirt, Jack is looking through the Echo: there are holes in Christine Keeler's story. Upstairs, Pat kicks out at Moira as Annie uncovers a fresh row of daisies. Moira rolls over murmuring of her new skirt from Binns. It is nineteen-sixty-three. In Murton it is earlier. Annie checks the hem of her bairn's modesty. I will be born over her dead body. 8 Desk Dad raised his hand. The gavel fell. The following week the delivery man left no stair uncursed as he dragged the desk like a cross to my room. It was stuck by the dressing table, catching my hip when I danced in the mirror. It wasn't a dog or a TV, it was a leg-up with the La Sagesse entrance exam, a short step from there to university. It was laden with trifles and pellucid jellies when I started to write. I saw myself crowned with leaves in the reflected glory of the bay that overlooked all the fences. There was a room - a whole wing - of my parents' house that they hadn't discovered. I entered through the desk like a wardrobe, Mum sneaked in after me, cleaning up poems like snow from my floor. 9 Take Two "Let - me - row" he hissed. Our loveboat was circling towards a waterfall, an iceberg, a plug but I couldn't lie like a lady in a Merchant Ivory film with my fingers wrinkling into queer fish in the water so we fought for command of the leaky Bonny Lassie while people steered clear with their well-balanced families. Now we are not in the same boat: there is room for a dog, kids even and a different man has fallen into my lap. I hold him like a sack of potatoes or a pinch of tobacco fit for a queen as we drift in our ferry. Ahead of us the sun shines like the gong the muscleman bangs at the beginning of the big picture. 10 Singing in the Bath I am wearing the bath water. My bare breasts are perfectly suited to my bare body. A flash of coarse hair is fitting between my thighs. Only my nails are polished on my nude figure which is drifting indecently into the morning. It is running late. I need to stop gazing into my navel. I need to start covering my back. On the other hand, which squeezes out a little soft soap, I am up to my neck in hot water already. How can I keep from singing? 1 1 The Goldilocks Variable Some fairytales say she jumped out of the window and ran home to her mother , never to stray ever after. Some say she came round to the idea that her prince wouldn't come and settled for shared living with the bears. An Internet site describes her turning into a glamour model called Goldie who likes a good hiding or, maybe, she's not out of the woods yet and her hair went white, slim-picking through the neighbourhood bins. In Prague, an astronomer saw a light in the sky and christened it for her - and his mystery blonde girlfriend - , The,Goldilocks Variable. It is an elusive star. It isn't always shining. Sometimes it appears to have vanished from the night's curtain-call.