When I paint my backdrops, set my pots on them, and perhaps add something in them it’s like creating a room or in poetic terms like writing a stanza. When I combine the image with a poem and a memory it’s as if I can play my whole life like a xylophone. My experiences as the child of artists or as the only girl in a family of boys strengthened my need to find my direction in clay. Sometimes I describe it as the walls in our apartment or later the loft were so filled up by the family’s art I was left to utilize the table. When I fill these pots it a reminder that I really do intend for these objects to be used. My images and the pots themselves create the boundary of function. I like to think of function as a large room with flexible walls that I push and pull to create my pots.
“Poetry allowed Olds to play her whole life like a xylophone: All those stories, sitting there in cold silence, could be struck and made to sing.”
“The word “stanza” means “room.” (Edward Hirsch: “Each stanza in a poem is like a room in a house, a lyric dwelling place.”) This means that every poem, and every book of poems, is a sort of house tour. The poet leads you, room by room, through the various chambers of his or her world. Different poets, of course, are very different hosts. T.S. Eliot cracks the front door solemnly, greets you with a formal nod and recedes into his velvety labyrinth; Wallace Stevens throws confetti in your face while shouting spelling-bee words; Emily Dickinson stares silently down from an upstairs window, blinking in Morse code.”
–Sam Anderson, from Sex, Death, Family: Sharon Olds Is Still Shockingly Intimate, New York Times, October 12, 2022