Sex Without Love by Sharon Olds

Sam Cimino

Mr. Hamilton

AP Literature 6^th hour

13 November 2014

Sex Without Love by Sharon Olds

Biography on Sharon Olds: Sharon Olds is one of contemporary poetry’s leading voices. Winner of several prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, Olds is known for writing intensely personal, emotionally scathing poetry which graphically depicts family life as well as global political events. “Sharon Olds is enormously self-aware,” wrote David Leavitt in the Voice Literary Supplement. “Her poetry is remarkable for its candor, its eroticism, and its power to move.” Olds’s candor has led to both high praise and condemnation. Her work is often built out of intimate details concerning her children, her fraught relationship with her parents and, most controversially, her sex life. Critic Helen Vendler publically disparaged Olds’s work as self-indulgent, sensationalist and even pornographic. However, Olds has just as many supporters who praise her poetry for its sensitive portrayal of emotional states, as well as its bold depiction of “unpoetic” life events. Discussing Olds in Poetry, Lisel Mueller noted: “By far the greater number of her poems are believable and touching, and their intensity does not interfere with craftsmanship. Listening to Olds, we hear a proud, urgent, human voice.” And the poet Billy Collins has called her “a poet of sex and the psyche,” adding that “Sharon Olds is infamous for her subject matter alone…but her closer readers know her as a poet of constant linguistic surprise.”

Language- Diction and Description: Fiction and Drama depend on language just as poetry does, but in a poem almost everything comes down to the particular meanings and implications, as well as sound and shape of individual words. When we read stories and plays, we generally focus our attention on character and plot and although words determine how we imagine those characters and how we respond to what happens to them, we are not as likely to pause over any one word as we may need to when reading a poem. Because poems are often short, much depends on every word in them. Sometimes, as though they were distilled prose, poems contain only the essential words. They say just barely enough to communicate in the most basic way, using elemental signs- each of which is chosen for exactly the right shade of meaning or feeling or both. But elemental does not necessarily mean simple, and these signs may be very rich in their meanings and complex in their effects. The poet’s word choice- the diction of a poem- determines not only meaning but just about every effect the poem produces. In Sharon Olds’s poem “Sex Without Love,” we can see how this is true:

How do they do it, the ones who make love

without love? Beautiful as dancers,

gliding over each other like ice-skaters

over the ice, fingers hooked

inside each other's bodies, faces

red as steak, wine, wet as the

children at birth whose mothers are going to

give them away. How do they come to the

come to the come to the God come to the

still waters, and not love

the one who came there with them, light

rising slowly as steam off their joined

skin? These are the true religious,

the purists, the pros, the ones who will not

accept a false Messiah, love the

priest instead of the God. They do not

mistake the lover for their own pleasure,

they are like great runners: they know they are alone

with the road surface, the cold, the wind,

the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-

vascular health--just factors, like the partner

in the bed, and not the truth, which is the

single body alone in the universe

against its own best time.

Analysis: This poem spoke to me because a lot of times in society today people are out of touch. The people described in this poem are out of touch with their family, their lovers, and themselves. Unlike other poems whose lines consist of complex imagery, symbolism, and other forms of fugitive speech in order to paint a picture for the reader to interpret, Olds does the opposite and presents a clear and detailed view with the use of irony, enabling a single point to come across. The elements that are compared with the idea of sex without love are usually seen as beautiful circumstances, but due to word choice and structure these elements quickly turn into a disturbing scene within the walls of the poem. The ironic forms of the images provide an understated disapproving tone to the lines. As the poem beings, Olds uses a series of objects that seem perfectly normal to the eye, such as the ice skaters, new born babies, and runners, unfortunately these images mean more than a glamour shot. Olds begins to answer her own question with a well-constructed metaphor; "Beautiful as dancers, gliding over each other like ice skaters, over ice," the use of the ice skater feels simplistic and also carries the feeling that the act is approved of. However, looking deeper, ice skaters are just performers performing an act that must be faked in order to signal happiness and beauty. The dance is also performed on the ice implying that the act of sex without love is cold and impersonal. I wish that things were different and the world would be filled with genuine love again, but until the cold frost that binds true love is lifted there can be no summer love, and there shall be sex without love.