Sharon Olds’s huge archive of thinking and feeling

“Clouds of meaning were rolling this way and that.”

Greetings! I was planning to write an elaborate, extensively researched issue for you all today, but the Thanksgiving holiday intervened and I’m also just kind of a wreck lately, so instead here are two paragraphs from Sam Anderson’s lovely 2022 profile of the poet Sharon Olds, which I very belatedly read over the weekend, that struck me as just wonderful and something we might all try to steal in one way or another:

Olds still writes by hand, in cheap spiral-bound notebooks. When she’s really humming, she can fill a whole notebook in just a few days. Only a small fraction of this private writing will ever be published. Publication, for Olds, is not entirely the point. The act of writing itself, she insists, is fun—a physical discipline that sits somewhere between drawing and dancing. Olds writes searchingly, as a way to think and feel herself through the world. In her apartment, she told me that she had written, just that morning, a poem partly inspired by her feelings about our upcoming conversation. “Clouds of meaning were rolling this way and that,” she said.

When Olds finishes a notebook, she gets very organized. (“I’m kind of a fussbudget,” she says.) She records its start and end dates. She creates an index. She reads the material over and over, dog-earing pages. In this way, she builds up a huge archive of thinking and feeling; although her finished books tend to be slim, they carry inside them, hidden like dark matter, the gravity of all the unpublished writing that helped make them possible.

There is so much to admire in this brief glimpse of Olds’s process. To build up “a huge archive of thinking and feeling” seems a necessary project for any artist, even without publication as the eventual goal. But also to be a fussbudget about it! To make notes in one state of mind (searching) and revisit them in an entirely different state (fussy). So much of writing seems to be indulging different sides of your personality around a topic or a theme, watching them collaborate—or letting them jockey for prominence, seeing who comes out on top.

And also to have fun with the writing! To think of it as somewhere between drawing and dancing. I tend to experience it as somewhere between slipping and falling. But I had fun writing this, and I’m enjoying indulging the side of my personality that wants to write a very brief newsletter for a change. See you in two weeks.

Sharon Olds photographed by Ruven Afanador for the New York Times Magazine

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If the above makes you want to read a Sharon Olds’s poem, may I recommend “Bonnard Aria”?

If it makes you want to read another writer profile by Sam Anderson, his 2017 dive into the mind of John McPhee is not to be missed.

And if you enjoy reading about brilliant minds’ note-taking practices, I highly recommend Jillian Hess’s newsletter,

Noted

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MORE POETS’ PROCESSES

From the archive:

Louise Glück on writer's block

Alice Notley on getting things to come easily

Bernadette Mayer will give you ideas

Mary Ruefle does not own a computer

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