Sharon Olds: Poetry coming down my arm

The American poet Sharon Olds has been one of the leading voices in contemporary poetry since her first book was published in 1980. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013 for "Stag’s Leap", her extraordinary collection of poems chronicling the breakup of her marriage, with its themes of love, family, sorrow, desire and memory, which have echoed throughout her work. But her career as a poet nearly didn’t happen. Her first poems were dismissed by some editors who saw them as not literary enough, perhaps objecting to the intense way she wrote about sexual love and the minutiae of being a woman. But it’s precisely those qualities that have won her new generations of fans and critical praise across the world. Now after a period of long isolation due to the pandemic, Sharon talks to Emma Kingsley about her work and how lockdown has affected her perception of the world. She describes how she creates new poems and how the words and images literally come down her arm and out through the pen.