Shit poem by 70 year old woman whose husband left her wins T S Eliot Prize

It is not even in iambic pentameters.

It is an insult to the men who entered the competition too.  I am sure she is very nice and charming and it was frightfully good of her to restrain herself from publishing the poems she wrote about her ex-husband who left her for another woman, but it is still SHIT poetry.

Is this yet another conclusive sign that we live in a matriarchy, this privileging of MEDIOCRITY just because this woman was supposed to have suffered?

I have a few old love poems I could inflict on my readership too, if I wanted to.  They are probably shit too, but not as shit as Sharon Olds'.  



Sharon Olds - mutton dressed as lamb.  Could you bear it if your wife went around with her hair done like that?


You can listen to her boring boring boring poem about her son at http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9785000/9785165.stm  It really is SHIT.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-21016402

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/01/14/sharon-olds-win-ts-eliot-prize_n_2473669.html?utm_hp_ref=uk

Unspeakable
from Stag's Leap, published by Jonathan Cape
Now I come to look at love
in a new way, now that I know I'm not
standing in its light. I want to ask my
almost-no-longer husband what it's like to not
love, but he does not want to talk about it,
he wants a stillness at the end of it.
And sometimes I feel as if, already,
I am not here - to stand in his thirty-year
sight, and not in love's sight,
I feel an invisibility
like a neutron in a cloud chamber buried in a mile-long
accelerator, where what cannot
be seen is inferred by what the visible
does. After the alarm goes off,
I stroke him, my hand feels like a singer
who sings along him, as if it is
his flesh that's singing, in its full range,
tenor of the higher vertebrae,
baritone, bass, contrabass.
I want to say to him, now, What
was it like, to love me - when you looked at me,
what did you see? When he loved me, I looked
out at the world as if from inside
a profound dwelling, like a burrow, or a well, I'd gaze
up, at noon, and see Orion
shining - when I thought he loved me, when I thought
we were joined not just for breath's time,
but for the long continuance,
the hard candies of femur and stone,
the fastnesses. He shows no anger,
I show no anger but in flashes of humour
all is courtesy and horror. And after
the first minute, when I say, Is this about
her, and he says, No, it's about
you, we do not speak of her.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Hi there :)
I enjoyed a nice reading over here, rolling the old posts and i think you may find interesting the conference Pilar Sordo gave on Valdivias.

It's about the problem of "equality" when we are not built to be 100% equal from our mind scructure.

It's in spanish, you may search for one in english
www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAF1oYesS5E

Hope you enjoy it :-)
Gustavo
Unknown said…
I think she's very lovely. I wouldn't have left her.

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