Poets & Writers Theater

“We are the quiet street hours before doors open. / We are the first words, and the parting ones.” John Keene reads “Pulse” and other poems from his National Book Award–winning collection Punks: New & Selected Poems (The Song Cave, 2021), for this 92NY reading with Sharon Olds, author most recently of Balladz (Knopf, 2022). Keene and Olds are introduced by poets Dante Micheaux and Omotara James.

“Last to the podium was Muriel Rukeyser, / who once wrote her own Smartian vow: ‘Never / to despise in myself what I have been / taught to despise, and never to despise the other.’” The late Galway Kinnell reads from his poem “Jubilate” and discusses the work and impact of poet Muriel Rukeyser with Sharon Olds in this Paris Press video celebrating Rukeyser’s book of essays, The Life of Poetry.

In this video, poet Sarah Browning introduces an encore presentation of a 2016 reading and conversation with Sharon Olds at the Folger Shakespeare Library, part of the O. B. Harrison Poetry Series titled “Begin Again.”

In this TEDx Talk, Sharon Olds speaks about the moments “in between” that have inspired her life and poetry, and reads from her collection Stag's Leap (Knopf, 2012), as well as her poem “Ode to the Hymen.” Olds's latest collection, Odes (Knopf, 2016), is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Then they all came a little closer / where he squatted next to his death, his shirt / glowing its milky glow...” In this vintage video from the Poetry Breaks series, presented in partnership with the Academy of American Poets, Sharon Olds reads her poem “Summer Solstice, New York City” at a Martha’s Vineyard retreat.

“…all our cities twin cities, / all our states united…” In this vintage video from the Poetry Breaks series created by Leita Luchetti and presented in partnership with the Academy of American Poets, Sharon Olds reads her poem “Topography.”

"No one ever signs up to have a mom who is an autobiographical family poet," the poet says as she explains why she waited fifteen years to publish the poems, about the end of her marriage, in Stag's Leap (Knopf), winner of the 2012 T. S. Eliot Prize.

The poet, whose newest poetry collection, Stag's Leap, was published by Knopf in September, recently read "The Worst Thing" on the PBS NewsHour.