On Sharon Olds

Reading Sharon Olds The Wellspring. Her descriptive ability is awe-inspiring. Particularly about her children, and about sex. Showed a poem to K, who said that she was scientifically trained, used to writing scientific reports, and therefore could not understand these poems.

I was thunderstruck: I could have been listening to myself - except that I do find Sharon O very accessible.

Then it emerged that she had thought the writer was a man, there was an I in the poem, and so it did not make sense to her.

The Robert Hass book is a book edited by him, a collection. So am still not able to read him. Am getting over the Hass = hate bit. It probably was Hase, once. Or Haas. A hare. I think of emigrants coming in through American immigration in the 1920s, on an island near NY - people's names mis-spelled by the bureaucrats...

Speculation.