The Gold Cell by Sharon Olds

First published: 1987

Type of poem: Book of poems

The Poems

Sharon Olds is among the most highly regarded contemporary American poets. Her work has been described as “haunting” and “striking,” and the novelist Michael Ondaatje has said that it is “pure fire in the hands.” Like the poet’s earlier books Satan Says (1980) and The Dead and the Living (1984), Olds’s third collection, The Gold Cell, makes aspects of everyday life—news items, childhood, family, and sexuality—its subject matter. Olds tells her audiences at poetry readings that she did not publish her poetry until late in life (she was thirty-seven years old when her first book was published) because she did not know whether she wanted to make her work public. She also says that when she decided to publish, she considered using a pseudonym. This hesitation to publish may have had something to do with Olds’s tendency to blur the lines between the public and the private, for it is never quite clear where she draws the line between what she calls “the paper world and the flesh world.”

As a result, many of Olds’s readers view her books as “poetic memoirs,” comparing her to confessional poets such as Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Historically, American poets have argued that to assume too much of a connection between a poem’s speaker and its writer is to commit a “biographical fallacy,” though some contemporary American poets, perhaps influenced by a growing tendency in the United States to view public exposure of the private self as emotionally healthy and socially productive, admit to writing highly autobiographical pieces (Linda McCarriston, for example). Olds has been unwilling to publicly discuss the connections between her private life and her poetry, though, so readers must encounter Olds’s poems on more universal grounds, taking them as one poet’s attempt to see the world clearly and to represent it accurately. In an interview with Patricia Kirkpatrick, Olds says, “We need to know how bad we are, and how good we are, what we are really like, how destructive we are, and that all this often shows up in families.” When Olds writes about the difficult aspects of human nature, then, she invites her readers to confront those realities with her, to know that these are the circumstances not only of individual lives but also of life in general.

Olds has been described as a poet of the landscape of time, and The Gold Cell traverses that landscape. The book has four parts: The first part is concerned with the relationship of the poet to the world in which she lives, the second focuses on childhood, the third deals with life beyond childhood, and the fourth is about the relationships between parents and children. Among the most frequently discussed poems in the first section are “On the Subway” and “The Girl.” In their own ways, these two poems are at once disturbing and redemptive. In “On the Subway,” the speaker encounters a black man on the subway and is forced to acknowledge her own racist assumptions. She says, “white skin makes my life, this/ life he could break so easily, the way I/ think his back is being broken.” “The Girl” is about a twelve-year-old girl who is raped and left for dead, then must go on with her life: “she does a cartwheel, the splits, she shakes the/ shredded pom-poms in her fists,” knowing “what all of us want never to know.”

“I Go Back to May 1937,” in part 2 of The Gold Cell, is about the speaker’s desire to communicate with her parents before their marriage to warn them, “you are going to do things/ you cannot imagine you would ever do,/ you are going to do bad things to children,/ you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,/ you are going to want to die.” Initially, the speaker, who has the 20/20 vision of hindsight, wishes she could collapse time in order to influence her life and the lives of her parents; she wants to save herself and her parents by warning them that they are going to make terrible mistakes. In the end, however, the poem declares, “Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.” In the course of the poem, the speaker—clearly a writer—decides to speak about her life, to answer it in her own words rather than wish it away. This poem’s primary goal is to tell about the world as the poet sees it. Olds says that the poet has only what she knows and that the poet’s unique experiences are central to her work. The question both the reader and the poet must ask is, “What can this poem tell?”

The title of the book is directly connected to the overriding themes in The Gold Cell. The book’s cover art, which illustrates the title, is an adaptation of figure 14 from The Collected Works of C. G. Jung (1959). The figure is a gold ball surrounded by a snake, and Jung identifies it as an “Indian picture of Shiva-bindu, the unexpected point.” Jung explains, “The god rests in the point. Hence, the snake signifies extension, the mother of Becoming, the creation of the world of forms.” The Hindu god Shiva is the primordial state and the snake encircles that state, indicating both the containment and the continuity of creation and life. Therefore, all life forms connect, and life itself connects with the concept of god and with its own beginnings or source. This reference to creation, and particularly to the feminine aspects of creation, plays itself out in virtually every poem in the book; each of the poems works to examine and elucidate both life’s cyclical nature (the connection of every moment to the previous and to the next) and the connections among lives.

Forms and Devices

In The Gold Cell, as in most of Olds’s work, the metaphor represents the poet’s vision and thinking. In interviews, Olds expresses concern with seeing accurately; her poems reveal her commitment to this goal, for their vision is unflinching. Part of what Olds wants readers to see has to do with the connections between endings and beginnings. “Summer Solstice, New York City” has as its narrative core the story of a man threatening to commit suicide by jumping off a building and his interactions with the people who convince him not to jump. However, the poem’s metaphors reveal one of its philosophical points: that life’s beginning and its end are inextricably tied. That tie becomes apparent when the title, in which the summer solstice represents birth and renewal, comes together with the poem’s first image: a suicidal man walking across the roof of a building, then standing with “one leg over the complex green tin cornice.” Within the poem, Olds describes the bulletproof vest one “cop” puts on as a “black shell around his own life,/ life of his children’s father,” an image that illustrates that the police officer, in the middle of his life, is aware of the impact his death would have on the lives of his children who have just begun their lives. Olds describes the net meant to catch the man if he does jump as a sheet “prepared to receive at a birth” and the burning ends of the cigarettes that the man and the police officers smoke as “tiny campfires we lit at night/ back at the beginning of the world.” Though the man finally chooses life, the poem is about the possibility of his death. When Olds ends by connecting the image of the men smoking and the image of campfires at the beginning of the world, she implies that there is a connection between the beginning of all time and the beginning created when the man chooses not to jump. One life, the poem seems to imply, can represent all life.

In “Alcatraz,” the prison, famous for its remote location and for its reputation as inescapable, becomes a metaphor for a child’s shame and for the intense power parents have over their children’s sense of self. The connections between humans and other animals and between the manufactured and natural worlds are established as the metaphor deepens; the prison becomes “white as a white/ shark in the shark-rich Bay,” and its bars are like the shark’s “milk-white ribs.” The child sees herself as a shameful creature who will be swallowed whole by the prison shark. She believes she will be trapped there forever with “men” like her “who had/ spilled their milk one time too many,/ not been able to curb their thoughts.” “Alcatraz” draws a connection not only between the child’s life and that of other animals but also between the female child and the adult men who inhabit the prison when the speaker proclaims, “When I was a girl, I knew I was a man/ because they might send me to Alcatraz/ and only men went to Alcatraz.”

If the metaphor reveals to readers the way Olds sees and thinks, then the poetic line helps readers hear how she speaks. Like most American poets writing in free verse during the latter half of the twentieth century, Olds has expressed great concern for the poetic line. Olds is known for her run-on sentences broken into lines and for lines that end in articles and conjunctions. In the Kirkpatrick interview, she publicly analyzes her use of the poetic line in The Gold Cell: “As for ending lines on of the, I think I did that too much in The Gold Cell, so much that the poems as written lack the musical form I hear in them.” In spite of the poet’s criticism of her own work, the lines as she writes them serve an important function. In “Looking at My Father,” for instance, the second sentence spans sixteen-and-a-half lines. There are, in those sixteen lines, fifteen commas, two semicolons, and one colon. The combination of a run-on construction and lines that end in articles and conjunctions lends a breathlessness to the poem that expresses the difficult moment when a child both recognizes the failings of her father and acknowledges her connection to and affection for him.

Bibliography

Franks, Elizabeth. “The Poet Stripped Bare.” Mirabella 4 (December, 1992): 62-65. A profile and appreciation combined with an interview. Emphasizes the sensual nature of Olds’s poetry and her life as a mother, scholar, and artist.

Matson, Suzanne. “Talking to Our Father: The Political and Mythical Appropriations of Adrienne Rich and Sharon Olds.” American Poetry Review 18, no. 6 (November/December, 1989): 35-41. Matson lucidly explicates Olds’s poems about her father in The Gold Cell and places them in the context of feminist considerations of patriarchal power and its effects on women.

Olds, Sharon. Interview by Laurel Blossom. Poets & Writers Magazine 21, no. 5 (September/October, 1993): 30-37. A candid, revealing, and often pointed discussion of Olds’s influences, attitudes, poetics, and ambitions.

Wright, Carol. Review of The Dead and the Living. Iowa Review 15, no. 1 (Winter, 1985): 151-161. A consideration of Olds’s writing prior to the composition of The Gold Cell, showing how some of the poet’s essential concerns were presented in her earlier books.