Take the I Out (Sharon Olds)

I love the idea of this poem by Sharon Olds. Can't you just picture the teacher or writing professor who told her 'just take the I out - it'll make your writing stronger'.

I remember that they said you weren't supposed to put I into any of the essays you wrote for school. As if, what you wrote in that English paper wasn't opinion, but clear-as-day fact. I never had a creative writing teacher say that, but I get the impression that is what spurned her to write this poem.

I like how she using that pronoun to talk about her father and her mother and even the look of the letter itself. I love that the personal pronoun I yields talk about her family and her history and our history (as Americans, as women, as people into writing) because isn't that the way it is? I is not a solitary being, but is wrapped up in all that came before and is around the I. I sees and survives. How could you get rid it?

Favorite line: "But I love the I, steel I-beam / that my father sold"

But I love the I, steel I-beam that my father sold

The Space Heater (Sharon Olds)

I was at a bar with the leader of my workshop when he asked what modern writers I liked. I mentioned this poem and this writer. He groaned at the mention of her name saying that she was emblematic of the problems with modern poetry. I can't speak to that, but the poem is kind of great.

At first, I wished the lines were more even and I wished for my own ease of reading that there was more than the single long stanza. But I find that the raggedness reflects N's (N as in the Narrator) state of mind. And I think the length of the poem just goes to show how N's revelation came all at once. It wasn't preplanned. Therefore, it could not have been in stanzas with even line lengths. This way it looks more organic, like she wrote it all down in a rush into her journal.

I'm a little confused by the last bit, what exactly the revelation is if I were to write it in prose, but I like the feel of it. I sense a heat from it which is kind of great since it all started with wanting to turn off the room's heater, but then she goes and supplants it with her own heated words and connections. I didn't feel the heat or hear the "group of sick noises" from the space heater before, but at the end, with her tightly tied conclusion, I totally feel it. The pattern of repeated words is almost a bit much and if the poem had gone on for much longer I, like N did the space heater, would have wanted it to stop.

Absolute favorite line: "And I was so moved, that he/would act undignified, to help me,/that I cried"