Interview: Sharon Olds

Sharon grants so few interviews that this is a treat.

From The Guardian:

The woman many regard as America's greatest living poet lives in a sprawling Upper West Side apartment where, for the past 40 years, she has written in a rocking chair overlooking the Hudson. When she gives a reading, people queue around the block to hear her - the night before we meet, so many fans turned up that they had to crouch on the floor and on window-sills. Her work has been anthologised in more than 100 collections and she has won poetry's most prestigious awards - the San Francisco Poetry Center award, the Lamont Poetry prize, the National Book Critics Circle award, the TS Eliot prize - but she is strangely little known here. In America she divides opinion: Michael Ondaatje called her poetry "pure fire in the hands"; the critic Helen Vendler called it pornographic.