My senses were super-pleasurable to me, and there was so much gorgeous beauty in the garden and - small garden and a brick barbecue, homemade, in which I could bake pies with lattice crusts, braided lattice crusts made of dirt.

So I think, all my childhood, I was a pagan, underneath the burden of the particularly negative vision of Christianity that I was in the house of. I don’t remember this, but it just seems true that the heartbeat and the breath and the borborygmi - the sounds of this digestion - so I was gradually hearing that. I was upside-down, and I was engaged in rhythm.

Well, I would say that even before I was born, I was a pagan dancer. But I wonder how you would start to describe the religious and spiritual background of your childhood as it appears to you now, because, I think, like many things in childhood, what we see changes as we look back at it across time. So I think that tells us where you went with that. And then your first book was called Satan Says. Tippett: This is a lively Sunday morning crowd - which leads right into where I wanted to start, which is that you speak, often, about having had a hellfire and brimstone Calvinist upbringing. This conversation unfolded in Newark, New Jersey, at the 2018 Geraldine R. Tippett: I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Human ectoplasm risen on its hind legs to discourse with them.” I am embryonic, pre-eyebrows, pre-eyelids, pre-mouth, Something unnerving, as if I have no features,

If they’re close enough, they can see something is different with me, Sharon Olds: “Maybe one reason I do not wear makeup is to scare people. Her most recent book, Odes, pays homage to aspects of the human body and experience that get bleeped out on public radio to follow FCC rules, including “Ode to the Clitoris,” “Ode to the Penis,” and “Ode to the Tampon.” So the conversation you’re about to hear has parental advisories, but please don’t let that stop you - it is a joy. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her collection Stag’s Leap, about walking through the end of a marriage she had also praised and opened up to poetry. Krista Tippett, host: Sharon Olds has written: “The politeness and the prudity of the world I grew up in meant that there were things that were important to me and interesting to me, but I had never read a poem about.” She’s been writing poems about all those things now for over 40 years.

The Dead and the Living by Sharon Olds