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Upside Down Devil

James Siena

Issue 154, Spring 2000

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More from Issue 154, Spring 2000

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  • Interview

    • Robert Bly

      The Art of Poetry No. 79

    • Carolyn Kizer

      The Art of Poetry No. 81

    • Derek Mahon

      The Art of Poetry No. 82

    • Geoffrey Hill

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  • Poetry

    • Agha Shahid Ali

      A Ghazal for Michael Palmer

    • Nin Andrews

      Poets on Poets

    • John Ashbery

      Caravaggio and His Followers

    • John Ashbery

      Strange Cinema

    • Mary Jo Bang

      Two Poems

    • Dan Beachy-Quick

      Two Poems

    • Murray Bodo

      After the Earthquakes

    • Thomas Bolt

      Two Poems

    • Bruce Bond

      Oval

    • Shannon Borg

      Walking London with Charlotte Mew

    • Lucie Brock-Broido

      Periodic Table of Ethereal Elements

    • Zbigniew Herbert

      Three Poems

    • Peter Covino

      At the Triple Treat Theatre

    • Catherine Coy

      Three Poems

    • Brian Culhane

      Chekhov's "The Student"

    • Arnaut Daniel

      Lo Ferm voler qu’el cor m’intra

    • Robert Devlin

      Two Poems

    • Bryan D. Dietrich

      The Magician

    • Jeff Dolven

      Two Poems

    • Michael Fried

      The End of History

    • Debora Greger

      To the Snow

    • Eamon Grennan

      Musical Interlude

    • Marilyn Hacker

      A Farewell to the Finland Woman

    • Judith Hall

      Upon the Bed-Trick Played on Jack

    • Jeffrey Harrison

      Two Poems

    • William Hunt

      Outside with Georg Trakl

    • Karl Kirchwey

      Three Poems

    • John Koethe

      Theories of Prayer

    • Yusef Komunyakaa

      Nipples

    • Nicole Krauss

      Bronze Poseidon

    • Nicole Krauss

      The Nostalgia of Descartes

    • James Lasdun

      Deathmeadow Mountain

    • Daniel Lewis

      Word Dog Doesn't Bite

    • Elizabeth Macklin

      Two Poems

    • Saadi Youssef

      Three Poems

    • J. Cailin Oakes

      Substitute

    • Joe Osterhaus

      New York Minute

    • Geoffrey G. O’Brien

      To

    • Pam A. Parker

      Venice 1993, Adventures in Crossdressing

    • Evan Smith Rakoff

      Three Poems

    • Timothy Richardson

      Three Poems

    • Robyn Selman

      Essay in the Form of a Russian Doll

    • Gleb Shulpyakov

      Two Poems

    • John Tranter

      See Rover Reach

    • Pimone Triplett

      One More Time

    • Reetika Vazirani

      Independence

    • Rosanna Warren

      Cyprian

    • Greg Williamson

      Double Exposures

    • Cynthia Zarin

      Auden in the Aquarium

  • Feature

    • Reflections on a Worksheet

    • A. R. Ammons

      Pomework: An Exercise in Occasional Poetry

    • David Barber

      The Man in the Back Row Has a Question VI

    • Dan Glover

      Travels with Ezra

    • Robert Pinsky

      Occasional Poetry and Poetry on Occasions

    • Simon Worrall

      Emily Dickinson Goes to Las Vegas

  • Notice

    • George Plimpton

      Notice

  • Art

    • James Siena

      Upside Down Devil

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From left, Galway Kinnell, Robert Hass, Olds, and Brenda Hillman in the Oakley house at the Community of Writers, Olympic Valley, California, 1989. Courtesy of Sharon Olds and the Community of Writers.

Sharon Olds published her first book, Satan Says, in 1980, at the age of thirty-seven. The book is organized into four sections, “Daughter,” “Woman,” “Mother,” and “Journey,” and it begins with its title poem, whose speaker is locked in a box she can open only by repeating after Satan: “Say shit, say death, say fuck the father.” At the time, Olds—who was born in San Francisco, graduated from Stanford, and received a Ph.D. in English from Columbia—was married to a psychiatrist, and she spent her days on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, caring for their two young children. Not long after the book’s publication, she told me last year, someone who had invited her to give a reading picked her up at the airport and said, “I thought you would look angrier.”

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Rachel Cusk photo courtesy the author.

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