“Without You, I’m Nothing?”: Images of Self-enactment in Sharon Olds’ Stag’s Leap

This research investigates Sharon Olds’ award-winning collection, Stag’s Leap (2012) arguing that Olds uses her text to engender poem-artefacts bound to enactments of self, and that this is an affirmative, pseudo-Confessional mode of performance. Adopting a theoretical reading position from Julia Kristeva, I critique Olds’ textual performances as self-enactments in which variant versions of self are announced by way of the poetic image functioning as a kind of willed imago. While Olds deals with the disintegration of her marriage, my reading asserts that she consistently refrains from showing particular affective responses. I read these texts as engaging processes of self-abjection into self-enactment, in which Olds obliterates herself. She is establishing a boundary that has textual, semantic, psychic, private and public contours. Indeed, with the arrival of the poet through a book’s worth of image/imago, the vacated self acquires new contours. When making these poems, Olds is also reinventing her identity.