G: It's called "The Glass."It's about a man dying of throat cancer. Atwood comes close to that too in some of her poems about torture but Atwood doesn't bring us into the physical ... B: Her ability is to create a distance from the cruelty which puts even more emphasis on the cruelty. G: But the physical experience that Sharon Olds deals with ... I don't know. "In my father's house there are many mansions," and in poetry there are many things that people do ... I was listening to a cowboy poet yesterday--it was a convention of cowboy poets. They started out with 500 people. They had 8,000 people come to Elko Nevada last year for a convention of cowboy poets. So there are many things that are called poetry and what they have in common is that people organize language in lines on a page and say, "here, here is a poem!" Contents