Mothers, Sons and Confessional Verse: Our Greatest Poet and Her Indicted Son

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Gabriel Olds is facing life in prison. I have never met him, but I have known him since he was a boy.

With the death of Nobel Laureate Louise Glück in 2023, the title of Favorite Living American Poet passed to Bay Area-born Sharon Olds. ‘Favorite Living American Poet’ is an honor I bestow in my own mind, and it signifies nothing but my own prejudices and preferences.

(Glück’s predecessor as my FLAP was W.S. Merwin. I am not a poet. I don’t compose anything more than mildly amusing doggerel and off-color limericks. Just as I can’t play an instrument but still adore music, I love the poems I do not dare attempt to imitate. My mother made us memorize poems as boys, and I complained at the time, but now I am grateful for her insistence. Quote verse too often and you become a tiresome pedant or show off. Cite an apt couplet, every once in a great while, though, and you can elevate an otherwise pedestrian paragraph considerably. In that sense, quoting poets is like deploying profanity – very effective when done on rare occasions for emphasis, very tiresome when overused.)

Sharon Olds is famous for her poems about family and the body. Over the course of more than five decades, she has written some marvelous poems about the joys and shocks of the erotic. (Long ago, a young woman and I broke up after a brief fling, and in a pre-Internet age, she snail-mailed me a photocopy of Sex Without Love, a poem thick with reproach.) I often quote the last six words of First Sex. Last year, when a friend’s first boyfriend died suddenly, I sent her Cambridge Elegy, Olds’ achingly lovely tribute to a former beau who was killed at 19. Good poetry can seduce, it can indict, and it can console. Olds, who is now 82 and in poor health, is one of our most accessible poets. Even your friends who have little time for poetry will concede that they find some of hers arresting.

Olds had a daughter, Liddy, born in 1969; her son, Gabriel, followed in 1972. In the decade or so after she became a mom, as the Second Wave of feminism hit its crest, Olds wrote a series of poems mapping the tedium and wonder of domestic life. Her poems were sometimes bitter, sometimes enchanted, always precise. In the age of social media, parents are warned not to overshare images or anecdotes about their young children online. A quarter-century before Myspace, Sharon Olds wrote strikingly intimate descriptions of her children’s bodies, their wants, their fears, and their griefs.

This one is not online, so you’ll have to do with these two photos from my copy:

Gabriel Olds, that little boy who sobbed for his mouse, has been in Los Angeles County Jail since last August, held on $3.4 million bail. He is charged with twelve counts of felony rape against six different women. His defense, still in the pretrial stages, will rest on the claim that Olds practiced BDSM, and that his partners all consented. In court filings, Olds concedes he choked many of his lovers until they lost consciousness. He says that they had enthusiastically agreed to engage in the practice. Olds – a handsome man of a certain age who has enjoyed modest success as an actor – has produced nearly two dozen character witnesses, all former lovers. Individually, these women have written to the court, declaring that they regularly engaged in various sadomasochistic acts with Gabriel Olds, and that he was always scrupulous about ensuring their consent and their comfort. As the Los Angeles Times reports in an unnecessarily prurient article this week, “a jury will have to decide what consent looks like in a world of bondage and domination.” The defense has retained an expert on “alternative lifestyles” to contextualize Olds’ conduct.

The Times gets crudely, seedily personal. The reporter, Harriet Ryan, notes that “many women remarked on what one called an ‘unusual charisma’ that led them to ignore the messiness of his (Olds’) home and vehicle and his body odor.”

Decades ago, his mother wrote a poem entitled Six-Year-Old Boy. It begins:

We get to the country late at night
in late May, the darkness is warm and
smells of half-opened lilac.
Gabe is asleep on the back seat,
his wiry limbs limp and supple
except where his hard-on lifts his pajamas like the
earth above the shoot of a bulb.

I want to be very clear: Gabriel Olds enjoys the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. If he is proven guilty, it is not his mother’s fault. If he has turned out to be a middle-aged predator, it is not because his mama published award-winning poems about his wiry limbs, or his grief, or his penis. It’s 2025, and we can leave aside the cheap Freudianism. An oversharing -- or even overbearing -- mother does not, in fact, turn her son into a rapist. “He’s punishing his feminist mom by hurting and humiliating strong women” is too easy, too obvious, too pat, too cruel. It’s armchair bullshit.

The Times reports that Sharon Olds, who now lives in New York, has spoken regularly to her jailed son on the phone. The poet declined the paper’s request for an interview, as one would expect. I am a little older than Gabriel, and my mama a little older than Sharon, but I too am the disappointing son of a Second Wave feminist mother. I have never been accused of doing the things Gabriel is accused of doing, in part because the predilection that led me to disgrace is a far more banal desire to be adored. (Fear and pain are about as arousing to me as wilted asparagus.)

In any event, I know what it is to feel the guilt of worrying one’s aging mother. I know what it is to bring heartache and disappointment. I know what it is to remind a parent, “Nothing you did or didn’t do made me like this.” I hope in those phone calls from Los Angeles County Jail, Gabriel soothes his mother. I hope he is brave for her sake. I hope he faces whatever he must face with the firm resolve not to toss his family under the proverbial bus.

I hope this because while I don’t know Gabriel, and have never met him, I’ve been reading about him for nearly forty years. I’ve read about his broadening shoulders, about his laugh, about his tears, about his freckles. “Let no part go unpraised,” Olds wrote with a mother’s fierce adoration, and I muttered those very lines aloud as I studied my own children as they slept. Sharon’s words for Gabriel became mine for Heloise and David. They are not one and the same, but the connection feels real – and makes the present circumstances all the more painful to contemplate.

There is no tidy ending here. There is only poetry. I don’t know the diagnosis, but I do know that Gabriel had seizures as a boy. Read this one aloud, especially if you are a fellow parent, and spare a thought for a grown man in jail, an elderly woman in grief. Spare a thought too for the women that boy may have grown to hurt. There is a wideness in our mercy, surely, wide enough to hold them all:

Prayer During a Time My Son is Having Seizures (1983)

Finally, I just leaned on the door-frame, a woman without belief, praying
please don’t let anything happen to him. Don’t let him stand there and his gold
jaw lock while he watches the burning mountain falling slowly through his mind and no word comes to him.

Don’t let him stand there like a tree with its green branch lopped off and
falling slowly away, the tiny
amber cones already darkening,

don’t let him fall like the lip of a
cliff coming off, a heavy tuft
stuck with white berry blossoms
sliding down the raw bluff of his life,
don’t let him stand on the curb watching his mind get hit by a blue car

over and over, there is nothing he can do about it. Don’t hurt him, I cry out,
don’t take his thoughts away as a
kid will rip toys from another kids hands,

don’t go up to his small dazzling
brain in spangles on the high wire
and push it off. There is no net.
Don’t leave him in a wheelchair drooling into cereal, not knowing the dark

holes are raisins. And yet if that’s the only way I can have him, I want to have him, to look deep into his face and see just the avenues of light,

empty and spacious, to put on his bib
as I once did, and spoon brown sugar
into the river of his life.
I’ll change his dark radiant diapers, I’ll
scrape the blue molds that collects in the creases of his elbows, I will sit with him in his room for the rest of my days,

I will have him on any terms.

Amen.