SOURCE: "Talking to Our Father. The Political and Mythical Appropriations of Adrienne Rich and Sharon Olds," in The American Poetry Review, Vol. 18, No. 6, November-December, 1989, pp. 35-41.

Matson is a poet and educator. In the following excerpt, she discusses Olds's use of metaphor as a means of articulating her painful and ambivalent feelings towards her father and as a strategy for healing and empowering the divided self of the poet/narrator.

When I first composed the title of this essay, I was unconscious of the grammatical—and hence sematic—blur I had built into my project's announcement. Accustomed to viewing the writers under discussion as powerful originators, I had used the word "of" in the title as belonging to the possessive case: that is, the claims to ownership were Rich's and Olds's. A colleague glanced at my title and saw the slippage immediately: whose appropriations? Uneasily I watched as...