“The Day They Tied Me Up”: Serial Return, Punishment, and the Phenomenology of Memory in the Work of Sharon Olds

dara ayu lestari;

This essay traces lyric recurrences of a particular narrative – in which the young Sharon Olds empties a bottle of ink onto her parents’ bedspread and is tied to a chair as her punishment – as indicative of an ongoing perceptual process fundamental to the personal and embodied
experience of memory. Drawing on phenomenological work in perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as that of feminist scholars of embodiment and serial poetics, the essay demonstrates how Olds’s serial return to the moment of this punishment within the
space of the lyric poem is a formal method for investigating the perceptual sensations of childhood trauma. The sensual evocation of inner experience inherent in lyric form offers
Olds a space in which to reexperience and re-create the body’s phenomenological recall as a serial project of return to her own body’s lived sensory experience. Inextricable from memories of sexual awakening and a blossoming awareness of gender difference, this essay
argues that Olds’s repetition of the punishment narrative also articulates a phenomenology of gendered embodiment that is missing from Merleau-Ponty’s analysis.