Each week we bring you a poet, some of their work, and leave the rest up to you.
This week’s poet is Anne Sexton. Also, this week, EthologyNerd is substitute-hosting for Jennywren.
Background:
Anne Sexton was the Courtney Love of 1960’s American poetry. Sylvia Plath, her good friend and main rival at the time, was winning awards and smiling dutifully at receptions; Anne was showing up drunk to receptions if at all, lighting hundred-dollar bills on fire in restaurants, having multiple affairs, and was generally considered the one poet you had to see read…again, if she made it and you could understand what she was saying.
Widely considered to have opened the door for modern “confessional” poetry, she tackled all manner of controversial topics in her writing, including menstruation, abortion, her mania and depression, and her rebellion against her straitlaced, WASPy, somewhat abusive upbringing. As her mental illness worsened, so did her personal relationships. Her decades-long marriage ended in divorce in the early 1970s as Anne descended further into prescription drug abuse, alcohol abuse, and her suicide attempts, of which there had been several in the past, became more frequent and more serious. Her last suicide attempt in 1974 was successful.
Examples:
The Black Art
A woman who writes feels too much,
those trances and portents!
As if cycles and children and islands
weren’t enough; as if mourners and gossips
and vegetables were never enough.
She thinks she can warn the stars.
A writer is essentially a spy.
Dear love, I am that girl.
A man who writes knows too much,
such spells and fetiches!
As if erections and congresses and products
weren’t enough; as if machines and galleons
and wars were never enough.
With used furniture he makes a tree.
A writer is essentially a crook.
Dear love, you are that man.
Never loving ourselves,
hating even our shoes and our hats,
we love each other, precious, precious.
Our hands are light blue and gentle.
Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.
But when we marry,
the children leave in disgust.
There is too much food and no one left over
to eat up all the weird abundance.
The Ballad of The Lonely Masturbator
The end of the affair is always death.
She’s my workshop. Slippery eye,
out of the tribe of myself my breath
finds you gone. I horrify
those who stand by. I am fed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
Finger to finger, now she’s mine.
She’s not too far. She’s my encounter.
I beat her like a bell. I recline
in the bower where you used to mount her.
You borrowed me on the flowered spread.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
Take for instance this night, my love,
that every single couple puts together
with a joint overturning, beneath, above,
the abundant two on sponge and feather,
kneeling and pushing, head to head.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
I break out of my body this way,
an annoying miracle. Could I
put the dream market on display?
I am spread out. I crucify.
My little plum is what you said.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
Then my black-eyed rival came.
The lady of water, rising on the beach,
a piano at her fingertips, shame
on her lips and a flute’s speech.
And I was the knock-kneed broom instead.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
She took you the way a women takes
a bargain dress off the rack
and I broke the way a stone breaks.
I give back your books and fishing tack.
Today’s paper says that you are wed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
The boys and girls are one tonight.
They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies.
They take off shoes. They turn off the light.
The glimmering creatures are full of lies.
They are eating each other. They are overfed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
Her Kind [note: this was her signature poem; she closed every reading with it]
I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.
I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.
I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.
“The Cmplete Poems: Anne Sexton” is an excellent purchase; two separate biographies of her, Diane Middlebrook’s, done with Sexton’s participation, and Linda Gray Sexton’s,” Searching for Mercy Street“, done after her mother’s death, are both riveting.
