“I Hold Back Nothing.” – Anne Sexton

Today is the birthday of poet Anne Sexton.

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When you read The Complete Poems, and you read her work in chronological order, you can feel her sliding off the rails at the end – not just mentally: I’m talking about the quality of her work (the two are probably related).

Robert Lowell’s thoughts on this are very interesting:

For a book or two, she grew more powerful. Then writing was too easy or too hard for her. She became meager and exaggerated. Many of her most embarrassing poems would have been fascinating if someone had put them in quotes, as the presentation of some character, not the author.

Some of her late stuff sounds like a bad imitation of Jack Kerouac, a riff with no purpose, like this, from one of her last poems:

I love you the way the oboe plays.
I love you the way skinny dipping makes my body feels.
I love you the way a ripe artichoke tastes.
Yet I fear you,
as one in the desert fears the sun.
True.
True.

Terrible. The voice of a sentimental undergraduate, not a celebrated prize-winning American poet. David Trinidad has some thoughts:

I jokingly refer to Sexton’s late period as “Bad Anne.” How else to reconcile such slipshod lines as “I flee. I flee. / I block my ears and eat salami” with her amazing early metaphors (“leaves . . . born in their own green blood / like the hands of mermaids”) and admissions (“Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself”)? It’s too painful to think of her simply as a brilliant poet who got bad. And too easy, somehow, to blame it on pills, alcohol, insanity, fame. Better, I recently decided, to think of her as a genius with demons, writing to beat the clock.

The regression in her work is palpable, even more so because her first poems are so undeniably spectacular (it is Sylvia Plath in reverse).

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Sexton was a housewife and mother, who had done some modeling, who spent time in mental institutions. After the birth of her second child in 1955, Sexton was hospitalized due to another nervous breakdown (a term I prefer to other more “approved” phrases.) She tried to commit suicide while she was in the hospital. Dr. Martin Orne was the psychiatrist in charge of Anne in the hospital – and would continue to treat her for many years after. He recognized she was extremely intelligent and not using her intelligence at all, and also felt – based on her earlier schooling – that she was gifted at writing. He suggested that maybe she “should write” as a way to get through the darker moments.

“You, Dr. Martin” came directly out of that experience, as did so many of the poems in her first collection, To Bedlam and Part Way Back.

Here is “You, Dr. Martin.”. Keep in mind: This is her first poem.

You, Dr. Martin

You, Doctor Martin, walk
from breakfast to madness. Late August,
I speed through the antiseptic tunnel
where the moving dead still talk
of pushing their bones against the thrust
of cure. And I am queen of this summer hotel
or the laughing bee on a stalk

of death. We stand in broken
lines and wait while they unlock
the doors and count us at the frozen gates
of dinner. The shibboleth is spoken
and we move to gravy in our smock
of smiles. We chew in rows, our plates
scratch and whine like chalk

in school. There are no knives
for cutting your throat. I make
moccasins all morning. At first my hands
kept empty, unraveled for the lives
they used to work. Now I learn to take
them back, each angry finger that demands
I mend what another will break

tomorrow. Of course, I love you;
you lean above the plastic sky,
god of our block, prince of all the foxes.
The breaking crowns are new
that Jack wore.
Your third eye
moves among us and lights the separate boxes
where we sleep or cry.

What large children we are
here. All over I grow most tall
in the best ward. Your business is people,
you call at the madhouse, an oracular
eye in our nest. Out in the hall
the intercom pages you. You twist in the pull
of the foxy children who fall

like floods of life in frost.
And we are magic talking to itself,
noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins
forgotten. Am I still lost?
Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself,
counting this row and that row of moccasins
waiting on the silent shelf.

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Whether or not you “like this sort of stuff” (the main complaint you hear about Sexton and the other “confessional” poets) is not the point. The point is that the VOICE we meet in “You, Dr. Martin” is confident, strong, and unselfconscious. It’s THERE. It needed no coaxing to come out. We are meeting the poet herself, not a smokescreen of words and metaphors and literary devices. “You, Dr. Martin” is not clever. Straight out of the gate, there was nothing between Anne Sexton and her expression of herself. Sylvia Plath’s early poems suffer from precocity, they can come off as coy or wordy. (Ted Hughes describes Plath writing a poem with a Thesaurus balanced on her knee, and it’s evident in that early work.) It wouldn’t be until 1962, years into her career, when Plath would burst out with her original voice. Sexton STARTED at that point. Plath recognized this, writing in her journal in April of 1959, while editing her own book:

Have rejected the Electra poem from my book. Too forced and rhetorical. A leaf from Anne Sexton’s book would do here. She has none of my clenches and an ease of phrase, and an honesty. I have my 40 unattackable poems.

“none of my clenches …” Plath was rigorously honest with herself.

There was jealousy between Plath and Sexton, but they were also good friends. The two took a poetry class together in 1959 with Robert Lowell, and they’d all go out for cocktails afterwards. (Why cannot I find a time-machine and go join that ferocious trio?) Sylvia Plath wrote in her journal on March 20, 1959:

Criticism of 4 of my poems in Lowell’s class: criticism of rhetoric. He sets me up with Ann Sexton, an honor, I suppose. Well, about time. She has very good things, and they get better, though there is a lot of loose stuff.

The two poets had similar journeys, were from similar backgrounds, from the same state, and had both spent time in McLean’s (the mental institution known for its famous artistic clientele – Robert Lowell had been hospitalized there as well).

Michael Schmidt, in his wonderful Lives of the Poets has this to say about Sexton’s influence on Plath:

What Sexton suggested to Plath was the force of simple rhyme and simple rhythm, the magic of nursery rhyme darkened by time, of fairy tale where the happy ending somehow doesn’t happen. Sexton showed Plath the way, and then Plath died first, stealing a march on her friend, which Sexton resented and envied. Four years Plath’s senior, Anne Sexton survived her by twelve years, committing suicide in 1974. But Plath keeps hold of the laurels. There are wonderful things in the Complete Poems of Sexton, published in 1981, but many of them are things we associate, whatever their original source, with Plath, and Sexton’s work seems but a footnote to hers.

Sadly, this is true. It’s not fair, really. Sexton’s body of work is larger, but because of the dropoff in quality in her final years, the work doesn’t have the overall “oomph” that Plath’s has, added to the fact that Plath went out in a blaze of genius, stopping at her very highest point.

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Sexton wrote a rather extraordinary poem when she heard of Sylvia Plath’s suicide. You can see here Sexton’s fearlessness in self-presentation. She doesn’t care about “looking good.” She has no self-consciousness, perhaps her most admirable quality. From her, we can learn about honesty. Sexton was openly jealous of Sylvia stealing that suicide, the suicide she had dreamt of so often. Sylvia had actually gone and done it!

Sylvia’s Death
for Sylvia Plath

O Sylvia, Sylvia,
with a dead box of stones and spoons,

with two children, two meteors
wandering loose in a tiny playroom,

with your mouth into the sheet,
into the roofbeam, into the dumb prayer,

(Sylvia, Sylvia
where did you go
after you wrote me
from Devonshire
about rasing potatoes
and keeping bees?)

what did you stand by,
just how did you lie down into?

Thief —
how did you crawl into,

crawl down alone
into the death I wanted so badly and for so long,

the death we said we both outgrew,
the one we wore on our skinny breasts,

the one we talked of so often each time
we downed three extra dry martinis in Boston,

the death that talked of analysts and cures,
the death that talked like brides with plots,

the death we drank to,
the motives and the quiet deed?

(In Boston
the dying
ride in cabs,
yes death again,
that ride home
with our boy.)

O Sylvia, I remember the sleepy drummer
who beat on our eyes with an old story,

how we wanted to let him come
like a sadist or a New York fairy

to do his job,
a necessity, a window in a wall or a crib,

and since that time he waited
under our heart, our cupboard,

and I see now that we store him up
year after year, old suicides

and I know at the news of your death
a terrible taste for it, like salt,

(And me,
me too.
And now, Sylvia,
you again
with death again,
that ride home
with our boy.)

And I say only
with my arms stretched out into that stone place,

what is your death
but an old belonging,

a mole that fell out
of one of your poems?

(O friend,
while the moon’s bad,
and the king’s gone,
and the queen’s at her wit’s end
the bar fly ought to sing!)

O tiny mother,
you too!
O funny duchess!
O blonde thing!

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Sexton’s life was not easy. She made life hell for her husband, her kids, and anyone who loved her. Sexton said:

“All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children…. I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can’t build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out.”

A mixture of drink, drugs, and a lifetime battle with mental illness took its toll on her relationships. But mental illness cannot explain or excuse all. She “acted out” in ways that detonated her life, her relationships. She sexually abused her daughter, who was also – eventually – the literary executor of her estate. Linda Sexton has written eloquently about all of this. Anne Sexton had the classic charisma of a narcissist. There was no room for anyone else.

Illness like hers – like mine too – takes its prisoners. It decimates. She was a survivor. She took something that terrifies others (madness), and wrestled it into form. Her writing was the bulwark against her and “it.” She wrote about things that weren’t supposed to be included in poetry, “female” things. People didn’t know what to feel about it. She “held back nothing.”

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Maxine Kumin wrote about Sexton’s freshness of approach. Sexton had a high school education, but wasn’t groomed for anything great or accomplished (unlike, again, Plath). She was a simple girl who married young, and then, one day, discovered she was a poet. She was free of the timeline of literary associations most writers have, she was totally independent, free. She didn’t know she should be scared or intimidated by those who came before. She didn’t set out to imitate anybody. Here’s Kumin:

… above all else, she was attracted to the fairy tales of Andersen and Grimm, which her beloved Nana had read to her when she was a child. They were for her, perhaps, what Bible stories and Greek myths had been for other writers. At the same time that she was being entertained and drawn into closer contact with a kind of collective unconscious, she was searching the fairy tales for psychological parallels.

Erica Jong describes some advice that Sexton once gave to her:

Once, when I wrote to her about my terror of publishing a second book of poems, she answered: ‘Don’t dwell on the book’s reception. The point is to get on with it–you have a life’s work ahead of you–no point in dallying around waiting for approval. We all want it, I know, but the point is to reach out honestly–that’s the whole point. I keep feeling that there isn’t one poem being written by any of us–or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem–a community effort if you will. It’s all the same poem. It doesn’t belong to any one writer–it’s God’s poem perhaps. Or God’s people’s poem. You have the gift– and with it comes responsibility–you mustn’t neglect or be mean to that gift–you must let it do its work. It has more rights than the ego that wants approval.’

Sexton’s most famous poem, perhaps, is “Her Kind”.

Even after endless readings of it, it still brings a chill to my spine. It’s one of those poems that put my own experience with madness – as early as middle school – into stark (and helpful) clarity.

Her Kind
by Anne Sexton

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.

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Greg Johnson, in analyzing, “Her Kind”, writes:

The poem is a serious attempt to understand such a woman–her sense of estrangement, her impulse toward death–by internalizing evil and giving it a voice: a chortling, self-satisfied, altogether amiable voice which suggests that ‘evil’ is perhaps the wrong word after all. Sexton’s witch, waving her ‘nude arms at villages going by,’ becomes something of value to the community, performing the function Kurt Vonnegut has called the ‘domestication of terror.’ Unlike Plath’s madwoman in ‘Lady Lazarus’–a woman at the service of a private, unyielding anger, a red-haired demon whose revenge is to ‘eat men like air’–Sexton’s witch is essentially harmless. Although she remains vulnerable–‘A woman like that is not afraid to die’–she rejects anger in favor of humor, flamboyance, self-mockery. She is a kind of perverse entertainer, and if she seems cast in the role of a martyr, embracing madness in order to domesticate it for the rest of the community–making it seem less threatening, perhaps even enjoyable–it is nevertheless a martyrdom which this aspect of Sexton accepts with a peculiar zest.

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Anne Sexton and W.S. Merwin

Many people (mostly men, although there are women too) found her poems distasteful, with its openness about her body and its functions. People really wondered “Is this poetry? What is it?” Women’s bodies, and their functions, are grosser to men, because men want their sexual fantasies to remain intact, they don’t want to hear about menstruation and menopause. Men’s bodily functions are somehow noble and “universal”, while women’s are strictly “other” and better not talked about. Sexton broke apart those assumptions. Do men only write about beautiful things? Of course not. Men write about “gross” and “ugly” things, too. It is the assumption that women should be more “ladylike” that keeps women out of the canon. Women have problems with Sexton’s work, too. She tells our secrets. She leaves us no place to hide.

Mona Van Duyn observed:

“Her delineation of femaleness [is] so fanatical that it makes one wonder, even after many years of being one, what a woman is.”

Hayden Carruth wrote of Sexton:

“[Sexton’s poems] raise the never-solved problem of what literature really is, where you draw the line between art and documentary.”

That conversation continues. It’s a great conversation. It’s a necessary conversation.

But let’s not let the conversation drown out the work. Sexton’s fairy tale poems are creepy and powerful. Her death poems are relentlessly bleak, but with an inventiveness of imagery overwhelming with beauty. You get why people fall in love with death. Or … you should. Try to listen, try to hear. Death means rest, a cessation of what Keats called – accurately – “wakeful anguish.” Anne Sexton is a reporter from those dangerous psychological zones. The domestic poems, the nostalgic poems, the drudgery poems … In her career, Sexton covered it all.

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My father went to see her read her poetry in Cambridge, Massachusetts when he was in college. A Sexton poetry reading was more like an underground rock show, with handmade posters, and an electric buzz of excitement running through the mostly-young crowd. They weren’t poetry readings, really, they were events. Anne Sexton was gorgeous, and she would dress the part. When my dad saw her, she wore a bright red dress, and slinked her beautiful long legs around each other (so many photos of her show her twining her legs like that), and chain-smoked. My dad said she was great, a really exciting presence.

Anne Sexton said:

“I’m hunting for the truth. It might be a kind of poetic truth, and not just a factual one, because behind everything that happens to you, there is another truth, a secret life.”

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And finally, Peter Gabriel read Sexton’s poem “45 Mercy Street” (poem listed below the song clip) and was inspired to write the song “Mercy Street.”

45 Mercy Street
by Anne Sexton

In my dream,
drilling into the marrow
of my entire bone,
my real dream,
I’m walking up and down Beacon Hill
searching for a street sign –
namely MERCY STREET.
Not there.

I try the Back Bay.
Not there.
Not there.
And yet I know the number.
45 Mercy Street.
I know the stained-glass window
of the foyer,
the three flights of the house
with its parquet floors.
I know the furniture and
mother, grandmother, great-grandmother,
the servants.
I know the cupboard of Spode
the boat of ice, solid silver,
where the butter sits in neat squares
like strange giant’s teeth
on the big mahogany table.
I know it well.
Not there.

Where did you go?
45 Mercy Street,
with great-grandmother
kneeling in her whale-bone corset
and praying gently but fiercely
to the wash basin,
at five A.M.
at noon
dozing in her wiggy rocker,
grandfather taking a nap in the pantry,
grandmother pushing the bell for the downstairs maid,
and Nana rocking Mother with an oversized flower
on her forehead to cover the curl
of when she was good and when she was…
And where she was begat
and in a generation
the third she will beget,
me,
with the stranger’s seed blooming
into the flower called Horrid.

I walk in a yellow dress
and a white pocketbook stuffed with cigarettes,
enough pills, my wallet, my keys,
and being twenty-eight, or is it forty-five?
I walk. I walk.
I hold matches at street signs
for it is dark,
as dark as the leathery dead
and I have lost my green Ford,
my house in the suburbs,
two little kids
sucked up like pollen by the bee in me
and a husband
who has wiped off his eyes
in order not to see my inside out
and I am walking and looking
and this is no dream
just my oily life
where the people are alibis
and the street is unfindable for an
entire lifetime.

Pull the shades down –
I don’t care!
Bolt the door, mercy,
erase the number,
rip down the street sign,
what can it matter,
what can it matter to this cheapskate
who wants to own the past
that went out on a dead ship
and left me only with paper?

Not there.

I open my pocketbook,
as women do,
and fish swim back and forth
between the dollars and the lipstick.
I pick them out,
one by one
and throw them at the street signs,
and shoot my pocketbook
into the Charles River.
Next I pull the dream off
and slam into the cement wall
of the clumsy calendar
I live in,
my life,
and its hauled up
notebooks.

Here’s my favorite Anne Sexton:

LIVE
Live or die, but don’t poison everything…

Well, death’s been here
for a long time —
it has a hell of a lot
to do with hell
and suspicion of the eye
and the religious objects
and how I mourned them
when they were made obscene
by my dwarf-heart’s doodle.
The chief ingredient
is mutilation.
And mud, day after day,
mud like a ritual,
and the baby on the platter,
cooked but still human,
cooked also with little maggots,
sewn onto it maybe by somebody’s mother,
the damn bitch!

Even so,
I kept right on going on,
a sort of human statement,
lugging myself as if
I were a sawed-off body
in the trunk, the steamer trunk.
This became perjury of the soul.
It became an outright lie
and even though I dressed the body
it was still naked, still killed.
It was caught
in the first place at birth,
like a fish.
But I play it, dressed it up,
dressed it up like somebody’s doll.

Is life something you play?
And all the time wanting to get rid of it?
And further, everyone yelling at you
to shut up. And no wonder!
People don’t like to be told
that you’re sick
and then be forced
to watch
you
come
down with the hammer.

Today life opened inside me like an egg
and there inside
after considerable digging
I found the answer.
What a bargain!
There was the sun,
her yolk moving feverishly,
tumbling her prize —
and you realize she does this daily!
I’d known she was a purifier
but I hadn’t thought
she was solid,
hadn’t known she was an answer.
God! It’s a dream,
lovers sprouting in the yard
like celery stalks
and better,
a husband straight as a redwood,
two daughters, two sea urchings,
picking roses off my hackles.
If I’m on fire they dance around it
and cook marshmallows.
And if I’m ice
they simply skate on me
in little ballet costumes.

Here,
all along,
thinking I was a killer,
anointing myself daily
with my little poisons.
But no.
I’m an empress.
I wear an apron.
My typewriter writes.
It didn’t break the way it warned.
Even crazy, I’m as nice
as a chocolate bar.
Even with the witches’ gymnastics
they trust my incalculable city,
my corruptible bed.

O dearest three,
I make a soft reply.
The witch comes on
and you paint her pink.
I come with kisses in my hood
and the sun, the smart one,
rolling in my arms.
So I say Live
and turn my shadow three times round
to feed our puppies as they come,
the eight Dalmatians we didn’t drown,
despite the warnings: The abort! The destroy!
Despite the pails of water that waited,
to drown them, to pull them down like stones,
they came, each one headfirst, blowing bubbles the color of cataract-blue
and fumbling for the tiny tits.
Just last week, eight Dalmatians,
3/4 of a lb., lined up like cord wood
each
like a
birch tree.
I promise to love more if they come,
because in spite of cruelty
and the stuffed railroad cars for the ovens,
I am not what I expected. Not an Eichmann.
The poison just didn’t take.
So I won’t hang around in my hospital shift,
repeating The Black Mass and all of it.
I say Live, Live because of the sun,
the dream, the excitable gift.

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19 Responses to “I Hold Back Nothing.” – Anne Sexton

  1. bybee says:

    Sexton turns up as a character in Erica Jong’s sequel to Fear of Flying — How To Save Your Own Life. I think her name in the novel is Jeannie Morton.

  2. sheila says:

    Bybee – I haven’t read it. What’s the character like?

  3. Jennchez says:

    “It’s too painful to think of her simply as a brilliant poet who got bad. And too easy, somehow, to blame it on pills, alcohol, insanity, fame. Better, I recently decided, to think of her as a genius with demons, writing to beat the clock”.

    I agree with this sentiment completely. I feel this way myself often times. As an artist I many times feel as there is a ticking clock, esp when on a deadline. (I’m sure you can relate to this) Everyone says find your balance says my non-artistic friends, balance and the arts never really have meshed for me :)

    I remember reading Anne Sexton earlier works in college and thinking “wow, she gets it”. Reading her later works I always thing maybe she got it to much and just couldn’t deal. Talented, tragic, beautiful lady.

    Sorry Im posting on everything but I was gone all week with no wi-fi , Im still shuddering, lot a great post Ive missed out on. Hope you have electricity and heat.

  4. sheila says:

    Jennchez – never apologize for posting on everything. It makes me happy!

    I agree with your thoughts on the ticking clock. I suppose Sexton, who was so drawn to death, and probably knew she would succeed in taking her own life eventually, experienced the ticking clock as a booming deafening sound.

    When Sexton is on, there’s no one like her. That poem “Live” is just so powerful to me. Powerful and bracing.

  5. gina in al says:

    “She is the sum of yourself and your dream.
    Climb her like a monument, step after step.
    She is solid.
    As for me, I am a watercolor.
    I wash off.”

    Anne Sexton – from “For My Lover, Returning To His Wife”

    A poem that helped me survive a similar moment, to know that I was not alone in my experience helped me get through.

  6. Fiddlin Bill says:

    Thanks so much for this great post! Did Sexton have any connection to Elizabeth Bishop? Bishop just blew me away when I “found” her a few years back?

  7. Fiddlin Bill says:

    I made a song out of Bishop’s “One Art.” It’s quite “singable.” The criticism of Sexton as one of “those confessionals” seems to my ear extremely provincial at this point in time. The poems you quote from Sexton are sledgehammers; sometimes I think critics just search for some possible way to attack, as a kind of aggrandizement of their own stature. Sad, but mostly an unimportant private fact, that Sexton “declined” at the end of her arc. What if she’d lived to be very old and produced alzheimeric gibber? Nothing at all would have changed the masterpieces already on the page.

  8. Desirae says:

    (And me,
    me too.
    And now, Sylvia,
    you again
    with death again,
    that ride home
    with our boy.)

    That naked jealousy of this part always gives me the chills.

    • sheila says:

      I know, right?? I’m still enough of a Victorian (and I’m barely that) that I read something like that and think: “It’s fine to THINK that … but to say it??”

      Of course that’s why it’s so unforgettable. So true.

  9. Fiddlin Bill says:

    This post is so good I came to it again and found my own last year’s comments, which are fairly irrelevant. “Her Kind.” It’s a poem spoken by a corpse. That’s how to understand it. Or a kind of zombie. The second verse is a description of being buried. In the last verse she’s been dug up. There’s a lot of the holocaust in the imagery. Maybe it’s too hard for some people to live in the truth that we’re all just here for a little while, like a crop of mushrooms. Death does surround us. Since Sexton embraces death so fervently, she’s able to inhabit this truth in its details.

  10. bybee says:

    This post inspired me to go out and get Plath’s unedited journals. Been reading them on the subway and nearly missed my stop tonight.

  11. sheila says:

    Yes, they will do that to you. Riveting!

    Now all we need is for those last two years of her journals to show up. I firmly believe they were never destroyed.

  12. bybee says:

    Two more things:

    1. Yes, those journals will turn up someday. I just hope I’m still alive. If I’m not, their release will be enough to bring me up out of the grave.

    2. I was thinking today that the last line from Edge “Her blacks crackle and drag” seems very much like a line Anne Sexton could have written. If you played a game with some newbie-ish English major called “Plath or Sexton?” I think Sexton would get credit for that one.

  13. Kerry O'Malley says:

    “and a husband
    who has wiped off his eyes
    in order not to see my inside out”

  14. Beth says:

    Anne Sexton is a huge deal for me. I discovered her totally at random in college, looking through the stacks in the University Library for something else, and the moment I read “You, Dr. Martin” I was transfixed. It was a revelation and an awakening for me. Most of my own college poems were imitative of hers. She gave me a language to describe depression. One of my early Internet screen-names was “ConfessionalPoet.” I identified with them all so much — Plath, Sexton and Lowell, but especially Sexton. (And to be a fly on the wall in that 1959 class! OMG!) Not sure if that’s just because I found her first, so to me Plath is more of the footnote…interesting how their trajectories are so opposite. Plath’s voice on tape immediately unsettled me, Sexton’s only in the later recordings where cigarettes have completely destroyed her voice and you can hear her laboring to breathe, speaking slowly. Reading Anne Sexton, especially her early classic works, was a blessing and a curse — I identified with her so much I felt less alone, but while wrestling with my own demons about creative expression have so often told myself she covered the same ground I’ve wanted to cover, but better, and there is no way I’ll ever add value to what she’s already done.

    • sheila says:

      Beth – I love that you found her at random!

      In my experience in Humanities classes and English classes – Plath was the one that was taught. I don’t remember Sexton in the curriculum at all. I found Sexton through my obsession with Plath – and then moved into a Sexton obsession all on its own. In a lot of ways, I prefer Sexton’s stuff – although I’ll admit that the hold Plath has on me is pretty damn strong.

      // I identified with her so much I felt less alone, but while wrestling with my own demons about creative expression have so often told myself she covered the same ground I’ve wanted to cover, but better, and there is no way I’ll ever add value to what she’s already done. //

      Interesting. I think this is what Harold Bloom meant when he talked about “the anxiety of influence.”

      I agree with you – that she put to words things that had been elusive, especially in regards to women and madness.

      I know that something was set free in me when I read “Her Kind.” I had an emotional response to that poem unlike anything I ever experienced reading Plath.

      and I suppose it’s totally unfair that those two get looped together! They’re very different people and poets!

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