The Sheila Variations: National Poetry Month: Anne Sexton

April 25, 2007

National Poetry Month: 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.

"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." -_ Michael Schmidt, "Lives of the Poets"

"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." -- Sylvia Plath, journal, April 23, 1959

" I hold back nothing." -- Anne Sexton, 1969

"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.'" -- Erica Jong

"My own struggle with Anne Sexton, for twenty years now, has not been about her subject matter (she is the one who taught me that you can write a poem about anything), but about the blatant deterioration of her talent. Sexton's Complete Poems appeared in 1981, edited by her daughter/literary executor Linda Gray Sexton. This volume includes the eight books Anne Sexton sent to press during her lifetime, as well as one hundred and thirty pages of posthumously published poems. Though fascinating as Sexton documents, the latter are shockingly sloppy and full of over-the-top, bad-trip imagery. This, coupled with the fact that the last three books she did publish (The Book of Folly, The Death Notebooks, and That Awful Rowing Toward God) saw an obvious decline in quality, has made it difficult to come to grips with her complete body of work. It also didn't help that, after her death, her former mentor Robert Lowell wrote that her writing had become "meager and exaggerated." 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. " -- David Trinidad

"One feels tempted to drop [Sexton's poems] furtively in the nearest ashcan, rather than to be caught with them in the presence of so much naked suffering." -- James Dickey

Sylvia's Death - by Anne Sexton
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!

"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." -- Anne Sexton