LIVE<\/b>
\nLive or die, but don’t poison everything…<\/i><\/p>\n
Well, death’s been here
\nfor a long time —
\nit has a hell of a lot
\nto do with hell
\nand suspicion of the eye
\nand the religious objects
\nand how I mourned them
\nwhen they were made obscene
\nby my dwarf-heart’s doodle.
\nThe chief ingredient
\nis mutilation.
\nAnd mud, day after day,
\nmud like a ritual,
\nand the baby on the platter,
\ncooked but still human,
\ncooked also with little maggots,
\nsewn onto it maybe by somebody’s mother,
\nthe damn bitch!<\/p>\n
Even so,
\nI kept right on going on,
\na sort of human statement,
\nlugging myself as if
\nI were a sawed-off body
\nin the trunk, the steamer trunk.
\nThis became perjury of the soul.
\nIt became an outright lie
\nand even though I dressed the body
\nit was still naked, still killed.
\nIt was caught
\nin the first place at birth,
\nlike a fish.
\nBut I play it, dressed it up,
\ndressed it up like somebody’s doll.<\/p>\n
Is life something you play?
\nAnd all the time wanting to get rid of it?
\nAnd further, everyone yelling at you
\nto shut up. And no wonder!
\nPeople don’t like to be told
\nthat you’re sick
\nand then be forced
\nto watch
\nyou
\ncome
\ndown with the hammer.<\/p>\n
Today life opened inside me like an egg
\nand there inside
\nafter considerable digging
\nI found the answer.
\nWhat a bargain!
\nThere was the sun,
\nher yolk moving feverishly,
\ntumbling her prize —
\nand you realize she does this daily!
\nI’d known she was a purifier
\nbut I hadn’t thought
\nshe was solid,
\nhadn’t known she was an answer.
\nGod! It’s a dream,
\nlovers sprouting in the yard
\nlike celery stalks
\nand better,
\na husband straight as a redwood,
\ntwo daughters, two sea urchings,
\npicking roses off my hackles.
\nIf I’m on fire they dance around it
\nand cook marshmallows.
\nAnd if I’m ice
\nthey simply skate on me
\nin little ballet costumes.<\/p>\n
Here,
\nall along,
\nthinking I was a killer,
\nanointing myself daily
\nwith my little poisons.
\nBut no.
\nI’m an empress.
\nI wear an apron.
\nMy typewriter writes.
\nIt didn’t break the way it warned.
\nEven crazy, I’m as nice
\nas a chocolate bar.
\nEven with the witches’ gymnastics
\nthey trust my incalculable city,
\nmy corruptible bed.<\/p>\n
O dearest three,
\nI make a soft reply.
\nThe witch comes on
\nand you paint her pink.
\nI come with kisses in my hood
\nand the sun, the smart one,
\nrolling in my arms.
\nSo I say Live<\/i>
\nand turn my shadow three times round
\nto feed our puppies as they come,
\nthe eight Dalmatians we didn’t drown,
\ndespite the warnings: The abort! The destroy!
\nDespite the pails of water that waited,
\nto drown them, to pull them down like stones,
\nthey came, each one headfirst, blowing bubbles the color of cataract-blue
\nand fumbling for the tiny tits.
\nJust last week, eight Dalmatians,
\n3\/4 of a lb., lined up like cord wood
\neach
\nlike a
\nbirch tree.
\nI promise to love more if they come,
\nbecause in spite of cruelty
\nand the stuffed railroad cars for the ovens,
\nI am not what I expected. Not an Eichmann.
\nThe poison just didn’t take.
\nSo I won’t hang around in my hospital shift,
\nrepeating The Black Mass and all of it.
\nI say Live, Live<\/i> because of the sun,
\nthe dream, the excitable gift.<\/p>\n
\n
\n“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<\/i> 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”<\/i><\/p>\n
“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><\/p>\n
” I hold back nothing.” — Anne Sexton, 1969<\/i><\/p>\n
“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<\/i><\/p>\n
“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<\/i><\/p>\n
“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<\/i><\/p>\n
Sylvia’s Death<\/b> – by Anne Sexton
\nfor Sylvia Plath<\/i><\/p>\n
O Sylvia, Sylvia,
\nwith a dead box of stones and spoons,<\/p>\n
with two children, two meteors
\nwandering loose in a tiny playroom,<\/p>\n
with your mouth into the sheet,
\ninto the roofbeam, into the dumb prayer,<\/p>\n
(Sylvia, Sylvia
\nwhere did you go
\nafter you wrote me
\nfrom Devonshire
\nabout rasing potatoes
\nand keeping bees?)<\/p>\n
what did you stand by,
\njust how did you lie down into?<\/p>\n
Thief —
\nhow did you crawl into,<\/p>\n
crawl down alone
\ninto the death I wanted so badly and for so long,<\/p>\n
the death we said we both outgrew,
\nthe one we wore on our skinny breasts,<\/p>\n
the one we talked of so often each time
\nwe downed three extra dry martinis in Boston,<\/p>\n
the death that talked of analysts and cures,
\nthe death that talked like brides with plots,<\/p>\n
the death we drank to,
\nthe motives and the quiet deed?<\/p>\n
(In Boston
\nthe dying
\nride in cabs,
\nyes death again,
\nthat ride home
\nwith our boy.)<\/p>\n
O Sylvia, I remember the sleepy drummer
\nwho beat on our eyes with an old story,<\/p>\n
how we wanted to let him come
\nlike a sadist or a New York fairy<\/p>\n
to do his job,
\na necessity, a window in a wall or a crib,<\/p>\n
and since that time he waited
\nunder our heart, our cupboard,<\/p>\n
and I see now that we store him up
\nyear after year, old suicides<\/p>\n
and I know at the news of your death
\na terrible taste for it, like salt,<\/p>\n
(And me,
\nme too.
\nAnd now, Sylvia,
\nyou again
\nwith death again,
\nthat ride home
\nwith our<\/i> boy.)<\/p>\n
And I say only
\nwith my arms stretched out into that stone place,<\/p>\n
what is your death
\nbut an old belonging,<\/p>\n
a mole that fell out
\nof one of your poems?<\/p>\n
(O friend,
\nwhile the moon’s bad,
\nand the king’s gone,
\nand the queen’s at her wit’s end
\nthe bar fly ought to sing!)<\/p>\n
O tiny mother,
\nyou too!
\nO funny duchess!
\nO blonde thing!<\/p>\n
“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<\/i><\/p>\n
\nMore on Anne Sexton here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading