I think I fell in love with Anne Sexton in June, 1997, staring at a picture of her through a display case as part of an exhibit on American poets at the New York Public Library. I had never before seen a poet who was so, well, sexy. She looked like an actress (which, in a way, she was, as well as a fashion model). And then I started reading her work and was immediately attracted to the rawness of it. I was 20 years old then, and the brutal honesty of the confessional school, with its nursery rhyme meditations on death and suicide, appealed to me. Looking back at her work now, I can see some of the problems, particularly the way Sexton publicly flirted with death in her work for nearly 20 years before finally killing herself in September, 1974. At times it seemed as if her work embodied a sort of self-fulfilling destructive narcissism in which her exposure of her psychological traumas became more intense through the act of performance. Without her suicide to bookend her career, her work would have seemed fraudulent; it was almost as if she had to take her own life to demonstrate that her confessional style was not all an act.
All that said, however, I still enjoy her work, and this poem, from her 1966 Pulitzer Prize winning collection Live or Die, remains one of my favorites.
Wanting To Die
Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.
I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.
Then the almost unnameable lust returns.
Even then I have nothing against life.
I know well the grass blades you mention
the furniture you have placed under the sun.
But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.
Twice I have so simply declared myself
have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,
have taken on his craft, his magic.
In this way, heavy and thoughtful,
warmer than oil or water,
I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.
I did not think of my body at needle point.
Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.
Suicides have already betrayed the body.
Still-born, they don't always die,
but dazzled, they can't forget a drug so sweet
that even children would look on and smile.
To thrust all that life under your tongue! --
that, all by itself, becomes a passion.
Death's a sad bone; bruised, you'd say,
and yet she waits for me, year after year,
to so delicately undo an old wound,
to empty my breath from its bad prison.
Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,
raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,
leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,
leaving the page of a book carelessly open,
something unsaid, the phone off the hook
and the love, whatever it was, an infection.
There is a "between the lines" project by Moritz Eggert based on her poems that almost works. I am more partial to Igeborg Bachmann who is kind of the Austrian version of Anne Sexton and appropriately darker and more neurotic.
Posted by: Damon Smith at April 5, 2006 4:39 PMThat poem is wonderful, it captures just how im feeling lately.
Posted by: Gary at April 5, 2006 7:42 PMYeah, this poem often has resonated for me as well during tough times. There's something about the phrase "empty my breath from its bad prison" that rings particularly true from time to time.
Posted by: David Jones at April 5, 2006 7:48 PMA powerful poem, and a frightening one: what is life if suicide can be spoken of so beautifully and lovingly?
I'm also struck by how stanza three x-rays American 20th century culture. J. Robert Oppenheimer on developing the atomic bomb: "When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success."
Posted by: Richard at April 6, 2006 7:56 AMThe Moritz Eggert disc (Wide Unclasp) was one of my favorite purchases last year, although I agree that it's not completely successful. His recent one, I Belong the Road I Know, is also quite good, but quite different.
Sexton had some great titles. With a title like "For My Lover, Returning To His Wife" is a poem even necessary?
Posted by: soulfrieda at April 6, 2006 12:38 PMIsn't it fairly widely known that Anne Sexton sexually abused her young daughter? I broach such a contentious thing not be provocative but to wonder why this is so rarely discussed in connection with Sexton's work and life, while, say, John Cheever's homosexuality tends to go hand-in-hand with discussions of his work. If a famous 20th Century male poet had sexually molested his daughter, I can imagine there would be arguments for striking his name from the public record and pulling his books from school libraries. Thoughts?
Posted by: Richard Harland Smith at April 7, 2006 9:48 AMI read the daughter's memoir several years ago, and can't say I remember much about it, but I remember thinking that the sexual abuse described in the book was pretty mild compared to your more typical sexual abuse allegations.
Regardless, I don't think it should make any difference to whether her books should be in libraries or anything like that.
Posted by: David Jones at April 7, 2006 10:48 AMMe, I fell in love with Anne, knowing nothing about her but her words, from a copy of a collection of American verse at the Inn Dae Won in
Seoul during a visa run during my bushiban teacher days.
And the following became my favorite, before I heard about any of the concerns discussed in the comments above:
PAIN FOR A DAUGHTER
Blind with love, my daughter
has cried nightly for horses,
those long-necked marchers and churners
that she has mastered, any and all,
reigning them in like a circus hand --
the excitable muscles and the ripe neck;
tending this summer, a pony and a foal.
She who is too squeamish to pull
a thorn from the dog’s paw,
watched her pony blossom with distemper,
the underside of the jaw swelling
like an enormous grape.
Gritting her teeth with love,
she drained the boil and scoured it
with hydrogen peroxide until pus
ran like milk on the barn floor
Blind with loss all winter,
in dungarees, a ski jacket and a hard hat,
she visits the neighbors’ stable,
our acreage not zoned for barns;
they who own the flaming horses
and the swan-whipped thoroughbred
that she tugs at and cajoles,
thinking it will burn like a furnace
under her small-hipped English seat.
Blind with pain she limps home
the thoroughbred has stood on her foot.
He rested there like a building.
He grew into her foot until they were one.
The marks of the horseshoe printed
into her flesh, the tips of her toes
ripped off like pieces of leather,
three toenails swirled like shells
and left to float in blood in her riding boot.
Blind with fear, she sits on the toilet,
her foot balanced over the washbasin,
her father, hydrogen peroxide in hand,
performing the rites of the cleansing.
She bites on a towel, sucked in breath,
sucked in and arched against the pain,
her eyes glancing off me where
I stand at the door, eyes locked
on the ceiling, eyes of a stranger,
and then she cries...
Oh my God, help me!
Where a child would have cried Mama!
Where a child would have believed Mama!
she bit the towel and called on God
and I saw her life stretch out...
I saw her torn in childbirth,
and I saw her, at that moment,
in her own death and I knew that she
knew
italics are supposed to end after second "Mama!"
Posted by: godoggo at April 18, 2006 11:17 PMyour page is pretty, i'm happy to come upon it...this is my favorite poem in the whole world. i want a tattoo of a couple lines on my body. what you wrote about her is completely on-the-dot. "her work embodied a sort of self-fulfilling destructive narcissim..."
Posted by: Mimi Brooks at May 6, 2006 12:30 PM(...sound of tumbleweed blowing across the mainstreet of a ghost Web site...)
Posted by: Frank at May 10, 2006 8:31 AMIt's almost....too quiet.
Posted by: Brian Olewnick at May 10, 2006 9:34 AMBrian--I thought I'd never hear you say that. :) Thoughts on Malfatti/Mattin? That's what I'd call "too quiet".
Posted by: N.D. at May 10, 2006 12:23 PMHeard Whitenoise, Nate? I much prefer that.
Meanwhile things are pretty quiet, yes - but that's probably because I'm spending most of my time these days with the Rowe / Toshi disc and the Loren Connors set on Family Vineyard, both terrific and both extremely hard to write about.
Nate, review ready to go. I'm waiting for Will to forward a cover pic bigger than my thumbnail...I like it a lot, I'm guessing more than Dan? Also still digesting Rowe/Nakamura; love it. There's a *scale* about it that's wonderful but, at the same time, difficult (for me) to verbalize about...
Posted by: Brian Olewnick at May 10, 2006 1:03 PMThat new Polwechsel disc is an ear opener...not to mention Niblock's newest offering...not to mention the entire Gil Scott-Heron backcatalogue which I'm falling in love with all over again.
Posted by: Tom Sekowski at May 10, 2006 2:00 PMAre we talking a review of the Malfatti Mattin for Bags here, Brian? I look fwd to reading your thoughts with great interest. Funny, Mattin sent me a mail about this disc telling me that I probably wouldn't like it (at least not as much as Whitenoise, which I thought - and still think - is perhaps Malfatti's best outing since the Timescraper solo).. I wonder how he guessed! I haven't honestly had enough time with the music to make any sensible comments (not that I'm ever able to make many sensible comments in the first place about anything, I sometimes wonder), but the rather fetishistic quotes from Radu all over the cover are rather bothersome. I've maintained for a while that Radu has, in my opinion, somewhat fallen victim to what he criticised in others, ie a certain stagnation. Or, if you prefer, predictability. And one thing I love about Mattin in particular is his total lack of predictability.. even Whitenoise has some nasty moments.
But anyway, I guess this will all come up on some future thread here. Bags is back!
to empty my breath from its bad prison.
I really love that.
Where a child would have cried Mama!
Where a child would have believed Mama!
she bit the towel and called on God
So painful.
I think you completely misunderstood the reason behind Sexton's writing. Why she started writing in the first place was to SAVE herself--it was the eye of the hurricane in her otherwise chaotic life. It helped her deal with her depression. Though death was inevitable, writing held it off long enough for her to write six books (1 posthumously published). Please read more of Sexton's biography before you pass judgement on her character.
Posted by: Anna at June 17, 2006 12:33 AMI think you completely misunderstood the reason behind Sexton's writing. Why she started writing in the first place was to SAVE herself--it was the eye of the hurricane in her otherwise chaotic life. It helped her deal with her depression. Though death was inevitable, writing held it off long enough for her to write six books (1 posthumously published). Please read more of Sexton's biography before you pass judgement on her character.
I have read her biography, as well as her daughter's memoirs, as well as Sexton's published letters, and all her poems. I don't think the relationship between her death and her poetry is nearly as simple as you make it out to be. She expressed envy at Sylvia Plath's death, and the way that her suicide enhanced her fame. Plus, I think that the performative aspect of confessional poetry tends to blur with self-mythologizing. This is my own experience as a writer who was deeply influenced by Sexton.
I'm not passing judgment on her character, only on the relationship between her poetry and her public persona, culminating in her self-prophesied suicide.
But I do agree that Sexton took up poetry as a way of rescuing herself from self-destruction. But I also believe that as her fame grew, the relationship between her poetry and her illness became more complex.
Posted by: David Jones at June 18, 2006 12:04 PMSo what do you think of assigning Pain For a Daughter to a class of 8th Grade English students (after reading Hedda Gabler, The Hunger Artist and The Infant Prodigy)? After finishing Anne Frank it's on to Lord of the Flies....
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