Anne Sexton Part I

We’re going to start the week with a review of Anne Sexton’s poetry by Diane McCormick who will be contributing to this blog regularly for awhile. Hopefully, I’ll post my review of more Sexton poems tomorrow, though I’m running a little late because of a follow-up surgery last week, a delightful grandson’s birthday, and the sheer amount of time it took to read Richard Wright’s book last week.

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The Massachusetts born poet Anne Sexton, 1928-1974, could only briefly be described as the thwarted mother and housewife of the 1950s, stifled at home unable to make her creativity known to the outside world, because before she died she had won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry and a full professorship at Boston College.

It is true she never received a college degree, but Anne wrote her way into the acquaintance of lovers, critics, fellow poets, and psychiatrists.

The best sources of information about her life come from Anne Sexton: a Biography written by Diane Wood Middlebrook, professor of English, Stanford University, and the foreword to The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton, written by long-time friend and fellow poet Maxine Kumin. Two web sites offer additional background, the Diane Middlebrook site and A Brief Biography of the Life of Anne Sexton. There are other web sites that discuss Anne Sexton, but these two seem the best. There is also The Academy of American Poets.

To say Anne Sexton was complex, controversial, and confessional only begins the conversation about her. She appears to have begun her life as an indifferent student who married young and gave birth to a daughter at the age of 25. Her mental illness may have begun with post partum depression, but she has also been called schizophrenic. Alcoholism and drug addiction contributed to her problems. So far I have not seen a picture of her without a cigarette in her hand.

At the age of 29 she began to write poetry at the suggestion of her therapist, a treatment program she followed the rest of her life, but she was hardly the quiet patient, writing to calm her fears and anxieties. She sought attention, doing lectures accompanied by her own rock band, “Her Kind.” Audio samples of her readings are available on the net at the Diane Middlebrook site.

Her poems were often challenged as just too confessional. Readers need to make up their own minds now that we are beyond the 1950s and 60s. Pick up The Complete Poems. There is something there for everyone. A sample follows of some of her work.

I know Loren has already written about “Courage,” but I have to add my own words because it is a favorite of mine.

Courage

It is in the small things we see it.

The child’s first step,

as awesome as an earthquake.

The first time you rode a bike,

wallowing up the sidewalk.

The first spanking when your heart

went on a journey all alone.

When they called you crybaby

or poor or fatty or crazy

and made you into an alien,

you drank their acid

and concealed it.

Later,

if you faced the death of bombs and bullets

you did not do it with a banner,

you did it with only a hat to

cover your heart.

You did not fondle the weakness inside you

though it was there.

Your courage was a small coal

that you kept swallowing.

If your buddy saved you

and died himself in so doing,

then his courage was not courage,

it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.

Later,

if you have endured a great despair,

then you did it alone,

getting a transfusion from the fire,

picking the scabs off your heart,

then wringing it out like a sock.

Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,

you gave it a back rub

and then you covered it with a blanket

and after it had slept a while

it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.

Later,

when you face old age and its natural conclusion

your courage will still be shown in the little ways,

each spring will be a sword you’ll sharpen,

those you love will live in a fever of love,

and you’ll bargain with the calendar

and at the last moment

when death opens the back door

you’ll put on your carpet slippers

and stride out.

Those of us “sturdy for common things” as William Stafford wrote, can continue to feel rewarded in Anne Sexton’s “Courage.”

For it takes courage to do the common things we do at every time in our lives. Imagine the courage it took to make that first step, an event “as awesome as an earthquake.” Or the first time we ride a bike, “wallowing up the sidewalk.”

The stanza continues to portray our courage in more introspective, less physical ways–perhaps times when we needed courage most of all, when we were spanked, instantly separated from a parent who was supposed to only hug us, or when we were teased, called poor or f ¯atty or crazy. “You drank their acid and concealed it. Courage gave us strength to conceal the sting of words flung in our faces.

The next stanza refers to the courage soldiers exhibit on the battlefield, references brought to Sexton’s mind from the Korean War in which her husband was a participant. The men faced the “death of bombs and bullets” stoically, with only a hat to cover your heart.” Courage on the battlefield was a small coal swallowed to keep alive. Then if a buddy dies saving you, his courage is elevated to love as simple as “shaving soap.”

These metaphors and personifications are the life’s blood of Sexton’s poems, the words, “as awesome as an earthquake,” “wallowing up the sidewalk,” “heart went on a journey all alone,” “drank their acid,” “courage was a small coal,” “love as simple as shaving soap,” pull the reader into her mind. These are extraordinary images of ordinary things–taking a first step, riding a bike, receiving a spanking, being teased, fighting a war, saving a buddy.

The last two stanzas are just as rich. We ordinary folk show courage when we endure despair, get “a transfusion from the fire, picking the scabs off your heart, then wring it out like a sock.” The stanza ends with the extended metaphor of caring for an infant, powdering, rubbing its back, putting it to sleep to wake to the “wings of roses…transformed.”

At the end of life we are the most courageous of all. In the spring we will renew ourselves as long as we can, sharpening our swords, to fight for life; we will love even more and bargain with the calendar. Finally when we can’t hang on anymore, we will put on our “carpet slippers and stride [not limp or crawl or sneak but stride] out.”

The sharpness of the images, the originality are unique but exact. Few can duplicate her imagery, but we can read and appreciate her work.

“Courage” is found in her book of poems entitled, The Awful Rowing Toward God, the last book published during Sexton’s life. Sexton wrote nine books of poetry, the titles of which give some insight into the woman: To Bedlam and Part Way Back, All My Pretty Ones (Macduff’s line from Macbeth upon learning Macbeth has slaughtered his entire family); Live or Die, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967; Love Poems, Transformations, The Book of Folly,The Death Notebooks, which Sexton originally meant to be published posthumously; The Awful Rowing Toward God, and 45 Mercy Street which was published posthumously. There are more uncollected, unedited poems which her daughter, Linda Gray Sexton, has included in her mother’s Complete Poems.

“Riding the Elevator into the Sky” is another from The Awful Rowing Toward God.

As the fireman said:

Don’t book a room over the fifth floor

in any hotel in New York.

They have ladders that will reach further

but no one will climb them.

As the New York Times said:

The elevator always seeks out

the floor of the fire

and automatically opens

and won’t shut.

These are the warnings

that you must forget

if you’re climbing out of yourself.

If you ’re going to smash into the sky.

Many times I’ve gone past

the fifth floor,

cranking upward,

but only once

have I gone all the way up.

Sixtieth floor:

small plants and swans bending

into their grave;

Floor two hundred:

mountains with the patience of a cat,

silence wearing its sneakers.

Floor five hundred:

messages and letters centuries old,

birds to drink,

a kitchen of clouds.

Floor six thousand;

the stars,

skeletons on fire,

their arms singing.

And a key,

a very large key,

that opens something–

some useful door–

somewhere–

up there.

The extended metaphor, the elevator ascending to heaven and, I think, self knowledge, appeals to me. One must not be warned away if she is to climb out of herself, if she is going to “smash into the sky,” burst into glory and achievement.

I can believe Sexton’s confession of her ascent as she goes beyond “the fifth floor, cranking upward,” past the “small plants and swans bending into their grave,” past the “mountains with the patience of a cat, silence wearing its sneakers,” beyond the “messages and letters centuries old,” “a kitchen of clouds,” “the stars, skeletons on fire,” to the “key…that opens something…somewhere–up there.” Such irony to reach the key that still offers no right or wrong answer, only more mystery– a key that opens something somewhere.

“Young” and “I Remember” are printed in her second book of poetry, All My Pretty Ones, 1962.

Young

A thousand doors ago

when I was a lonely kid

in a big house with four

garages and it was summer

as long as I could remember,

I lay on the lawn at night,

clover wrinkling under me,

the wise stars bedding over me,

my mother’s window a funnel

of yellow heat running out,

my father’s window, half shut,

an eye where sleepers pass,

and the boards of the house

were smooth and white as wax

and probably a million leaves

sailed on their strange stalks

as the crickets ticked together
and I, in my brand new body,

which was not a woman’s yet,

told the stars my questions

and thought God could really see

the heat and the painted light,

elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight.

As the title implies this is a remembrance of youth, a “thousand doors ago,” an adult remembering a summer home, lying out at night, looking up at the stars, mom and dad at home in the house. The house was a favorite, its boards smooth ad white as wax, surrounded by trees with a million leaves that hid the crickets. I hope everyone has such a house in her memory; for me it’s the old family farm house, to remember a time when we thought God could really see our dreams and our new formed bodies.

I Remember

By the first of August

the invisible beetles began

to snore and the grass was

as tough as hemp and was

no color–no more than

the sand was a color and

we had worn our bare feet

bare since the twentieth

of June and there were times

we forgot to wind up your

alarm clock and some nights

we took our gin warm and neat

from old jelly glasses while

the sun blew out of sight

like a red picture hat and

one day I tied my hair back

with a ribbon and you said

that I looked almost like

a puritan lady and what

I remember best is that

the door to your room was

the door to mine.

The child in “Young” is an adult now, drinking gin in jelly glasses, sharing a room with someone, a lover, I hope. There is a sweetness in these two poems that I don’t think is commented on enough in Sexton’s poetry. Her poems about “menstruation, abortion, masturbation, incest, adultery, and drug addiction” to quote her friend Maxine Kumin, draw much more attention. Of course, she wrote of sex, too. Read the very sensual “When a Man Enters a Woman” in The Awful Rowing Toward God and note the sadly ironic ending which could only be written by a woman of experience.

Sexton used nature as referenced in “Young” and “I Remember” and also in the next poem, “Snow.”

Snow

Snow,

blessed snow,

comes out of the sky

like bleached flies.

The ground is no longer naked.

The ground has on its clothes.

The trees poke out of sheets

and each branch wears the sock of God.

There is hope.

There is hope É everywhere.

I bite it.

Someone once said:

Don’t bite till you know

if it’s bread or stone.

What I bit is all bread,

rising, yeasty as a cloud.

There is hope.

There is hope everywhere.

Today God gives milk

and I have the pail.

A master of the extended metaphor, isn’t she? Hope, like snow, is everywhere. At this moment in her life God gave her snow–hope like milk and she had a pail. According to her biographers, she didn’t feel this way often enough. Sexton committed suicide.

Finally here is what some critics call her signature poem, “Her Kind” found in To Bedlam and Part Way Back, 1960.

Her Kind

I have gone out, a possessed witch,

haunting the black air, braver at night;

dreaming evil, I have done my hitch

over the plain house, 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.


All the roles of woman she has been by the grand age of 32–the bewitched woman, the housewife and mother, fixing supper for “worms and elves, whining, rearranging the disaligned.” She has been the survivor “learning the last bright routes.” Note the next to the last lines in each stanza for the ultimate clarity” “a woman like that is not a woman, quite…A woman like that is misunderstood…A woman like that is not ashamed to die.”

The signature of Anne Sexton

Diane McCormick

6 thoughts on “Anne Sexton Part I”

  1. yeahbaby anne sexton all the way!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! have a nice day 🙂

  2. I just started reading Anne Sexton and I have to write an essay on “Her Kind”. I am very interested in her work and did not realize how emotional and deep her work was till I read this poem and started my research!! She is very interesting.

  3. Anne Sexton’s poems connect with me immediately. I can’t wait to read more! Thank you for your comments.

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