A confession about Anne Sexton from the occasional poetry reader

Poetry makes me contented. I’m not sure if that’s cool to admit anymore, but I can pick up some verse, sink into it and come back out feeling more mentally rested. As if that isn’t a strange enough to confess (these days), I’ll one up it: when I look to my bookshelf for a bit of poetry, there’s one go to volume that beats the rest: Anne Sexton: The Complete Poems.

I know: “Isn’t she a girl’s writer?"

I first picked up my volume of Sexton because I had a crush on a girl in college who liked the more sexual, free verse poets of the 60s. Sexton held my attention, then, with her rewritten fairy tales from her 1971 collection, Transformations. New spins on stories I knew lured me in, but the character of her writing kept me hanging around.

Here are some moments in her writing that appeal to qualities I like:

I like dark imagery: In her poem “Rats Live on no Evil Star,” she describes Eve giving birth to an evil thing by saying it has a “bellyful of dirt.”

Cleverness: In her poem “Rumplestiltskin,” she finds a witty way to capture the sadness of the peasant girl forced to spin gold for the king:

Poor grape with no one to pick. Luscious and round and sleek. Poor thing. To die and never see Brooklyn.

Humor: She made me laugh with the second line of the fourth verse of her poem, “Gods” when she wrote:

She prayed in all the churches of the world and learned a great deal about culture.

“The Sermon of the Twelve Acknowledgments” is filled with her wry humor. She even opens with a laugh:

January? The month is dumb. It is fraudulent.

Also,

If someone dies in October do not sweep the house for three days.

Anne, that will be no problem.

Also,

November? Shave. whether you have hair or not. Hair is not good.

Tension: In “Oh,” she captures the tension between female sexuality and intellect when a character says.

“You suicide bitch! I’d like to take a corkscrew and screw out all your brains and you’d never be back ever.”

In “Cripples and Other Stories,” she describes growing up with her mother and father.

Mother frowned at my wasted life. My father smoked cigars.

A poignant euphemism: In “The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator,” she runs through a series of regret filled thoughts about a lover who cheated on her and left and reminds you at the end of what she’s doing now, without him. She says, “At night, alone, I marry the bed.”

Irony: In “The White Snake,” a traveling man is made to compete in a contest to win the heart of a princess, after completing several extraordinary tasks the extraordinary man gets to marry into royalty. Extraordinary. Yet Sexton ends the poem in a way that, I think captures her thoughts on domesticity as an end in itself:

They played house, little charmers exceptionally well. So, of course, they were placed in a box and painted identically blue and thus passed their days living happily ever after – a kind of coffin a kind of blue funk Is it not?

A choice image: In “Whale,” she captures the boredom of workers in New York by simply writing, “…we are sick of writing checks.”

These are just moments that I like. They give you hints, but really I just like her whole work. I get this one big feeling from Sexton’s poems. The feeling changes its nuances and tones and timbres along the way, but it is all one. I can dip into it, flip around at random, read poetry from 1960 and 1971 and it’s all there. It’s stimulating and comforting at once, like warm peppermint tea, like Indian food.

As I have been thinking about my relationship with this book this morning, I got to running the numbers, I realized that I’ve had this volume of Sexton’s work for about thirteen years - which is longer than almost all of my friendships. It’s one of the books I bought when I left my job at a Southeast Kansas bookstore to go to college. I bought it because during quiet times in the store, I liked to pick it up and flip about. The volume I have sat on the shelf of our bookstore the whole time I worked there. The only person that ever picked it up was me. Then, I took it home.

Now that I’ve said I have had this book for so long, you’ll think I’m an expert on Sexton. I’m not. I probably haven’t read half the poems in it. I just found these selections by flipping about this morning. Years have passed that I’ve never opened the book.

If you can’t tell, it makes me a little nervous to admit that I am a poetry fan, because I feel like you’re going to expect me to be able to quote passages to you. To be the sort that knows his poets bios. To have special insights on their verse. I can’t, I’m not and I won’t. I just read poetry. Sometimes. It passes through me. I won’t even remember the ones I have quoted here tomorrow. Usually, I read a poem twice, because you appreciate it the first time and see the whole thing the second time. Still, I don’t necessarily remember them — not in the way you might mean by that.

I don’t know why poetry isn’t exactly cool anymore. It’s alive and well in song lyrics and it’s doing okay in the spoken word seen. As printed matter, though, it isn’t doing so well. Maybe that’s because of the pernicious tedium poetry zealots make of the form? Picking apart a poem can be fun and satisfying, but only if you want to. It’s like music. I read a poem much like I listen to a song. Afterwards, I won’t remember much but the singer’s name, how it felt and whether or not I thought it was nice.

I find Anne Sexton’s work very, very nice. Might be a funny thing to say about a writer like her, but I do.