Art, Poetry, Writing

Fifty Shades of Anne Gray Sexton

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I finished reading Anne Sexton: A Biography by Diane Wood Middlebrook. It was insightful, and the second Sexton-related biography I read this year. The first was written by Anne Sexton’s eldest daughter, Linda: Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother.

I enjoyed the Middlebrook biography more, but both played off each other well. Some thoughts:

1.) A Biography caused a stir
when it was released, for outing a sexual relationship between Anne
Sexton and one of her later psychiatrists. Among the immediate problems
that come to mind: conducting an affair during the scheduled therapy
hour as part of therapy and charging for it. Caused concern among her
friends at the time, and remains an eyebrow-raiser now.

2.)
More controversially, A Biography relies on many hours of recorded
sessions between Anne Sexton and the main psychiatrist of her life, Dr.
Martin Orne. The material was used with the permission of Linda Sexton,
her mother’s literary executor, and the book has a foreword by Dr.
Orne to put things in context. No big deal. Auxiliary family members had
a problem with it, Linda sanctioned it. Good insights resulted.
Middlebrook did a good job using fragments to shed light on Sexton’s
life and work. 

3.) Anne
Sexton’s poetry started in her 20s, at the suggestion of Dr. Orne as a
way to deal with her mental and emotional issues.  It helped.

4.) It is a romantic notion to regard the artist as shaman, one who has a
schizophrenic break and becomes shifted from the rest of our humdrum
reality. That has a bit of bearing on Sexton’s creativity and
productivity. Primarily, though, that romantic notion gets set aside as
true blue mental illness seems an outright pain in the ass with
devastating consequences for the sufferer, family, and friends. It’s not
that the person is ahead of his/her time so much as the wiring is off, leading
to sparks of brilliance than extended short circuiting and shutdowns.
The upcycle of mania may be fun. The downcycle is hellish.

5.) Middlebrook was trustworthy in both the conveyance of Sexton’s life and interpretation of her art. 

6.) I admire Dr. Orne’s willingness to endorse use of the confidential
material, and especially admire Linda Sexton’s willingness to share a
variety of personally embarrassing and harrowing details in her own book
and allowing Middlebrook to probe and bring things to light the rest of
the family would likely object to. It mattered to understand the art.

Art, Reading, Writing

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us

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“I think we ought to read only the kind of books
that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with
a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us
happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no
books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could
write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a
disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more
than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone,
like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
   

— Franz Kafka, letter to Oskar Pollak, 27-January-1904

Poetry, Reading, Writing

The time I (didn’t really) pass out at a bookstore

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The first paragraph below is real. The other paragraphs are largely made-up.

Upstairs to the Poety & Beat Literature room. Community Bulletin Board asks questions, customers answer with Post-Its. 
Upstairs to the Poety & Beat Literature room. Community Bulletin Board asks questions, customers answer with Post-Its. 

Upstairs in the Poetry & Beat Literature room in the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco it was muggy, musty, but calm and infused with history. Beats! I knew little about them other than what could be gleaned from movies and television. I’ve not read any Kerouac and only a little Ginsberg. Gore Vidal in his memoir Palimpsest boasted of buggering Kerouac. Always the buggerer, never the buggeree. I stipulation I now know was common among homosexuals. Then, it seemed an odd and selfish admission from Vidal given his libertine reputation but typically offered few personal details.

Maybe he placed a silver dollar on Kerouac’s back, who, when he caught his breath exclaimed: “I can use this!” 

Above the bookshelves, posters ran round the room of poets that listed the year of the photo. Walt Whitman. Edna St. Vincent Millay. Anne Sexton. 

A trigger was pulled and I stomped downstairs and yelled at the slight blond young man at the register with an earnest soft meticulous beard. “How can this place have a poster of Anne Sexton and not one of Sylvia Plath?” A pause. My loudness increased. “They’re both American. I revere Anne Sexton. She’s a personal favorite and I talk with her in dreams. But Plath is the better, stronger poet. What are the standards here? Is Plath thought of as too precious? Too much the purview of cloistered Women’s Studies departments and sensitive teenage souls to be brought out for display? Break Plath free!”  I stumbled over my tongue on the last sentence and repeated is more slowly and loudly. “Break Plath free! Bring her to the Pantheon upstairs! Set her among the stars!”

I blacked out. Then I came to. I was still in the City Lights Bookstore, seated at a corner table, my head resting against a bookshelf. A paper cup of water was in front of me and I sipped from it. My courier bag was set at my feet. I dragged the main zipper open to extract my large Moleskine journal. I fetched a pen, and opened my journal to see a series of blue and red marks and edits across the 30 or so pages I had already written up. 

Violated, I looked closely and found myself agreeing with almost all the suggestions. I made faces at the excess of added commas. I am a devotee of the Oxford comma, but loathe when commas are added to indicate a pause as if in a speech. Not necessary. Ruins the flow. 

I took myself, the cup of water, my bag, my pen, and my emended journal and exited the bookstore, placing a dollar in the tip jar for art, shame, and karma. 

Activity, Poetry, Writing

My dead dog doggerel – “Who goes with Argus?”

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I hate the grim calculations and budgeting that comes with an ailing pet – slim and expensive chances to maintain that pet’s health but that may also increase its distress to no benefit. I hate, once euthanasia is done, how it changes the rhythms and routines of the home, even if it means less clean-up. I hate knowing if I killed my own meat for food I’d still be sad at times like these, but more pragmatic.

Due to her bladder cancer, diminishing energy, and messy external symptoms – I euthanized our dog of 14 and a half years this afternoon. I got her a cheeseburger for lunch today (Burgerville), because, fuck it.

Who goes with Argus?

You are now a fuzzy hide over meat.
You used to be a wheezing farting bag
Of love and company and eating and shame
And delight.
Now inert. No, gone.
You are only in our memories.
We are no longer in yours.

Activity, Poetry, Writing

When you were young

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A meter tracking bike traffic on the Hawthorne Bridge in Portland. Like London Bridge in The Wasteland :
A meter tracking bike traffic on the Hawthorne Bridge in Portland. Like London Bridge in The Wasteland : “so many/I had not thought death had undone so many.” but happier.

Images crawl up
Then are broadcast
For us to see
Into your past
When you were young.

Poses struck while
A camera clicked.
Days passed outside
Past what was snapped
When you were young.

The snaps resurface
Years later with
“Remember?” “Place?”
Sentimental whiffs
When you were young.

Others of us
Bear witness though
Not witnesses
Then, piqued to view
When you were young.

Ripeness, smoothness
And smiles thrown hard.
Warding distress
Like priest or bard
When you were young.

How, who was she.
Outstretch fingers.
If the same age,
Did they linger
When you were young.

You are hiding
Molting beauty
Sun skin honeying.
You were not you
When you were young.

I now hear you,
“I remember”
Sighed to be kind.
Arid nod back to
When you were young.

Dimmer souls swarm
And cling on you.
I’d want to warm
But not love you
When you were young.

I get stuck on
Your life from then
To now and when
You became you from
When you were young.

Did it turn when
Your edge cut through.
Someone heard when
You spoke your truth
When you were young.

The friends in stasis
Are the same but
Slower. Their paths
Clear, even back to
When you were young.

Fact and will changes
Every molecule
Of you. Estranging
Yourself more from
When you were young.

Poetry, Writing

Good night, Anne

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For months your book of poems sat atop all the other books on my nightstand.
I would read a poem, or two, or three
And re-read them once, or twice.
And dream of you and me. We would sit.
You had no Minerva wisdom,
Manifesting a shimmering catalog model now leading a life of thought.

We would talk. And act. And each morning I would wake
And approve and wonder why you had visited.

As I have now come to the end of your work, the book set down
To be shelved soon,
I realized why you never had advice.
You were not a sage. You set the pen down and let the car run
And exhale its happily fine particled gas and smoke to fill
Your lungs more gently than the acrid burn of cigarette ash.
Little more warm smog than on a busy intersection and not moving.
The hum of activity making your garage both busy and alone.
You thought of your beautiful friend’s undercalculated death.
Cassandra’s last cry not meant as a final cry.
But she famously made a man’s cheek trickle blood.
You thought of her and wanted to go.
Ten years on, the world drawn small
And unyielding and nothing shown for enduring it.
You knew you’d be a nuisance for those who found you.
But you wanted to go.

I close your book and my heart aches, but the world grows.
What we shared is the sigh of smarts to drown out our wants.
We heaved measured words and smiled and threw darts
From our desk chairs or living rooms with our feet up on ottomans
And won. We pinned down for a time the things that
We saw approach.
A victory of sight and talking over the whispering loam that sustains our homes
Until the brittle frames snap or rot from tremors or time or newer houses
And the earth that oozed us up sops us back in.

Your mind and wants and moans are on paper on my nightstand.
A cat has knocked that book to the floor many times.
You would have laughed each time.
That same cat now lays and warms my back as I write this,
My stomach on my bed,
In my bedroom over the garage.
As I shift its front claws stick to the back of my shirt.

Poetry, Writing

Drawer

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With a need for something I slide the drawer open.
Metal and plastic and metal tools clatter.
How many years since I used some of these?

When children inherit cluttered drawers do they scavenge
     and consider “What is this?”
“A melon baller.” their sibling or spouse or partner will answer.
And that will be it. Tossed back with a clatter.

Will they recall that I hated canteloupe?
Will the melon baller find its way to their home?
Will they neglect it as I did?
Will they manufacture a false memory of me scooping
     melon shavings into juicy cold globes?
Will they donate it?
“Why did our parents have three pair of scissors in this drawer?”

My darlings, I never knew, either.

Writing

Writing sample, pt. 1

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A sample from my writing project. A main character contemplates an uhappily deposed ruler being reincarnated. As a non sequitur, including a screenshot of accounts recommended as “Similar to God” by Twitter (“God” is a Twitter account I follow):

Some of his greatness could become part of a squirrel or wolf, who for some minute reason would be the mightiest and most ambitious of its group. Commanding respect. He would find that novelty and form of reward more gratifying than the restoration of wearisome familiarity held by again holding dominion over all who beheld him. A piece of him would be content in its element, satisfied with a day’s achievement having strived for only things within its grasp. A felled deer for the pack. A stash of tree nuts and acquisition. Maintenance and cooperation with a mate. Even if the day was not perfect, the next held promise for sufficient status and shelter and nourishment. He would feel full and not lost, not like a log with its center rotted out and coated with a sap always on fire with no remedy for the crackling and burning that he took with him everywhere.

Art, Poetry, Writing

Double put-on, or not!

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So, yes, posting about Anne Sexton again. Saw this on Facebook and was amused by Anne Sexton’s reverie on camera about music:

Where are the t.v. shows capturing artist rapt in enthusiasmos instead of stars stumbling in and out of buildings and cars?

While typing up purple prose from my hand-written manuscript (Dirty parts, yay! Also: yikes and ugh!) I came across this quote from Anne Sexton I jotted down from a podcast in June 2012 (where I was in my manuscript). The quote is over-the-top. Most anyone can think of good poetry that isn’t extruded from the writer’s marrow. But then I saw this photo and laughed and decided to put it all together. Don’t know what the deal is with the dress, but fair guess it was funny. Check the cigarette cherry!