[nyctom]

I promised myself I would post this, if only so some people who are not familiar with early Anne Sexton can know she didn't always write about her own craziness. I love this poem and have loved it since I first heard it at 13. I am sure there are a gazillion nits people can (and probably will) pick, but this is a personal favorite and I think it is a damn fine piece of writing. Yes, yes, it doesn't scan, but the narrative is marvelously handled. I think it is the best thing Sexton ever wrote. Bob--you better back me up on this!

nyctom


Some Foreign Letters


I knew you forever and you were always old,
soft white lady of my heart. Surely you would scold
me for sitting up late, reading your letters,
as if these foreign postmarks were meant for me.
You posted them first in London, wearing furs
and a new dress in the winter of eighteen-ninety.
I read how London is dull on Lord Mayor's Day,
where you guided past groups of robbers, the sad holes
of Whitechapel, clutching your pocketbook, on the way
to Jack the Ripper dissecting his famous bones.
This Wednesday in Berlin, you say, you will
go to a bazaar at Bismarck's house. And I
see you as a young girl in a good world still,
writing three generations before mine. I try
to reach into your page and breathe it back...
but life is a trick, life is a kitten in a sack.


This is the sack of time your death vacates.
How distant you are on your nickel-plated skates
in the skating park in Berlin, gliding past
me with your Count, while a military band
plays a Strauss waltz. I loved you last,
a pleated old lady with a crooked hand.
Once you read Lohengrin and every goose
hung high while you practiced castle life
in Hanover. Tonight your letters reduce
history to a guess. The Count had a wife.
You were the old maid aunt who lived with us.
Tonight I read how the winter howled around
the towers of Schloss Schwoebber, how the tedious
language grew in your jaw, how you loved the sound
of the music of the rats tapping on the stone
floors. When you were mine you wore an earphone.


This is Wednesday, May 9th, near Lucerne,
Switzerland. sixty-nine years ago. I learn
your first climb up Mount San Salvatore;
this is the rocky path, the hole in your shoes,
the yankee girl, the iron interior
of her sweet body. You let the Count choose
your next climb. You went together, armed
with alpine stocks, with ham sandwiches
and seltzer wasser. You were not alarmed
by the thick woods of briars and bushes,
nor the rugged cliff, nor the first vertigo
up over Lake Lucerne. The Count sweated
with his coat off as you waded through top snow.
He held your hand and kissed you. You rattled
down on the train to catch a steamboat for home;
or other postmarks: Paris, Verona, Rome.


This is Italy. You learn its mother tongue.
I read how you walked on the Palatine among
the ruins of the palaces of the Caesars;
alone in the Roman autumn, alone since July.
When you were mine they wrapped you out of here
with your best hat over your face. I cried
because I was seventeen. I am older now.
I read how your student ticket admitted you
into the private chapel of the Vatican and how
you cheered with the others, as we used to do
on the Fourth of July. One Wednesday in November
you watched a balloon, painted like a silver ball,
float up over the Forum, up over the lost emperors,
to shiver its little modern cage in an occasional
breeze. You worked your New England conscience out
beside artisans, chestnut vendors and the devout.


Tonight I will learn to love you twice;
learn your first days, you mid-Victorian face.
Tonight I will speak up and interrupt
your letters, warning you that wars are coming,
that the Count will die, that you will accept
your America back to live like a prim thing
on the farm in Maine. I tell you, you will come
here, to the suburbs of Boston, to see the blue-nose
world go drunk each night, to see the handsome
children jitterbug, to feel your left ear close
one Friday at Symphony. And I tell you,
you will tip your boot feet out of that hall,
rocking from its sour sound, out onto
the crowded street, letting your spectacles fall
and your hair net tangle as you stop passers-by
to mumble your guilty love while your ears die.

[Robert J. Clawson]

Don't "Bob you'd better" me. I have just a second, because the Leonids fire off in just a few minutes. I'll re-read it, but I've thought for years that her best was, "In the Deep Museum."

More later.

Bob

[Robert J. Clawson]

The Leonids fired from every quarter: looked like Reagan's missile shield gone awry. Not your normal morning.

Here's the Sexton poem. After a retrospective by Peter Davison in the Forest Hills Cemetery chapel, Lois Ames read it today at Sexton's grave.

In the Deep Museum

My God, my God, what queer corner am I in?
Didn’t I die, blood running down the post,
lungs gagging for air, die there for the sin
of anyone, my sour mouth giving up the ghost?
Surely my body is done? Surely I died?
And yet, I know, I’m here. What place is this?
Cold and queer, I sting with life. I lied.
Yes, I lied. Or else in some damned cowardice
my body would not give me up. I touch
fine cloth with my hands and my cheeks are cold.
If this is hell, then hell could not be much,
neither as special nor as ugly as I was told.

What’s that I hear, snuffling and pawing its way
toward me? Its tongue knocks a pebble out of place
as it slides in, a sovereign. How can I pray?
It is panting; it is an odor with a face
like the skin of a donkey. It laps my sores.
It is hurt, I think, as I touch its little head.
It bleeds. I have forgiven murderers and whores
and now I must wait like old Jonah, not dead
nor alive, stroking a clumsy animal. A rat.
His teeth test me; he waits like a good cook,
knowing his own ground. I forgive him that,
as I forgave my Judas the money he took.

Now I hold his soft red sore to my lips
as his brothers crowd in, hairy angels who take
my gift. My ankles are a flute. I lose hips
and wrists. For three days, for love’s sake,
I bless this other death. Oh, not in air --
in dirt. Under the rotting veins of its roots,
under the markets, under the sheep bed where
the hill is food, under the slippery fruits
of the vineyard, I go. Unto the bellies and jaws
of rats I commit my prophecy and fear.
Far below The Cross, I correct its flaws.
We have kept the miracle. I will not be here.

Bob

[nyctom]

I love that one too. I know she drives the staunch formalists crazy, but I think she took the forms and adapted them to her own purposes. And while I often wonder if AS riles so many people because she is so popular. I have given copies of her poems to people who swore they would never read poetry and they have loved her work. The "Transformations" poems are great if you want to turn a kid onto poetry. Let's face it, most kids are not going to get off on the subtle beauty of a slant rhyme or an intricate stanza pattern. But there is something about AS that makes many people who think they don't like poetry find something in it they can keep and admire.

I also love this poem, written after both her parents died within months of each other.

The Truth the Dead Know

Gone, I say and walk from church
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one's alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in their stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye, and knucklebone.

It is a rather creepy elegy--not only does the persona refuse the rituals of mourning, but the dead have their own refusals as well. It is not a comforting poem, but, I think, a profoundly honest one--much in the same way that "Jane Eyre" is profoundly honest that childhood can be pretty shitty.

[Kate Benedict]

Is "In the Deep Museum" based on a painting depicting Xt's body's being eaten by rats, or did AS make the story up?

[Robert J. Clawson]

I believe it's her story, but there could be a painting. Do you know of such, Kate?

Bob

[Kate Benedict]

No, I don't know of such, but the title "In the Deep Museum" suggests that a painting may have inspired the poem. Or maybe she was mentally "superimposing" a scene from Bosch onto the great Christian mystery. It reads that way.

It's a fine poem, one I've gone back to again and again. The one thing that disturbs me is its theological oddity. It's Christianity without resurrection or ascension: the empty tomb only.

I'm not a Sexton basher. She was, for me, a key early influence. As a young poet, I would sit on my bed, reading poetry for hours, Anne Sexton on one side of me, Richard Wilbur on the other. No one told me that they were polar opposites, you see ... and so I learned from both. The craft and cleverness of Wilbur, the passion and biographical impulse of Sexton -- that's what I hope to combine in my own writing.

It is also true, as this thread implies, that Sexton was a much more careful writer in the beginning of her career. Success led her astray, perhaps; certainly her mental problems grew more severe. Also, like so many successful poets, she published too much! And she developed some serious writerly "tics" -- such as an overreliance on clipped metaphors ("Horse, you flame thrower,/you shark-mouthed man,/you laughter at the end of poems,/you brown furry locomotive/whipping the snow..."). She lost control somehow.

[A. E. Stallings]

I love "where the sea swings in like an iron gate"... Wonderful stuff.

I agree that her boldness works better when she is trying to rein it in.

[nyctom]

I don't know. I think some of the places where she lets it go full throttle are very interesting--like the Transformations poems and the Jesus sequence. It may have been for several reasons she gave up that marvelous control: most of early mentors had had enough dealings with her, she took an enormous amount of pills and booze, there were always those who clap clapped no matter what she did. Those late poems are fascinating to me. Every now and then a really good poem emerges, but otherwise it is a terrifying exhibition of a talent disintegrating in front your eyes.

[Robert J. Clawson]

[quote]Originally posted by Kate Benedict:
[b]

"...maybe she was mentally "superimposing" a scene from Bosch onto the great Christian mystery."

Kate, I like this. Sexton was an autodidactic and sucked up a lot of culture from friends. Maybe someone showed her a Bosch at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, or just a print, but I like the idea as potential for inspiration. Anne was a wonderfully creative thinker. The "housewife" tag, was more promotional than accurate. I found her a marvelously stimulating associate.

"It's a fine poem, one I've gone back to again and again."

I love to hear this: it's what makes classics.

"The one thing that disturbs me is its theological oddity. It's Christianity without resurrection or ascension: the empty tomb only."

I so much wish you'd said the tomb empty only. I don't know why, maybe just rhythm. Anyway, it's NOT a theological poem, it's a piece of naturalistic literature, an in-you-face proposition of what might really have happened.

"I'm not a Sexton basher. She was, for me, a key early influence. As a young poet, I would sit on my bed, reading poetry for hours, Anne Sexton on one side of me, Richard Wilbur on the other."

This is a wonderful combination. I watched each of them read at the famed De Cordova Museum west of Boston. But, like Wilbur, Anne, in her early poetry, as Maxine Kumin instructed her, pounded it into form. Most of Sexton's early work is formal: read it again.

"No one told me that they were polar opposites..."

They weren't. They were closer than their reputations instruct, especially in Sexton's first three books.

"Success led her astray, perhaps; certainly her mental problems grew more severe. Also, like so many successful poets, she published too much! And she developed some serious writerly "tics" -- such as an overreliance on clipped metaphors ("Horse, you flame thrower,/you shark-mouthed man,/you laughter at the end of poems,/you brown furry locomotive/whipping the snow..."). She lost control somehow."

At a Poetry Society of America observance of Sexton, called "Anne Sexton Revisited," several poets read and talked about her work. The more formal poets loved her early work; the free-verse advocates loved her later work. I know that she tired of formal verse and tried to open up, and that she loved how Picasso had worked from representational to wildly abstract art. I think that Sexton thought that her later work was more like Picasso's later work, and I think that we might take a look at it in that context and decide if she was still a good writer.

There's no question that her "mental problems" led her astray, but they were more likely caused by alcohol abuse than anything she'd previously survived. Her "loss of control" was pretty much a physical thing. I think that she felt she was still controlling her later poetry, just changing it. If you look at her earlier work, she'd already proved herself a master of verse forms. In "The Deep Museum," she exhibits an exquisite control of line and rime.

She died at only 44 years old. She wrote a great batch of poetry in just a few years. Jealousies and her daughter's hardheaded control of rights have kept Sexton in a minor realm, but I think her work will rise above all the biographical gossip.

Bob