Confessional poetry of ANNE SEXTON...and Her Kind by Diana Saenz
Imagine if you will, Newton, Massachusetts circa 1955. Let us pick the spring, when New Englanders have shed their winter coats and the freshness of winter still clings as the first leaves unfold assuring us of a lush summer. The house-proud suburbanites present a sense of order, a slice of Americana at it's simple best. There are children playing, their bicycles left unattended on well-groomed lawns. Mothers are chatting to each other, exchanging household tips and gossip, overseeing the cleaning of their soon to be filled swimming pools. Their husbands have already left for work in their suits and Oldsmobiles to their reliable jobs, the reliable providers of their single income homes. Well, this might be enough to drive anybody mad, let alone the young woman who lives a few houses down, with a history of relatives not			strangers to alcoholism, nervous breakdowns, and sanitariums. She paces the rooms, nervously twisting her dark tresses into a mass of tangles. She catches her reflection and frantically brushes her hair. Although it is only 1:00 p.m., she mixes some tonic and gin and gulps it down. By 1:30 she is in her bedroom masturbating for the third time that day, tears running down her face. She avoids looking at the walls where dreadful faces have appeared. Then the voices start. Belittling, berating. Some are dead people, some are strangers. They are directing her to go into her daughter's room, kill her, then kill herself. There are others like her, pocking the landscape of Leave It To Beaver neighborhoods like an embarrassing rash. But this young woman's name is Anne Sexton. She will soon attempt suicide, find herself hospitalized at Glenside and meet perhaps the most important of her numerous psychiatrists, Dr. Martin Orne. During the process of treatment, Dr. Orne will recognize an artistic voice and urge her to express her experience through writing.
Anne will appeal to her mother for money to return to school. Her mother will scorn the idea, not willing to pay tuition for a daughter who barely made it out of high school. Anne then will enroll in the Boston Center for Adult Education in Harvard Square, whose instructor is poet John Holmes. Here Anne will become one of the most confessional of the confessional poets. She will meet Sylvia Plath, Maxine Kumin and Robert Lowell, learn her craft, and make a meteoric rise to poetry stardom. She will soon be published in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and Saturday Review. All My Pretty Ones, her second book of poetry will be published and nominated for the National Book Award. She will receive a Ford Foundation grant, become a resident playwright at the Charles Playhouse in Boston, be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in Great Britain. Live or Die will win the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1967 and she will be named Phi Beta Kappa poet at Harvard in 1968 and receive a number of honorary doctoral degrees. Towards the end of her life she will command as much as $4,000 a reading, and ultimately publish nine collections of poetry. Of those soon-to-be celebrated poets in John Holmes' workshop, it is Anne Sexton who will speak to the greatest number of people by the sheer intensity and passion of what she must say and open the bowels of America with a terrible, embarrassing groan so that we see our mothers and fathers naked and let out a shriek of protest--or a sigh of relief. Anne Sexton, more than Allen Ginsberg, will dislocate the noses of many academicians and find herself subject to the to the criticism like the following: "Menstruation at Forty" was "the straw that broke this camel's back," wrote James Dickey in the New York Times Book Review, as he scathingly critiqued the poems in All My Pretty Ones, saying, "It would be hard to find a writer who dwells more insistently on the pathetic and disgusting aspects of bodily experience..."Keep in mind that years later Dickey wrote his best-selling novel, Deliverance, which relished in minute detail, an ugly scene of demented hillbillies raping a man. John Holmes found that Sexton's subjects of "abortion, suicide and madness, assaulted his sensibilities and triggered his own defenses," (Maxine Kumin). Holmes nevertheless recognized Sexton's talent and played a vital role in her development. As Sexton's popularity grew, Academia argued passionately for or against her. They called her work "maudlin," "uneven," and including her best friend, Maxine Kumin, they loathed the drama of her readings. Kumin writes, "The intimate details divulged in Sexton's poetry enchanted or repelled with equal passion. In addition to the strong feelings Anne's work aroused, there was the undeniable fact of her physical beauty. Her presence on the platform dazzled with its staginess, its props of water glass, cigarettes, and ashtray. She used pregnant pauses, husky whispers, pseudo-shouts to calculated effect. A Sexton audience might hiss its displeasure or deliver a standing ovation. It did not doze off during a reading." Water glass and cigarettes? Well it is no secret that any form of theatrics is still abhorred in the citadels of learning. By open mike standards, Sexton's readings would be considered effective, but hardly theatrical when poets today stand before us and break into song, gesture, laugh at their work, wear a costume, and sometimes even do an occasional cartwheel. Sexton even formed a rock band, named after her signature poem, "Her Kind," and read to their accompaniment. But it was her fusion of traditional forms with the urgency of her experience along with the popularity of her work that forced academia to grudgingly acknowledge her work. An early piece demonstrates the discipline of the John Holmes workshops she attended: "in school. There are no knives for cutting your throat. I make moccasins all morning. At first my hands kept empty, unraveled for the lives they used to work. Now I learn to take them back, each angry finger that demands I mend what another will break" (You, Doctor Martin, 1960) As Sexton matured, she departed from her original formalist training and spun into the more volatile waters of experimentation, very likely influenced by the works of Pablo Neruda, Sexton's favorite poet. In these later pieces, the lines were broken not by the structure of metered verse, but by their natural, internal rhythms. Her images became more surreal. "I, the inlander, am here with you for just a small space. I am almost afraid, so long gone from the sea. I have seen her smooth as a cheek. I have seen her easy, doing her business, lapping in. I have seen her rolling her hoops of blue. I have seen her tear the land off. I have seen her drown me twice, and yet not take me. You tell me that as the green drains backward it covers Britain, but have you never stood on that shore and seen it cover you? " (In Excelsis, 1974) With this departure, academics were no longer placated by her use of traditional forms and declared open season on Sexton. Robert Lowell wrote, "For a book or two, she grew more powerful. Then writing was too easy or too hard for her. She became meager and exaggerated. Many of her most embarrassing poems would have been fascinating if someone had put them in quotes, as the presentation of some character, not the author." In listening to a tape of Anne Sexton, indeed her voice is resonant, deep. Even by the standards dictated in modern schools of natural acting, she goes over the top. She is full of herself. She is painfully human, and does not bother to numb us with distance and good taste. Sexton demands a reaction from the listener. And yes, although many of her poems underwent dozens of drafts, there remains imperfection. She uses "like" and "as" far too often, so that we immediately know we are not listening to the pristine lines of Stevens, Plath or Lowell. But then again she did not write for their institutions. Confessional Poetry rose from the muck of our collective psychosis. When Ginsberg's Howl hit the streets, confessionalism was birthed, Anne Sexton slapped its bottom and a scream went out permeating America with endless ramification. Today every Yahoo in Irkdom dreams of the opportunity to plant their mug on a television screen and air their dalliances, fetishes, and family business to anyone with a lazy finger on the remote control. Even law enforcement has gotten into the act with their own brand of confessionalism. Armed not only with sticks and guns, but video cameras, they schlep the viewer along as they search suspicious-looking individuals in their suspicious looking homes or vehicles. We are invited to see all, to know the intermost details of strangers' lives, and in a sense to partake. Did this indeed begin with confessional poetry? Well, for the drama of this article, this writer is satisfied to look no further and to declare that we are the direct descendants of Anne Sexton and Her Kind, who bravely gave their tormented minds a voice in verse and subsequently gave us the clearance to confess and confess. . .and confess. As I listen to poets of all sexes and degrees of sanity spill their guts in poetry that runs the gamut from the extraordinary on through to the malodorous, I am further convinced that in one way or another we have been created in Anne's image. Poets continue to shock, repulse and/or delight their audiences with confessional poetry. Several poets come to mind. One young man whose name I do not know writes of bodily functions and secretions in such graphically nauseating detail that it soon becomes clear we are listening to the ravings of a diseased mind. Yet here he stands preceded and in a way sanctioned by the works of Anne Sexton as a kind of demonic son. Another poem, written by Deborah Byrne, talks about saving used tampons in the freezer or six months and taping them to the back of rapist's van. It almost started a fight one night at Redbones between the poets and a couple of noisy barflies. I myself wasn't quite sure what to think, caught between the righteousness of humiliating the vile pig whose van was so grossly decorated or wondering if having these frozen discards in my refrigerator for half a year was too dear a price to pay. But what would Anne Sexton, who stormed New England with no apologies, who explored her bisexuality, and dubbed herself a witch, say? I think I hear her throaty laughter. Wickedly delighted? Because copyright laws do not permit the printing of an entire poem without the permission of the publishers, however relevant to the article, we have printed Anne's signature poem, "Her Kind" minus the last line.
"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 houses, 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. . . ."