Back Room 17: Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton has always been a favourite of mine maybe because she wrote highly personal confessional verse that seems more accessible, more immediate to me than Sylvia Plath's, a poet with whom she is often twinned and by whom she is often overshadowed.  She wrote of her suicidal tendencies, her depression and intimate details of her life with her (long suffering) children and husband. Hospitalised many times her body of work nevertheless is stunning and we are lucky enough to have examples of her reading it.

Although some depict Sexton and Plath as rivals, they were friends, and shared much in common, including a fixation on suicide, the way in which both died. After Plath's death Sexton said to a friend: "Suicide is addicting. Sylvia had the suicide inside her. As I do. As many do."To her psychiatrist she added " Sylvia's death disturbs me. Makes me want it too. She took something that was mine, that death was mine! Of course it was her's too. But we both swore off it, the way you swear off smoking."

Here are some marvellous clips of her reading and a link to more information.

A Lover returning to his wife:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Uxv7djrcF8

Her Kind:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btz8RZHSQ2Q


https://www.literaryladiesguide.com/classic-women-authors-poetry/10-poems-by-anne-sexton/

Wanting to Die

Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.
I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.
Then the almost unnameable lust returns.

Even then I have nothing against life.
I know well the grass blades you mention,
the furniture you have placed under the sun.

But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.

Twice I have so simply declared myself,
have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,
have taken on his craft, his magic.

In this way, heavy and thoughtful,
warmer than oil or water,
I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.

I did not think of my body at needle point.
Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.
Suicides have already betrayed the body.

Still-born, they don't always die,
but dazzled, they can't forget a drug so sweet
that even children would look on and smile.

To thrust all that life under your tongue!--
that, all by itself, becomes a passion.
Death's a sad Bone; bruised, you'd say,

and yet she waits for me, year after year,
to so delicately undo an old wound,
to empty my breath from its bad prison.

Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,
raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,
leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,

leaving the page of the book carelessly open,
something unsaid, the phone off the hook
and the love, whatever it was, an infection.