Encounter with Anne Sexton

She didn't come to my house. I found her in a book shop and took her to a cafe. We had a glass of wine. It was love at first sight. Then she undid me....

I found Anne Sexton in a bookshop one day, and assumed as a woman poet she would be a straight ‘Admire’. A kudos read: “Oh yes I love Anne Sexton. Doesn’t that say something interesting about me…” (This feels smutty to admit, but this is Anne Sexton and we are nothing if not smutty).

I sat in a cafe and read a few of her poems. I reread and reread and reread. I felt little flames flutter in my chest, the hairs rise on the back of my neck. It was like the beginning of love. Maybe that’s what I am really seeking in a book: I want to fall in love, or lust. I want to care about it in a way that is not entirely rational or sane or clean.

I want The Word. The Word is Goddess.

I want to build some kind of shrine and pray before it daily and dress in the style of. (Her photo on the cover of Mercies encapsulates The Cool Female Poet: boyfriend shirt, brown slacks, cigarette in hand, poised as though she has taken a break in her writing to have a conversation).

I want to absorb this:

“And if I tried

to give you something else,

something outside of myself,

you would not know

that the worst of anyone

can be, finally, an accident of hope.”

For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further

And this:

“She is all there.

She was melted carefully down for you.”

For My Lover, Returning to his Wife

Anne Sexton was a model; it’s hard not to get a great photo of Anne Sexton. Her friends included Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, John Cheever, Kurt Vonnegut, Joyce Carol Oates (only one of them alive and on Substack).

And her poetry - it’s hard to find a line that isn’t so extraordinary and weirdly delicious you want to eat it even before you taste it.

Not saying it was effortless being Anne Sexton, far from it.

Here’s the blurb on the Penguin Book Jacket.

“When Anne Sexton took her own life in 1974, she left behind a body of work which in less than two decades of writing had already won her the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry… Her work broken multiple taboos of subject matter, from insanity and addiction to menstruation, adultery and the figure of the witch.”

Kurt Vonnegut - “Anne Sexton domesticates my terror, examines it and describes it… God love her.”

Here’s some lines from Sylvia’s Death:

“Thief! -

how did you crawl into,

crawl down alone

into the death I wanted so badly and for so long,

the death we said we both outgrew,

the one we wore on our skinny breasts,

the one we talked of so often each time

we downed three extra dry martinis in Boston…”

Bukowski and she are often mentioned in the same breath. Her poem Cigarettes and Whiskey and Wild, Wild Women could have been written by his split-off/othered female alter-ego: “a woman of excess, of zeal and greed,/I find the effort useless./Do I not look in the mirror/these days,/and see and drunken rat avert her eyes?”

Oh yes, Anne drank and suffered, horribly, with anguishing mental disorders; was diagnosed with postpartum depression, ‘hysteria’ and bipolar. Her psychiatrist Dr Martin Orne “recommended that as an antidote to depression she try writing poetry to help her grapple with her condition.” (from the Introduction to Mercies, by her daughter, Linda Gray Sexton).

She enrolled in a poetry class and the rest, as they say…

“You, Doctor Martin, walk

from breakfast to madness.”

Her daughter, Linda writes of a roller-coaster or hospitalisations, punctuated or parallel with her “meteoric successes” as a writer.

This same daughter, a Harvard Graduate, Literary Executor of the Estate of Anne Sexton, was abused, physically, emotionally and sexually (“molested”) by her famous poet mother. This is not a case of ‘allegedly’ either. It happened.

There are - unfortunately and deeply unethically - tapes of Sexton’s therapy sessions, which have since been published. Not much about Orne seems ethical, but this was over 50 years ago. He used a concoction of sodium petothal and hypnotherapy to access her repressed memories, (although even he has said that ‘memory’ is not necessarily ‘truth’, but a version seen through the prism of the present).

This is why therapy is confidential. Who gets this other than therapists? But thanks to Orne (unless this is a literary conceit, history being written by the winners/men) we have Sexton’s poetry. And so the contradictions continue, multiply.

I am struck by this description by Linda Sexton for a lot of reasons:

“Had you met my mother at a cocktail party, you would have been struck by her beauty and vivacity, as well as by the vulnerability that lay beneath her smile when you looked closely enough. Witty and charming, she could captivate a room, and at the height of her career during public readings of her poetry - she utterly captured her audience’s attentions. Dressed seductively and gesturing with her graceful arms and hands, she spoke in a low, throaty rasp. Everything about her spelled sensuality, and yet she brought to the men and women gathered there an art that stunned with its seriousness as well as its drama.”

I would want to meet her mother at a cocktail party. I also would not want to meet her. I would want to go to the pub with her knowing it would end in the kind of messy way that I am trying to avoid these days. Monstrous confessions at the blackout end of the evening leaving a dark taste in the mouth, the mind, that only more drink can quell, briefly. I have had these evenings; it’s not just my own horrors and traumas that are buried within me, that I carry like ‘foreign bodies’, gallstones, cancers, cysts. Who knows what a dodgy, druggy hypnotherapist would dig up… It’s not all mine. I would argue it’s never just ours.

I would still go to the pub with her.

She died aged 44. Who knows how she would have grown? Her last poem In Exelsis was written to her last therapist, a woman called Barbara - Barbara! - who she loved. The poem imagines them at the edge of an ocean and “captures her longing for a divine and empathetic woman who will grant her the serenity she has craved for so many years, as well as the succour that lies deep within the sea’s ‘great mothers arms’.”

“You say it is angry.

I say it is like a kicked Madonna.”

Madonna as Anne Sexton in Vogue

If Anne Sexton is my goddess, she is the Hindu or Greek variety, the badly behaved poets pantheon, and my shrine to her would echo the shrines The Horniman Museum, cigarettes and booze among the holy relics.

Didn’t the Greek Gods eat, murder and abuse their own children and worse? Were they not beautiful and captivating and appalling at cocktail parties (The best kind of guest, the worst kind of parent - in Fitzgerald’s words, after the party comes Monday and we are “no longer the world’s guests, but its hosts.” Unless we are poets and gods, of course). Were they not projections from the little ant-like humans on the earth looking up at the skies from the shore “as it swallows the stars.”?

There is a lie that we like our ‘role models’ impossibly, grotesquely sanitised; I don’t believe that’s true at all. It is what we want for our children, and for those ‘other’ children we read about who kill and rob and act out from some inexpressible fear or pain. Not for ourselves. No. Too boring.

Anne Sexton is certainly not sanitised. She is a genius but also someone’s mother, in a way that a lot of male geniuses are not someone’s father. I am a woman (I am told), I am a mother, I struggle with all of that; I furiously underline passages in feminist books as did she, I have been both seductive and rude, rat-eyed and stupid in love. Unlike her and others, I fail to sacrifice my duties, my roles entirely for my art, and some people say this makes me a good person, but I don’t want to be good, or people pleasing, or kind.

Or maybe I do, after first being understood. First Anne Sexton, then maybe Adrienne Rich (not an Adrienne Rich bypass)… but please goddess, not yet.

This goddess of mine Anne Sexton is human, all too human. A goddess looking for her own goddess.

“and we stand on the shore

Loving its pulse.”