I was at a poetry reading (against my will, I might add) a few months ago where said poet criticized my beloved Anne Sexton, telling a student that she was much better than Anne Sexton (really?) and that Sexton wasn't very good and had made herself into a sideshow freak. This poet did his reading while I tuned out (a talent I honed during the worst of the open mike nights at Jim's Diner, a tried and true hang-out during college where grad students loved to read their suicide notes in a small room without air conditioning) and thought about why writers love to put other writers down. It shows one of our worst qualities -- vast insecurity borne of loneliness and misery, a pernicious side effect of too much time alone in the bad neighborhood of the mind. If this person was trying to establish a sort of snobby credential, it had the opposite effect. So in the spirit of defending the great Ms. Sexton, I'm posting one of her poems that I love.
Yellow
When they turn the sun
on again, I'll plant children
under it, I'll light up my soul
with a match and let it sing. I'll
take my mother and soap her up, I'll
take my bones and polish them, I'll
vacuum up my stale hair, I'll
pay all my neighbor's bad debts, I'll
write a poem called Yellow and put
my lips down to drink it up, I'll
feed myself spoonfuls of heat and
everyone will be home playing with
their wings and the planet will
shudder with all those smiles and
there will be no poison anywhere, no plague
in the sky and there will be a mother-broth
for all of the people and we will
never die, not one of us, we'll go on,
won't we?
Michelle's Spell of the Day
"I just get an idea and then all of a sudden I've got a song." John Lee Hooker
Cocktail Hour
Drinking memoir suggestion: Literary Life Larry McMurtry
Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Tuesday!
24 comments:
Modesty is a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.--Miquel de Cervantes
There's so much mass commercial entertainment that's so good and so slick, this is something that I don't think any other generation has confronted. I think it's the best time to be alive ever, and it's probably the best time to be a writer. I'm not sure it's the easiest time.--David Foster Walllace
Art follows nature as well as it can, as a pupil follows his master, thus it is a sort of grandchild of God.--Dante
Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.--Leonardo da Vinci
Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?--Ludwig van Beethoven
If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay in solid cash--the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.--Aldous Huxley
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.--Aristotle
In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.
You dance inside my chest,
where no one sees you,
but sometimes I do,
and that sight becomes this art.--Rumi
Great poem. Amusing that the piece itself is unsure, when Sexton's critic was so positive of their own conclusion. Anyway, the former is far more endearing.
It almost always comes over bad when a writer does that kind of criticism in a personal situation like that. Not the way to win friends and influence folks.
Anne and I had a relationship.--Martin Orne, M.D.
I came to see her[Sexton's] eighteen-year career as a successful response to a set of conditions that she could not change very much except by writing about them. Her maladies did not wholly succumb to insight: although psychotherapy helped her dramatically, she stayed sick. Yet her poems invented a self that others valued, and this endowed her real life with opportunities.-- Diane Wood Middlebrook
After reading the above comments from her therapist and biographer, it appears that the words "When they turn the sun /on again" have to do with depression. The joyful images of singing, playing and smiling seem to get the speaker of the poem out from under depression, but are themselves undercut by the haunting question of Sexton's last line. This is a superb poem that probably stems from Sexton's mental illness, a life experience she brilliantly translated into art.--Herman Northrop Frye
It's not enough that she sucks seed. You have to massage her poetic ego at all times, and that's how you win friends and influence people!--Dale Carnegie
She was whipped and chained to a poetry reading! This is an outrage!--Anna Ahkmatovah
I've never been to a poetry reading. My life is incomplete.-- M.Y.
She will have to sleep with grandma when she comes! She will have to sleep with grandma when she comes!--Traditional
Anything worth doing is worth overdoing!--Mick Jagger
I'm a monkey!--M.J.
Call off the evil monkies!!!!--MB
It is enough that you succeed, Michelle. Just not for me.--Pink is the New Blog
I am convinced my poetry is better than some of the guys who write on bathroom walls. Not all of them, mind you, but some of them.
Jenny, Jenny, who can I turn to...I got your number on the wall...867-5309!--Everclear
Hi Honey, I love the poem. As a direct, frank person, poetry comes hard for me. But I am learning.. xo
Post a Comment