It's Not Enough That I Succeed

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!