Anne Sexton was born Anne Gray Harvey on November 9, 1928, in Newton Massachusetts.

She attended prep school and finishing school, then eloped with Alfred Muller Sexton at age 19 and relocated from Boston to Baltimore.  She gave birth to her first daughter in 1953 and was soon diagnosed with severe depression and was hospitalized after a breakdown.  She was released and gave birth to her second daughter in 1955.  She had another breakdown and attempted suicide.

While recovering, her therapist recommended she write poetry as a form of therapy.  She was accepted into the graduate writing program at Boston University.  She studied under Robert Lowell and befriended fellow students Sylvia Plath, George Starbuck, and Maxine Kumin.  She gained a reputation as a poet and was invited to lecture at Harvard.  Her first book, “To Bedlam and Part Way Back,” appeared in 1960 and was nominated for a National Book Award.  She won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1967 work, “Live or Die.” Her work was controversial; she received honorary degrees, then a full professorship at Colgate University.

In 1973 she had another breakdown, divorced her husband, had still another breakdown and was hospitalized.  On October 4, 1974 she committed suicide by asphyxiation in the garage of her house.  While her legacy may be somewhat overshadowed by that of her friend and fellow confessional poet Sylvia Plath, Sexton’s poetic accomplishments cannot be underestimated; she has a decidedly open, frank, feminine voice.

The Truth The Dead Know 1959

read by the author

**

Gone, I say and walk from the church,

refusing the stiff procession to the grave,

letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.

It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape.  I cultivate

myself where the sun gutters from the sky,

where the sew swings in like an iron gate

and we touch.  In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls like stones

from the whitehearted water and when we touch

we enter touch entirely.  No one’s alone.

Men kill for this, or for as much.

and what of the dead?  they lie without shoes

in their stone boats.  They are more like stone

than the sea would be if it stopped.  They refuse

to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

For My Lover, Returning to His Wife 1969

She is all there.

She was melted carefully down for you

and cast up from your childhood,

cast up from your one hundred favorite aggies.

She has always been there, my darling.

She is, in fact, exquisite.

Fireworks in the dull middle of February

and as real as a cast-iron pot.

Let’s face it, I have been momentary.

A luxury.  A bright red sloop in the harbor.

My hair rising like smoke from the car window.

Littleneck clams out of season.

She is more than that.  She is your have to have,

has grown you your practical  your tropical growth.

This is not an experiment. She is all harmony.

She sees to oars and oarlocks for the dinghy,

has placed wild flowers at the window at breakfast,

sat by the potters wheel at midday,

set forth three children under the moon,

three cherubs drawn by Michelangelo,

done this with her legs spread out

in the terrible months in the chapel.

If you glance up, the children are there

like delicate balloons resting on the ceiling.

She has also carried each one down the hall

after supper, their heads privately bent,

two legs protesting person to person,

her face flushed with song and their little sleep.

I give you back your heart.

I give you permission—

for the fuse inside her, throbbing

angrily in the dirt, for the bitch in her

and the burying of her wound—

for the burying of her small red wound alive—

for the pale flickering flare under her ribs,

for the drunken sailor who waits in her left pulse,

for the mother’s knee, for the stockings,

for the garter belt, for the call—

the curious call

when you will burrow in arms and breasts

and tug in the orange ribbon in her hair

and answer the call, the curious call.

She is so naked and singular.

she is the sum of yourself and your dream.

Climb her like a monument, step after step.

She is solid.

As for me, I am watercolor.

I wash off.

Return to the poetry tour

Comments from the yahoo parallel universe:

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