CHAPTER 32

Glitter and Wounds, Several Wildnesses (1973)

Review of Anne Sexton’s The Book of Folly

At a reading at the Guggenheim Museum, Anne Sexton—after three books of poems—finished one of her poems and said, “But it is not true.” That hall feels cold and artificial. It was a beautiful woman standing there, in a beautiful dress. The expectation and the gossip around one was of confessional poetry. Now this is a curious genre, one taken to promise a new order of the secret, and one finds secrets that everyone knows; taken to promise emergent men, emergent women, who may bring to speech the lives of these generations; too, one is often given disposable poems, made without the structural reinforcements, those lattices on which the crystal grows.

However, when Anne Sexton said, “But it is not true,” a waver went through the audience. No, I cannot say that, I can speak only for myself. I thought, “It may very well be true.” She had cut through the entire nonsense about confessional writing, and returned me to the poem.

The issue in most of Anne Sexton’s poems has been survival, piece by piece of the body, step by step of poetic experience, and even more the life entire, sprung from our matrix of parental madness. It is these people, who have come this way, who have most usefulness for us, they are among our veterans, and we need them to look at their lives and at us. It is the receivers of these “confessions” who are the welcomers and the further damagers of the poets among whom Anne Sexton stands, with her father, her mother, the trains of relatives, doctors, nurses, lovers who populate this landscape, and the children in whom we find the same traits, with a difference: they may be dealing with them differently, their poems may be otherwise.

The two books of poems before The Book of Folly (published in 1972 and now before us) gave us a gathering-together of forces.1 I remember the signs. There had been books even earlier: Live or Die was shown to me in manuscript with the page on whose back Saul Bellow had written a letter.2 It was on the front of that page—a draft of his novel—that Anne Sexton had found her title, and it was in the work that was before a group of us at that moment that the instigation for her next work, running along with the poems in Love Poems, came.3

For Herbert Kohl, speaking to us as we worked for the Writers-Teachers group, said as he said to the high school students he knew, “Why not write fables? Or make something based on fables and childhood stories?”4 Anne Sexton’s Transformations followed that reminder.5 I do not know whether her play, Mercy Street, was written after that period, or whether the production I saw was based on earlier writing, but the density of the works—the play of the early flailing life in which our father’s fantasies overcome our own, and the poems of the next phase of our other childhood fantasies, inherited from Grimm and the rest—this reality, has fed the last two books.6

Love Poems opens with a statement of theme in “The Touch.”

For months my hand had been sealed off

in a tin box. Nothing was there but subway railings.

Perhaps it is bruised, I thought,

and that is why they have locked it up.

The hand lies there like an unconscious woman. It has “collapsed”: “Nothing but vulnerable. // And all this is metaphor.” And then we are given all the people and reasons for the trouble:

Then all this became history.

Your hand found mine.

Life rushed to my fingers like a blood clot.

Oh, my carpenter,

the fingers are rebuilt.

They dance with yours.

They dance in the attic and in Vienna.

My hand is alive all over America.

Not even death will stop it,

death shedding her blood.

Nothing will stop it, for this is the kingdom

and the kingdom come.7

In the next poem, “The Kiss,”

Before today my body was useless.

. . . Where there was silence

the drums, the strings are incurably playing. You did this.

Pure genius at work. Darling, the composer has stepped

into fire.8

These excerpted lines have some of the breath of her speech and her assumption of relation, but it is in the sequence of the book itself that the declaration here is made. It goes on with the architectural statement of Herbert’s The Temple: “The Breast,” “That Day,” and one of the few poems in which a woman has come to the fact as symbol, the center after many years of silence and taboo: “In Celebration of My Uterus.”9 We have allowed the language of sex when it was accompanied—really superseded—by wit; or, in this year, accompanied by strobe lights and lack of words on the stage; or, in film, when it is ripped away from the rest of life, ripped away from the exchange of fantasies that is deep in relation; or, as in Portnoy’s Complaint, when it is really prison literature, so that one’s genitals become the image of the world, the only beautiful thing, the only loved thing.10 In Anne Sexton’s poems, the world is here—Capri, Vietnam, Boston, Africa, Washington, the house, the bedroom—and the other person is here, or absent so strongly that he is “a weird stone man / who sleepwalked in, whose features did not change.”11 Although Anne Sexton wrote poems in high school, she soon stopped. What happened to let her come through this Afterlife of the American Girl, to take the reality and dance it, physical it, allow it always its whiskey and its gold skin, its psalms and the Papa and Mama dance?

There are traps here. There is always the chance to fall over into total sanity, a kind of fashionable grotto, the death of Elinor Wylie, in which the world is “gorgeous” and “crystal.”12 But here is a woman who was a model, who was a librarian. Sometimes you think it is going to be the marriage of E. E. Cummings and Marion Morehouse that is doing the writing.13 But these poems always ride steady again, furious and seductive; the woman is swimming, lying on the water,

The walls of that grotto

were everycolor blue and

you said, “Look! Your eyes

are seacolor. Look! Your eyes

are skycolor.” And my eyes

shut down as if they were

suddenly ashamed.14

It is that movement that brings the poems through the narcissism, the breakage, the wounds. Into what? Song and connection and delight, brought through by a poet who has transformed acrid experience into her own words and her own touch reaching another person.15 Reaching the reader superbly, as in this poem of one of the days of absence in the group “Eighteen Days Without You”:

Then I think of you in bed,

your tongue half chocolate, half ocean,

of the houses that you swing into,

of the steel wool hair on your head,

of your persistent hands and then

how we gnaw at the barrier because we are two.

How you come and take my blood cup

and link me together and take my brine.

We are bare. We are stripped to the bone

and we swim in tandem and go up and up

the river, the identical river called Mine

and we enter together. No one’s alone.16

The Book of Folly draws on all Anne Sexton’s earlier work, and a fertile transformation can be seen.

Once there was blood

as in a murder

but now there’s nothing

gives us a theme.17 The parts are here, one’s mother’s breasts, Mary’s breasts for Jesus, “His penis sang like a dog,” and the angels, the rather Spanish angels, “Angel of blizzards and blackouts, do you know raspberries . . . ?” and the larger statement, which when it comes, sounds too much like Sandburg,

We are America.

We are the coffin fillers.

We are the grocers of death.

We pack them in crates like cauliflowers.

But it goes on, a little further,

And the woman?

The woman is bathing her heart.

It has been torn out of her

and because it is burnt and as a last act

she is rinsing it off in the river.

This is the death market.18

The “confessional poem” is beginning to turn into something, and I think we have waited for this for a long time.

I heard a woman-poet say, “It’s really the distinction between those woman poets who are attractive and those who really aren’t like poor — — isn’t it?” Well, of course it isn’t, but that adheres to the name in its own time, and beyond. When the live woman is attractive, is part of her own and Sylvia Plath’s fable, works with a music group, trails clouds of Robert Lowell, has a Pulitzer and various epaulets, you have also an actress-persona, and actress before you.19

But when the live poet is a woman writing sonnets of angels:

Angel of fire and genitals, do you know slime,

that green mama who first forced me to sing,

who put me first in the latrine, that pantomime

of brown where I was beggar and she was king?

I said, “The devil is down that festering hole.”

Then he bit me in the buttocks and took over my soul.

and, in “Going Gone,”

Although you are in a hurry

you stop to open a small basket

and under layers of petticoats

you show her the tiger-striped eyes

that you have lately plucked,

you show her your specialty, the lips,

those two small bundles,

you show her the two hands

that grip each other fiercely,

one being mine, one being yours.

Torn right off at the wrist bone

when you started in your

impossible going, gone.

—then one sees that the long walk out the other side of the struggle, madness, into the other struggle, to use madness, has made a poet who no longer looks at the audience to see how the confession is going.20 For those confessions had to have their “other”—and the other, the audience, fattened on confessions, not even eating, they were not nourished by them, not using them in any way at all.

It has remained for the poet to use the early confessions and make a second poetry out of them. We see the gossip produced by that period all around us, and we also see the result of several battles, in their slightest, lightest terms, as well as the ones we all know. Still men talk about Emily Dickinson—last week, on a remote island in Canada, I heard a doctor and a student ask each other whether she really slept with him, she certainly wanted to, all her life. And I had a book-length manuscript from a woman poet—the stamps the package carried were twelve Emily Dickinsons and one Planned Parenthood.21

The contortions here, the deaths, the fathers, the silences, all turning into

Father,

we are two birds on fire

give us the versions of any one experience—even in the stories that begin to enter these books, here in “Dancing the Jig” and the others.22 The variousness reminds me of the great example out of Coleridge, who wrote to his wife, “a stye, or something of that kind, has come upon & enormously swelled my eye-lids, so that it is painful and improper for me to read or write,” and wrote to Wordsworth,

O, what a life is the eye! what a strange and inscrutable essence!

Him, that is utterly blind, nor glimpses the fire that warms him; . . .

Even for him it exists! It moves and stirs in its prison!

Lives with a separate life: and—“Is it a Spirit?” he murmurs:

“Sure, it has thoughts of its own, and to see is only a language!”23

I think of his “confessionals” and the nonsense that critics have issued about him, speaking of his incompleteness when he is the one who knows of the search for completeness.

What, then, is the place reached now by the women who have gone through the steps, as Anne Sexton has? What processes are brought together? Can these poems bring the moment through? Folly, the word in its title, speaks for the book. Sanity and madness as daily life—the folly that offers

. . . air to have.

There are gulls kissing the boat.

There is the sun as big as a nose.

And here are the three of us

dividing our deaths,

bailing the boat

and closing out

the cold wing that has clasped us

this bright August day.24

(Parnassus, 1973)