TOP35-JAS3
This Old Poem #35:
Anne Sexton’s Live
Copyright © by Jessica Schneider, 11/3/02
Anne Sexton
was a very good poet who basically wasted the latter half of her literary career
once she got famous. In other words, her poems sagged as she became more and
more a lazy writer. Her first few books, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, All My
Pretty Ones, and Transformations contain most of her best work. She
is a poet who proves that it’s not what you say, but how it is said in poetry
that matters most. Sexton, at her best, is technically sound, rhythmic, and has
unique turns of phrases that leave one surprised. She is able to mix the
personal with the factual, invent narrative, and is able to choose just the
appropriate word to leave the reader feeling raw. Poems about death,
menstruation, alcoholism, lesbianism, & depression were just not written in
her time, (1928-1974) and if they were, such was considered “taboo”. Now we
can’t seem to get rid of them. How many poems about suicide, depression, rape
& assorted rants have sprung from the likeness of Sexton and flood the
internet today? But here’s the question you should ask yourself: why is it
that many of Sexton’s poems are considered good, and the billions of doggerel
written from the imitation of Sexton/Plath fans are not? BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT!
In this
essay, not only will I demonstrate that 2 poems written about similar
“womanly” subject matter can be polar, but I will demonstrate that it’s
not what one says but how it is said that counts in poetry. Also, I will tackle
a bad poem of Sexton & improve it. The poetaster I am going to compare
Sexton to is Sharon Olds. I’m not going to go into the million reasons why SO
sucks because Dan has already done so in his Destroy Essay. Although SO denies
it, she is horribly imitative of AS, lacking any of the talent. Dan likes to
say: 5th rate Sylvia Plath 40 years too late. And if you know
anything of AS, you know that SP is often lumped beside her, even though her
work is quite different. You’d be surprised to know that many SP fans don’t
think much of AS. This is ridiculous, since AS has written Great Poetry &
this only proves my point that SP fans have no clue as to why SP is Great, they
just like her suicide & the fact that she was like a genius and stuff.
In fact, when they try to write poems like her, they will often fill
it with SP images, quoting directly from her & then filling the rest
of the poem up with their own clichéd crap, so what you get in the end are a
bunch of good phrases (SP’s) mixed with adolescent doggerel. “Ain’t I
artsy?” And on this note, there are many, many imitators of AS (SO) and
many, many imitators of the imitators so that what you get in the end is a bunch
of histrionic melodrama with no raison d’etre other than to annoy people like
me.
On to the poems:
The Abortion
Somebody
who should have been born
is gone.
Just as the earth puckered its mouth,
each bud puffing out from its knot,
I changed my shoes, and then drove south.
Up past the Blue Mountains, where
Pennsylvania humps on endlessly,
wearing, like a crayoned cat, its
green hair,
its roads sunken in like a gray washboard;
where, in truth, the ground cracks evilly,
a dark socket from
which the coal has poured,
Somebody
who should have been born
is gone.
the grass as bristly and stout as chives,
and me wondering when the ground would break,
and me wondering
how anything fragile survives;
up in Pennsylvania, I met a little man,
not Rumpelstiltskin, at all, at all...
he took the fullness that love began.
Returning north, even the sky grew thin
like a high window looking
nowhere.
The road was as flat as a sheet of tin.
Somebody
who should have been born
is gone.
Yes,
woman, such logic will lead
to loss without death. Or say what you
meant,
you coward...this baby that I bleed.
This
is an outstanding poem. There are no real flaws, and the language is poignant
and abrupt. One could argue that the italics are a bit much and that the line Somebody who should have been born/ is gone is
a bit melodramatic. I probably would not have included it, (3x no less) had I
written the poem, but the line itself is not so bad that it detracts from what’s
good. Keeping that in mind, look at this line-by-line. The title works well. It
is direct & plays off the description. Had this poem been just a graphic
description of an abortion itself, (which you will see in the SO poem) this
title would not have worked. But because there are no graphics, and are instead
hit in the face with the subtlety, the title is memorable & highly
effective. We begin with the melodramatic line of Somebody who should have
been born/ is gone. Well duh. It’s an abortion. You think this is going to
be just another piece of doggerel, but wait…
Up
past the Blue Mountains, where///
Pennsylvania humps on endlessly,
The
use of the word “humps” is obviously sexual, not to mention the image of
humping green hills being a metaphor for life, birth, breath, etc. Also the line
break at “where” seems to exist for the purpose of the rhyme alone because
in & of itself, the break is weak. *(Dan’s proofreading mark to indicate
bad enjambment ///)
wearing,
like a crayoned cat, its green hair,
its roads sunken in like a gray washboard;
where, in truth, the ground cracks evilly,
a dark socket from which the coal has poured,
Again
we get the nice rhymes, and the sense that the speaker is growing more
anticipation as she is approaching the clinic. The only cliché would be “dark
socket”.
the
grass as bristly and stout as chives,
and me wondering when the ground would break,
and me wondering how anything fragile survives;
In
this stanza, the 1st line is nice description, also works with the
rhyme. We get a sense of the speaker’s hopelessness for life itself, wondering how anything fragile survives; Another
important point is that the speaker is not being preachy in her views. Obviously
she isn’t against abortion, or else she wouldn’t be having one. We cannot
say that she views abortion as “murder” or “unjust”, but it is more
matter of fact, and her wondering is more of a curiosity. Next we get the core
of the poem, the prime example that saying something well is what makes a poem:
he
took the fullness that love began.
One
line people! What better way to describe an abortion than the former? “To take
the fullness that love begins” is much more memorable than talking about
sticking coat hangers up one’s snatch: the pools of blood, ouch, ouch, my
underpants ripped, I am being raped…
Returning north, even the sky grew thin
like a high window looking nowhere.
The road was as flat as a sheet of tin.
Notice how the earth is no longer
“puckering from it’s mouth, but The road was as flat as a sheet of tin. The
speaker does not need to tell us that she is sad, possibly having mixed
feelings, regret, etc, because it is shown to us by her observations. This is
what poetry does. Now the grand finale:
Yes, woman, such logic will lead
to loss without death. Or say what you meant,
you coward...this baby that I bleed.
Now we get a
sense of how the speaker feels- possibly remorse, but acknowledging that it was
something that needed to be done (the logic). Then she talks herself out of it
and admits to being a coward for this decision, and accepting the “logic” as
the means for why it had to be. This
is probably an argument that will continue for years. AS probably wanted her
readers to know how she truly felt, hence the repetition of the phrase Somebody…I
would have preferred to leave it up to the reader to decide what the speaker is
feeling, but AS wanted us to KNOW how she felt about it. But overall, this is an
outstanding piece of work from Annie in her better days.
Now lets
compare to a piece of tripe written by Sharon Olds. Keep in mind- similar
subject matter, but different approach, and see why SO falls flat on her ass!
(Clichés are italicized)( /// = bad line breaks)
Miscarriage
When I was a month pregnant, the great///
clots of blood appeared in the pale
green swaying water of the toilet.
Dark red like black in the salty///
translucent brine, like forms of life
appearing, jelly-fish with the clear-cut///
shapes of fungi.
That was the only appearance made by that///
child, the dark, scalloped shapes
falling slowly. A month later
our son was conceived, and I never went back
to mourn the one who came as far as the///
sill with its information: that we could///
botch something, you and I. All wrapped in///
purple it floated away, like a messenger
put to death for bearing bad news.
In a 16 line poem there are 7 bad line breaks and nearly a cliché for every line. Not only are the phrases themselves clichéd, but the overall trope is trite, dull, and familiar. Line 2 one could argue that “pale” could be heard as an actual pail, the noun- thereby redeeming the poor adjective break. I always think SO must be drunk when she writes her poems because there are so many obvious flaws just on 1st glance. If SO claims that she worked on this masterpiece for days and days she’s either stupid or lying, maybe both. I just don’t understand how anyone could publish this tripe. But do you see how 2 poems with similar subject matter can be so different, one being so poor and terrible, while the other is great? It’s not that I mean to pick on the supposed “confessionalists” if what they produced was something closer to AS, but they don’t. It’s 99.9999% of the time something closer to the tripe of SO. But next I am going to show a bad poem by AS which is closer to SO than AS’s own poem. Bad poetry thinks alike. Here’s the poem: (Clichés are italicized)(/// = bad line breaks)
Live
Live or die,
but don't poison everything...
Well, death's
been here
for a long time --
it has a hell of a lot
to do with hell
and suspicion of the eye
and the religious objects
and how I mourned them
when they were made obscene
by my dwarf-heart's doodle.
The chief ingredient
is mutilation.
And mud, day after day,
mud like a ritual,
and the baby on the platter,
cooked but still human,
cooked also with little maggots,
sewn onto it maybe by somebody's mother,
the damn bitch!
Even so,
I kept right on going on,
a sort of human statement,
lugging myself as if///
I were a sawed-off body
in the trunk, the steamer trunk.
This became perjury of the soul.
It became an outright lie
and even though I dressed the body
it was still naked, still killed.
It was caught
in the first place at birth,
like a fish.
But I play it, dressed it up,
dressed it up like somebody's doll.
Is life something you play?
And all the time wanting to get rid of it?
And further, everyone yelling at you
to shut up. And no wonder!
People don't like to be told
that you're sick
and then be forced///
to watch///
you///
come///
down with the hammer.
Today life opened inside me like an egg
and there inside
after considerable digging
I found the answer.
What a bargain!
There was the sun,
her yolk moving feverishly,
tumbling her prize --
and you realize she does this daily!
I'd known she was a purifier
but I hadn't thought
she was solid,
hadn't known she was an answer.
God! It's a dream,
lovers sprouting in the yard
like celery stalks
and better,
a husband straight as a redwood,
two daughters, two sea urchins,
picking roses off my hackles.
If I'm on fire they dance around it
and cook marshmallows.
And if I'm ice
they simply skate on me
in little ballet costumes.
Here,
all along,
thinking I was a killer,
anointing myself daily
with my little poisons.
But no.
I'm an empress.
I wear an apron.
My typewriter writes.
It didn't break the way it warned.
Even crazy, I'm as nice
as a chocolate bar.
Even with the witches' gymnastics
they trust my incalculable city,
my corruptible bed.
O dearest three, I make a soft reply. The witch comes on and you paint her pink. I come with kisses in my hood and the sun, the smart one, rolling in my arms. So I say Live and turn my shadow three times round to feed our puppies as they come, the eight Dalmatians we didn't drown, despite the warnings: The abort! The destroy! Despite the pails of water that waited, to drown them, to pull them down like stones, they came, each one headfirst, blowing bubbles the color of cataract-blue/// and fumbling for the tiny tits. Just last week, eight Dalmatians, 3/4 of a lb., lined up like cord wood each/// like a/// birch tree. I promise to love more if they come, because in spite of cruelty and the stuffed railroad cars for the ovens, I am not what I expected. Not an Eichmann. The poison just didn't take. So I won't hang around in my hospital shift, repeating The Black Mass and all of it. I say Live, Live because of the sun, the dream, the excitable gift.
It has a hell of a lot to do
with hell and suspicion of the eye,
the religious objects
and how I mourned them
when they made obscene
doodles.
Even so,
I kept right on going,
a sort of human lugging
myself as if I were
sawed wonder.
People don't like to be told:
(tumbling straight as a redwood,
two daughters, two sea urchins,
picking my hackles.)
Dance round and cook
marshmallows. And if I'm ice,
simply skate on me
in little costumes.
I'm an empress.
I wear an apron.
Even crazy, I'm as nice
as a chocolate bar. The witch comes on
and you paint her pink.
I come with kisses in my hood
and the sun, the smart one,
rolling in my arms.
Because the original poem is so overwritten, there are several different angles
one could take. I did not ponder over this rewrite for days, but wrote it out
as I typed. The original title is bland & does nothing. I changed it to
emphasize the more interesting parts of the poem, which would be the
fairytale-like observations & the idea of the speaker playing “pretend”.
The title now has a more playful feel. The rest I cut because it was too
cliched, and I tried to salvage some of the narrative. The 1st line
is straightforward, and following the title “suspicion of the eye” can read as
someone being spun around, like at a kid’s birthday party while trying to pin
the tail on the donkey blindfolded.
The next two stanzas are still fairytale-like and almost
like the speaker is recalling childhood, but then we are interrupted with the
line “people don’t like to be told”, which then leads into more reality
(motherhood and two daughters). The last stanza then leads us back into the
child-like images: is this a mother accepting her duties and just having fun
with it, or is she missing when she was also innocent and young? Is this a good
poem? It has potential if some of the angles were approached. But it’s a vast
improvement over the original disaster. I hope this essay has shown that even
good poets fuck up, and most never even reach that. Bad poetry had much in
common with itself. If you removed the name from Live and Miscarriage,
one could easily think they came from the same pen. The truth is, when
re-reading this bad AS poem, it seemed to echo SP’s Lesbos.
Final
Score: (1-100):
AS’s The Abortion: 95
SO’s Miscarriage: 48
AS’s Live: 42
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