Lit Bits-9/17/2014 Anne Sexton

Aleathia says:

When I first came onto the small press poetry scene I was grossly naive about poetry.  I had been writing it my whole life, but only for the comfort of my soul.  A friend had suggested that I try to get published.  This idea frightened me really.  It is such a hard concept knowing you will put out the most secret and tender parts of yourself for others to read and judge.  That is what poetry is about, isn't it?

Over the years I have learned that staying true to ones self is important.  If you get published you shouldn't be writing for an audience or so that you will continue to get published.  Write because you want to, because you have to.  Along this journey I have been introduced to so many different established poets.  In the poetry scene there seems to be certain poets that you are supposed to admire no matter what.  Anne Sexton is one of those poets.

Why wouldn't they want to love her?  She was beautiful and commanding...cool and sophisticated. She was a time bomb of mental illness waiting to go off.  She was confessional and let it all hang out hiding nothing from the reader.  That sort of power is very attractive to young minds.  Her life ended in suicide, wrapped in her mother's fur coat, in the family garage.

I have some of her work though most of it is wholly unpalatable to me.  As a reader she often gives too much for me.  She doesn't allow for me to use my imagination much.  I do however like this poem:

The Silence

My room is whitewashed,

as white as a rural station house

and just as silent;

whiter than chicken bones

bleaching in the moonlight,

pure garbage, 

and just as silent.

There is a white statue behind me

and white plants

growing like obscene virgins,

pushing out their rubbery tongues

but saying nothing.

My hair is the one dark.

It has been burnt in the white fire

and is just a char.

My beads too are black,

twenty eyes heaved up

from the volcano,

quite contorted.

I am filling the room 

with words from my pen.

Words leak out of it like a miscarriage.

I am zinging words out into the air

and they come back like squash balls.

Yet there is silence.

Always silence.

Like an enormous baby mouth.

The silence is death.

It comes each day with its shock

to sit on my shoulder, a white bird,

and peck at the black eyes

and the vibrating red muscle

of my mouth.