A story, a story!(Let it go. Let it come.)I was stamped out like a Plymouth fenderinto this world.First came the cribwith its glacial bars.Then dollsand the devotion to their plastic mouths.Then there was school,the little straight rows of chairs,blotting my name over and over,but undersea all the time,a stranger whose elbows wouldn’t work.Then there was lifewith its cruel housesand people who seldom touched-though touch is all-but I grew,like a pig in a trench-coat I grew,and then there were many strange apparitions,the nagging rain, the sun turning into poisonand all of that, saws working through my heart,but I grew, I grew,and God was there like an island I had not rowed to,still ignorant of Him, my arms, and my legs worked,and I grew, I grew,I wore rubies and bought tomatoesand now, in my middle age,about nineteen in the head I’d say,I am rowing, I am rowingthough the oarlocks stick and are rustyand the sea blinks and rollslike a worried eyeball,but I am rowing, I am rowing,though the wind pushes me backand I know that that island will not be perfect,it will have the flaws of life,the absurdities of the dinner table,but there will be a doorand I will open itand I will get rid of the rat insdie me,the gnawing pestilential rat.God will take it with his two handsand embrace it.As the African says:This is my tale which I have told,if it be sweet, if it be not sweet,take somewhere else and let some return to me.This story ends with me still rowing.
– from The Awful Rowing Towards God 1975
( Her eighth collection of poetry is entitled
The Awful Rowing Toward God.The title came from her meeting with a Roman Catholic priest who, unwilling to administer
last rites, told her
“God is in your typewriter.” This gave the poet the desire and willpower to continue living and writing.
The Awful Rowing Toward God and
The Death Notebooks are among her final works, and both center on the theme of dying
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Sexton#Death
Within 12 years of writing her first sonnet, she was among the honored poets in the U.S.: a Pulitzer Prize winner, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the first female member of the Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.[10][11]
On October 4, 1974, Sexton had lunch with Kumin to revise galleys for Sexton’s manuscript of The Awful Rowing Toward God, scheduled for publication in March 1975 (Middlebrook 396). On returning home she put on her mother’s old fur coat, removed all her rings, poured herself a glass of vodka, locked herself in her garage, and started the engine of her car, ending her life by carbon monoxide poisoning.[12]
In an interview over a year before her death, she explained she had written the first drafts of The Awful Rowing Toward God in 20 days with “two days out for despair and three days out in a mental hospital.” She went on to say that she would not allow the poems to be published before her death. She is buried at Forest Hills Cemetery & Crematory in Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts.
Sexton is seen as the modern model of the confessional poet. Maxine Kumin described Sexton’s work: “She wrote openly about menstruation, abortion, masturbation, incest, adultery, and drug addiction at a time when the proprieties embraced none of these as proper topics for poetry.”[13]
THE AUTHOR OF THE JESUS PAPERS SPEAKS
In my dream
I milked a cow,
the terrible udder
like a great rubber lily
sweated in my fingers
and as I yanked,
waiting for the moon juice,
waiting for the white mother,
blood spurted from it
and covered me with shame.
Then God spoke to me and said:
People say only good things about Christmas.
If they want to say something bad,
they whisper.
So I went to the well and drew a baby
out of the hollow water.
Then God spoke to me and said:
Here. Take this gingerbread lady
and put her in your oven.
When the cow gives blood
and the Christ is born
we must all eat sacrifices.
We must all eat beautiful women.
Anne Sexton from The Book of Folly 1972
the girls i knew in high school were all enamored with Sylvia. and i must admit i was some what smitten. but there was this teacher of English. she did not debate but rather exposed the rare woman genius the all too common crucifixion the dark stronger than the bright, the strength to take control in a time in a place where all is only waiting around food feeding on food attracted like horseflies to tenderness. the time was she said now and so the time was and so she said it was therefore it would be now and never any other time but. – pd lyons
all photos C. pd lyons photography.
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