Readers and critics are deeply divided about the poetry of Anne Sexton. Although she won many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1967, some regard her work as too confessional and lacking in artistic control. We’ll have a chance to add our own voices to the debate at the next Poetry Room session on Tuesday 3 May, 6pm-8pm, in Newcastle City Library.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1928, Sexton began writing at the age of 28, encouraged by her psychotherapist, and within four years she’d had her first collection, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, published to great acclaim by Houghton Mifflin. She went on to write eight more collections, win many more prizes and honours as well as tour with her band, ‘Her Kind’, giving immensely popular readings of her work, and become sought after as a teacher of creative writing, despite ongoing struggles with serious mental health problems.
At a time of profound questioning with regard to state, world, race and gender politics, Sexton broke taboos, daring to raise issues of identity, mental illness, abuse, adultery, the minutiae of a woman’s physical experience previously hidden from view. Influenced by WD Snodgrass, Robert Lowell, James Wright and Maxine Kumin, her work, clustering around the themes of family, love, the unravelling psyche, death and religion, is forthright, playful, rich in metaphor and allusion, immediate and compelling. Anne Sexton committed suicide in October 1974.
Erica Jong has said of her: “She is an important poet not only because of her courage in dealing with previously forbidden subjects, but because she can make the language sing. Of what does [her] artistry consist? Not just of her skill in writing traditional poems… But by artistry, I mean something more subtle than the ability to write formal poems. I mean the artist’s sense of where her inspiration lies… There are many poets of great talent who never take that talent anywhere… They write poems which any number of people might have written. When Anne Sexton is at the top of her form, she writes a poem which no one else could have written.”
The poems we will be reading together will include:
Her Kind
In the Deep Museum
I Remember
The Truth the Dead Know
The Double Image
Consorting with Angels
Wanting to Die
Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman
For My Lover, Returning to His Wife
Just Once
Us
Briar Rose
Jesus Suckles
Let Anne Sexton blow your Bank Holiday cobwebs away! Look forward to seeing you on 3 May in our new home at City Library.