This Business of Words

This Business of Words: Reassessing Anne Sexton gathers ten essays about one of the most prominent yet polarizing figures of the confessional movement, a major formation in American poetry of the second part of the twentieth century. As the title suggests, much of the focus falls on Sexton’s self-conscious professionalization as a poet; according to the editor Amanda Golden, the collection “examines her industry and her industriousness” (1). The book also attempts the delicate task of evaluation of the poet and, by extension, the literary phenomenon with which she was associated. For this purpose it balances contributions from literary scholars and creative writers. Essays in the first half consider the cultural and material dimensions of Sexton’s work and career, frequently drawing on the Anne Sexton Papers at the Harry Ransom Center for Humanities Research. Essays in the second half revisit her legacy from the standpoint of contemporary practitioners, who examine selected features and motifs in her poetry (also occasionally consulting the archives) or reflect on Sexton’s impact on their own work. From these diverse perspectives Sexton emerges as poet of many contradictions. She craved the spotlight yet cultivated vulnerability in her public image. She was savvy about her literary career yet troubled in personal life. She was brave, often brilliant in the way she addressed difficult subjects yet prone to writing bad, repetitive verse. This Business of Words offers many deep insights into Sexton’s poetry and career and, along the way, some fascinating glimpses into the U.S. poetry scene of the 1960s and early 1970s.In the opening essay Jo Gill considers Sexton’s oeuvre using the concepts of time and space. Drawing on Edward Soja’s notion of “cultural geography” (19), she mines Sexton poems for the presence of metaphorical journeys, topographical elements, liminal spaces, and what she calls “suburban sanctuaries” (26). Sexton’s later verse increasingly features disorienting surreal settings and landscapes, as in “The Room of My Life,” in which inanimate objects acquire lifelike features, or “45 Mercy Street,” in which, pace Gaston Bachelard, “time and space are to be understood as mutually constitutive, malleable, and contingent” (34). Anita Helle attends to what she calls Sexton’s “photographic self-fashioning.” Not averse to publicity interviews, and ready to capitalize on her movie-star looks, Sexton welcomed portrait photographers into her house in the Boston suburb of Weston; Helle discusses several images from those sessions, some of them never published before. Working with her letters and poems, she argues that Sexton understood the growing importance of visual culture in America. Unlike Elizabeth Bishop, who treasured her privacy so much that she even disliked being photographed, “Sexton is exceptional for her equivocal embrace of the medium, and for her head-on confrontation with its contradictions” (43). Kamran Javadizadeh traces Sexton’s poetic development within two institutions: the hospital and the university. The former is represented by Westwood Lodge, in which Sexton was treated for depression and which is figured as “Bedlam” in her poetry. The latter includes her experiences as a student in Robert Lowell’s legendary poetry seminar at Boston University, which was also attended by Sylvia Plath. Discussing poems like “The Double Image” and “Ringing the Bells,” Javiadizadeh argues that Sexton’s poetic breakthrough, when viewed in the context of medical and academic spaces, resulted in “internalizing the ‘boundaries’ that those institutions drew” and “crafting a kind of poem in which those institutional dramas could be restaged” (76).The next two essays reflect on the centrality of performance to Sexton’s poetic self-fashioning. Victoria Van Hyning discusses Sexton’s approach to live recordings in the era when poets were increasingly encouraged to read their work aloud, whether on the stage or in a sound booth. The issue was particularly fraught for poets inclined to self-disclosure, since their audiences rarely cared about distinguishing between author and persona. Sexton addresses the problem in her article “The Freak Show”: “why are we making ourselves into freaks when we are really some sort of priest or prophet or hermit?” (112). However, as her fame grew, Sexton took full advantage of the possibilities of the poetry reading circuit. As Van Hyning notes, especially later in her life she excelled at creating dramatic, emotionally charged performances. Christopher Grobe borrows from Roland Barthes’s concept of “the grain of the voice” to trace Sexton’s effectiveness as a reader of her own work, her ability to create, as she put it in a letter to Donald Hall, “good, great, zany, electricity, all that” (129). Grabe notes Sexton’s early interest in theater and her background in performance studies, the meticulous care with which she prepared for her readings, and her archival impulse (she often insisted on having her readings recorded; she collected fan letters and even fan poems, some of which Grabe reproduces). His essay demonstrates that for Sexton poems were never only words on the page but “verbal happenings” (132).Until this point This Business of Words might as well have been called Anne Sexton in Context, not unlike recent essay collections on W. H. Auden or Ted Hughes, which make no statement about the poet’s significance from the point of view of literary history. But the volume’s subtitle—Reassessing Anne Sexton—does invite questions of value, as well as questions about what is actually meant (and gained) by the act of reassessment. To be sure, such an act can take many forms. Diane Middlebrook’s biography published in 1991, as well as memoirs like that of Sexton’s daughter (with its disturbing revelations), produced new insights on the poet’s art by focusing on her life. Even limited critical interventions, like Gillian White’s chapter in Lyric Shame (2014) on the strained dynamic between speaker and audience in Sexton’s poetry, clarified her distinct approach to the lyric genre. But ultimately poets rather than scholars are better equipped—or at least freer—to comment on the value of Sexton’s work, because it is through their own intertextual engagements, their own creative readings (to use Emerson’s phrase), that the work itself lives or dies.Interestingly, most essays in the second half of This Business of Words are ambivalent about Sexton’s legacy. David Trinidad turns to the topic of the friendship between Sexton and Plath. Both poets took Lowell’s seminar in 1959 and both competed for his attention. Motivated by insecurity or perhaps jealousy, Plath made devastating comments about Sexton’s poetry (“there is a lot of loose stuff”), but also frequently borrowed from it. However, as Trinidad also shows, this dynamic was reversed after Plath’s death, with Sexton now borrowing Plath’s motifs and techniques although with dismal results: “Sexton’s desire to out-Plath Plath undid her in the end” (177). Kathleen Ossip offers a more personalized account of “Anne” (as she refers to her), refracted through her ambivalent relationship with her own mother and her experience as a mother herself. Rejecting the critical tendency to separate life from art, she considers Sexton through the lenses of “Pretty Anne,” “Housewife Anne,” “Stupid Anne,” “Classy Anne,” and “Dead Anne”; now more than ever, she argues, the cultural value of Sexton’s work is dependent on her “myth” (180). Jeffery Conway’s essay begins with some personal reminiscences, but soon launches into a serious effort at reevaluation. Live or Die, for which she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1966, may be in his opinion Sexton’s best book, but much of the later work suffers by the overuse of parallelism, repetition, refrain, noun phrases introduced by demonstratives, epithets, honorifics, and distasteful Nazi imagery; as Conway wryly observes, “she was not blind to the possibility of badness” (203). The final two essays continue the project of reassessment by drawing attention to parts of Sexton’s oeuvre that are not often linked with the confessional mode, at least not directly. Jeanne Marie Beaumont writes insightfully and appreciatively about the fairy tale poems in Transformations, which separate Sexton’s middle and later periods. Dorothea Lasky considers “Bestiary U.S.A.” from Sexton’s posthumous collection 45 Mercy St. Focusing on the tension between her mental illness and her poetic gift, she argues that Sexton “contained a wild animal in her lyric to perform a sort of catharsis for everyone, to empower her readers, people like her” (250).There has not exactly been a paucity of Sexton scholarship in the aftermath of her death in 1974 or even in the last two decades. Most poets who continued to pursue the confessional mode, especially those exploring themes like family life, gender roles, and mental illness, have been in one way or another indebted to her work. Hardly a neglected poet, though no longer a literary celebrity, Sexton had an extraordinary talent for words as well as the business of words. This is evident in her poems, but especially so with the added element of performance—a point made by more than one contributor to this volume. Fortunately, a large number of recordings of her poetry have been preserved and restored, so that we can have a better sense of what Sexton meant by “verbal happenings.” Sexton’s charisma, and her “stagey reading style” (198), come through powerfully during the poetry reading she gave at Goucher College on October 1, 1974, just three days before her suicide; the recording is available on YouTube. Another remarkable document, also available on YouTube and now also on PennSound, is the Sexton episode in Richard Moore’s program “USA: Poetry,” first broadcast on KQED for National Education Television (NET) in 1966. It features Sexton reading her poems, sharing anecdotes about her life, talking with her daughter, listening to music. Of all poets included in the series, she seems to be the most acutely aware of the presence of the camera as a proxy for her readership; at all times she is an actor as well as an author, an ultimate performer. These and other audiovisual materials make tangible the world in which Sexton promoted her poetry and cultivated her public persona. It is when close reading is complemented by close listening—and in some cases close viewing—that the full scope of her importance becomes apparent

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