The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Thu 2/7/2008)

[RetroLounge]

Wanting to Die

Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.
I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.
Then the almost unnameable lust returns.

Even then I have nothing against life.
I know well the grass blades you mention,
the furniture you have placed under the sun.

But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.

Twice I have so simply declared myself,
have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,
have taken on his craft, his magic.

In this way, heavy and thoughtful,
warmer than oil or water,
I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.

I did not think of my body at needle point.
Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.
Suicides have already betrayed the body.

Still-born, they don't always die,
but dazzled, they can't forget a drug so sweet
that even children would look on and smile.

To thrust all that life under your tongue!--
that, all by itself, becomes a passion.
Death's a sad Bone; bruised, you'd say,

and yet she waits for me, year after year,
to so delicately undo an old wound,
to empty my breath from its bad prison.

Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,
raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,
leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,

leaving the page of the book carelessly open,
something unsaid, the phone off the hook
and the love, whatever it was, an infection.

Anne Sexton

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Anne Gray Harvey was born in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1928. She attended Garland Junior College for one year and married Alfred Muller Sexton II at age nineteen. She enrolled in a modeling course at the Hart Agency and lived in San Francisco and Baltimore. In 1953 she gave birth to a daughter. In 1954 she was diagnosed with postpartum depression, suffered her first mental breakdown, and was admitted to Westwood Lodge, a neuropsychiatric hospital she would repeatedly return to for help. In 1955, following the birth of her second daughter, Sexton suffered another breakdown and was hospitalized again; her children were sent to live with her husband's parents. That same year, on her birthday, she attempted suicide.

She was encouraged by her doctor to pursue an interest in writing poetry she had developed in high school, and in the fall of 1957 she enrolled in a poetry workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education. In her introduction to Anne Sexton's Complete Poems, the poet Maxine Kumin, who was enrolled with Sexton in the 1957 workshop and became her close friend, describes her belief that it was the writing of poetry that gave Sexton something to work towards and develop and thus enabled her to endure life for as long as she did. In 1974 at the age of 46, despite a successful writing career--she won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for Live or Die--she lost her battle with mental illness and committed suicide.

Like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, W. D. Snodgrass (who exerted a great influence on her work), and other "confessional" poets, Sexton offers the reader an intimate view of the emotional anguish that characterized her life. She made the experience of being a woman a central issue in her poetry, and though she endured criticism for bringing subjects such as menstruation, abortion, and drug addiction into her work, her skill as a poet transcended the controversy over her subject matter.



*******************************
:hi:

RL

[lizziegrace]

1. ...

:hug:

[ThomCat]

2. I wonder if this could be set to slow music.

It seems like theres a song in there. :(

[RetroLounge]

6. Can you dance to suicide?

Why not...

:hi:

RL

[Tuesday Afternoon]

3. almost convincing. --

"Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,
raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,
leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,..."

That would be a meeting I could attend.

[xchrom]

4. this is my body -- broken for you --

also interesting that she refers to the personae of Death as feminine.

[RetroLounge]

5. Thanks for pointing that out...

I totally missed that. But she would, knowing her work...

:hi:

RL

[lizziegrace]

7. This poem...

this day.

:(

[RetroLounge]

8. Oh, sweetie, I'm so sorry...

She's going to be okay...

:hug:

RL

[lizziegrace]

9. I know she is

I wish I didn't have to make that call in the first place. :(

Lelapin just called. M's in the hospital. Lelapin talked to her mother and had never heard her mom cry before...

:hug:

Thank you for being out there...

[RetroLounge]

10. Please send my hugs on to all of them...

:hug:

RL

[lizziegrace]

11. Promise...

I'll stop by the hospital after work tomorrow. Lelapin and some friends are taking some necessities over to her now.

:hug:

[hisownpetard]

12. So is Lelapin home for the week-end then?

I hope so.
((hugs))

[lizziegrace]

13. Not yet

she stayed on campus with her group of friends. Around 11:00pm they finally got a call from her roommate's mother and they took some things she needed over to the hospital.

:hug:

I hope I find out more today.