Are We Fake?

With a mixture of talent, naiveté, and marketing smarts, Anne Sexton created lasting images of glamour, genius, insouciance, and self-destruction that defined the late-twentieth century woman, poet, and woman-poet. These images contributed to her success, but also made it difficult to assess her poetry, as shown by contemporary reviews of her work. “Are We Fake? Images of Anne Sexton, Twentieth-Century Woman/Poet” looks at how the images evolved and what pleasure and enlightenment we can gain from them now.

From the Podium to the Second Row

“From the Podium to the Second Row” argues that Sexton’s readings deserve to be remembered as performance, at least in this more-than-theatrical sense, and (assured of this caveat) Sexton herself would have argued the point. Poetry readings, in turn, were “a reliving of the experience, that is, they are happening all over again” (No Evil Star 108). So, if what’s “happening” in performance is what’s “happening” in the poem—and if it’s hard to tell the difference between these and what’s happening in real life—well, this, for Sexton, was a mark of her performative success.

Anne Sexton and the Wild Animal

“Anne Sexton and The Wild Animal” discusses the bestiary poems from Anne Sexton’s 45 Mercy Street in the context of the book as a whole. It also investigates the idea of a feral, metaphysical “I” in other American poets, including Sylvia Plath.

The Poet Has Collapsed

“The Poet Has Collapsed” is a sober assessment of Sexton’s later work, specifically the poems written after those included in Transformations. It examines three areas of concern: first, the overuse of particular tropes in The Book of Folly, The Death Notebooks, The Awful Rowing Toward God, and 45 Mercy Street, second, the plethora of failed figurative language and images in those collections, and third, the performative aspect of Sexton’s reading style and public persona in the latter part of her life. It delves into Conway’s fascination with the recordings of Sexton reading her poems, as well as her larger-than-life persona. He explores his own mixed feelings for Sexton’s later work, describing what happens when profound admiration for the poet and the concept of “Bad Anne” collide.

“The Speaker in This Case”

Transformations brings together several currents of Anne Sexton’s themes and methods and can be read as both a masked autobiography and transitional or gateway work from her mid to late poetry. This chapter analyzes the voice and tone she conjures to create the persona of witch/crone/teller and closely looks at the kinds of metaphors and images she employs to create her distinctive dramas. It compares her retellings to the original Grimm texts and also looks at some of her earlier poems as precursors while considering how, in her hands, the tales turn into both theatrical performances and case studies.

Introduction

Anne Sexton continues to fascinate readers. Her career is in need of a reassessment that considers the wide range of materials in her archive, her influence on contemporary poetry, and directions for future scholarship. While there have been recent volumes analyzing the poetry of Sexton’s midcentury contemporaries, there have not been comparable considerations of Sexton’s poetry. Several collections of essays were published from the late seventies to the early nineties, but there has not been a book that fully engages the scope of Sexton’s creative and critical legacy. This introduction speaks to the ways that This Business of Words addresses these goals and draws new attention to the material dimensions of Sexton’s life and work.

Anne Sexton’s Institutional Voice

“Anne Sexton’s Institutional Voice” offers a critique and revisionary account of the breakthrough narrative, with Anne Sexton serving as its central example. If a crucial aspect of the breakthrough narrative is that the poet makes a radical turn away from “objective” content and towards autobiography, then Charles Altieri suggests a way in which we can both acknowledge the poet’s renewed interest in his own life and at the same time preserve the possibility that certain legacies of modernist and New Critical poetics might still condition his deployment of autobiography. Put another way, my contention here is that poets like Plath, Lowell, and Sexton continue, rather than reject, key aspects of the institutional forms of modernism that they inherit, but that they do so, often, by writing poems in which they are themselves both the subjects and the objects of institutional scrutiny.

Anne Sexton’s Photographic Self-Fashioning

For many readers who have engaged Anne Sexton’s work, her play before the camera in photographs (both still and moving images) is inextricably linked to dynamics of woman’s looked-at-ness and to modes of confessional display. As Sexton’s fame has grown —in her era and in ours—her legacy in photographs has been treated a problem, an issue, an aspect of celebrity to be summarily dismissed (“exhibitionistic”) or selectively disavowed in the interest of a putatively more serious interest in a body of artistic work. This chapter presents an alternative, materially inspired reading of Sexton’s public authorial legend and the photographic references in her writing in which those two bodies—the lyric body and the photographed body—are less comfortably divisible.

“Two Sweet Ladies”

‘“Two Sweet Ladies”: Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath’s Friendship and Mutual Influence’ explores the friendship between Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and their mutual influence on each other’s work. Poems, letters, and journal entries will be used to trace Sexton and Plath’s meeting in Robert Lowell’s poetry workshop at Boston University in 1959, Sexton’s influence on Plath’s Ariel poems, and conversely, Plath’s influence on Sexton’s poetry after her suicide.

Reading, Voice, and Performance

Anne Sexton delivered her last public reading at Goucher College, Baltimore, MD, on October 1, 1974, three days before she took her own life. The high quality, eighty-minute long performance was recorded, but remained unknown until 2005. “Reading, Voice, and Performance” brings the last reading into conversation with some of the better known biographical aspects of Sexton’s last months and days—already familiar to readers of her obituaries and Diane Wood Middlebrook’s biography—as well as with other recordings (Caedmon (1974); Voice of the Poet (2000), etc.) and the work of scholars Derek Furr, Jo Gill, Christopher Grobe and J. D. McClatchy who have written on the nature of Sexton’s self-presentation and public persona(e).