Anne sexton

[PrinceMyshkin]

She's trying to skip herself
like a wrong-sided pebble
across the wide water,
she's taut
on her mind's thin edge,
slicing,
and calling on everyone to save her.


What did she do
until she discovered poetry
which, she said, would save her
(it didn't) or before she wrote letters
all day, her hand held out in front of her?


Poetry? It's a shirt that has to be turned
and turned again, a hand
flung hard as you can
away from the heart. She stands
at the shore of white sound, surveying the waves,


but the pebble skips back on itself,
and the castaway hand
strikes back, twice as hard,
at the heart, that unskippable stone.



____________
Apologies if I've posted this before

[Sampson]

daaamn... PrinceM, you are a truly inspiring poet. I don't have any intellectual comment, just admiration...

[AuntShecky]

I didn't know it mattered which side of a stone was skipped. In any case, I liked how you returned to the imagery in the last stanza (strophe.)

The pebble in the water image was used so effectively and beautifully by Pope in his Essay on Man, I myself was reluctant to use it, but I did in a poem about T. Monk. But the stone-skipping works very well here. I will look at the poems by Anne Sexton, at least the ones that are available in the anthologies I have, to see if she used that image
as well.

[firefangled]

Anne Sexton was the first poet whose entire body of work I read.

Your treatment of the metaphors you use (especially the last three words) are very reminiscent of her, though your style and voice are your own. I cannot recall her using a stone image or metaphor, but it was many years ago.

The third stanza is the best IMHO. I wondered why you had the editorial comment about poetry saving her. I though it was unnecessary because you allude to her fate with the last stanza.

This is an excellent poem well worth seeing again and well remembered.

[Bar22do]

Oh, Prince of Poetry who turned your shirt and turned again...
"but the pebble skips back on itself", and there is no escape, no salvation... Sylvia Plath's effect, psychologists coin, while you highlight the tragic with contained compassion... thank you, it is a privilege to read you

[Pendragon]

but the pebble skips back on itself,
and the castaway hand
strikes back, twice as hard,
at the heart, that unskippable stone.



____________
Apologies if I've posted this before

Woah! How do you do it, Jer? The heart doesn't skip well because it tends to break when one tries to hard

[Granny5]

I think I'll just stop commenting on your work because all I ever seem to say is "lovely". Couldn't you write something awful every once and a while so I can type something different? lol

[qimissung]

It's gorgeous, Prince. Even though it's ostensible about Anne Sexton, it is also about all of us.

I'm like Granny5. All I ever say about your stuff is that it's wonderful! ")

[PrinceMyshkin]

It's gorgeous, Prince. Even though it's ostensible about Anne Sexton, it is also about all of us.

I'm like Granny5. All I ever say about your stuff is that it's wonderful! ")

I'd gladly accept your and Granny5's responses over that from my #1 son to whom I sent some other poem and got this one word reply:

"Pretty"
So, the next poem I sent him, I preceded with: "Please don't say this is pretty," to which he replied:

"How about trite?"

There's a Yiddish saying I've occasionally offered him: Meh darft hoben kinder? = Did one need to have children?

[PrinceMyshkin]

daaamn... PrinceM, you are a truly inspiring poet. I don't have any intellectual comment, just admiration...

Intellectual comment is always welcome but moving someone - as I appear to have done to you - is what really matters to me. Thank you

[PrinceMyshkin]

Anne Sexton was the first poet whose entire body of work I read.

Your treatment of the metaphors you use (especially the last three words) are very reminiscent of her, though your style and voice are your own. I cannot recall her using a stone image or metaphor, but it was many years ago.

Nor was I aware at the time or since of her use of a stone as a metaphor. I thought it was appropriate to my viewing her from the exterior which was all that was available to me.


The third stanza is the best IMHO. I wondered why you had the editorial comment about poetry saving her. I though it was unnecessary because you allude to her fate with the last stanza.

But surely that was essential to establish the hope we invest in writing poems, beyond our striving for worthwhile perceptions and technical consonance?

[firefangled]

Nor was I aware at the time or since of her use of a stone as a metaphor. I thought it was appropriate to my viewing her from the exterior which was all that was available to me.

My comment about the stone was more in response to AuntShecky's comment about Sexton possibly using the same metaphor. It would fit for her as you have proven. I think in poems about poets, or allusions to their work in poems that are not, there are elements of their poetry that are often used by the writer.


But surely that was essential to establish the hope we invest in writing poems, beyond our striving for worthwhile perceptions and technical consonance?

Perhaps I was not clear. Regarding the sentence (S2) about poetry saving her, I was referring to the parenthetical expression (it didn't) only. I think you establish well enough the hope she placed in poetry and the outcome of that hope in the ending of your poem.

On subsequent readings I thought this was very interesting in counterpoint to the hope Sexton placed in poetry in your poem:


Poetry? It's a shirt that has to be turned
and turned again, a hand
flung hard as you can
away from the heart...

In her essay, Against Sincerity, Louise Gluck has a comment regarding the poetry of Diane Wakowski and the "I" in her poems. In creating a poem, Wakowski once reminded her critics that the "secret" of her poems, their intimacy was "regularly transformed by acts of decision." The hope that poetry can save the poet emotionally rests in the hope, as Gluck puts it, that "The secrets we choose to betray lose power over us." You seem to be saying, correctly, that poetry is not that unskippable stone.

Obviously this did not happen for Sexton, because our confessions as poets are tainted in the name of poetry. As with any fiction, "what really happens" or "how/what we really felt" is not always interesting nor is it always art. Truth is larger than that in art; that's what makes it interesting and in the best of cases enduring. Being the "supreme fiction" it is futile to think Pulitzer prize winning poems reflect the life of the poet exactly as it occurred in all honesty and sincerity.

[AuntShecky]

As with any fiction, "what really happens" or "how what we really felt" is not always interesting nor is it always art. Truth is larger than that in art; that's what makes it interesting and in the best of cases enduring. Being the "supreme fiction" it is futile to think Pulitzer prize winning poems reflect the life of the poet exactly as it occurred in all honesty and sincerity.

This is absolutely, positively true in the sense that the best poetry is "universal," meaning that its power transcends the banality of personal experience. That is the difference
between a good poem and a mere journal entry.

[PrinceMyshkin]

I think I'll just stop commenting on your work because all I ever seem to say is "lovely". Couldn't you write something awful every once and a while so I can type something different? lol



This poem is so bad
that if you took it to a poem doctor
she would say: “Your policy doesn’t cover
pre-existing conditions...”

So you might take it, then,
to a genealogist who’d report
“This was obviously written
by a primate who had not yet mastered
bi-pedalism so he scratched it
in the dirt with his bare knuckles.”

Oh, what to do
with a truly bad poem?
Cap it with a black beret
and stick a really stinky cheroot
in the corner of its lips...

[PrinceMyshkin]

Regarding the sentence (S2) about poetry saving her, I was referring to the parenthetical expression (it didn't) only. I think you establish well enough the hope she placed in poetry and the outcome of that hope in the ending of your poem.


This remarked plunged me into what I considered an interesting discussion between myself and the poem. In the lines in question, I could have written

poetry
which she said would save her
and saved the conclusion of my narrative for the end of the poem, but having written:


poetry
which, she said, would save her

the "she said" within commas hints that this is an example of the lady protesting too much or at least in vain, wherefrom the following


(it didn't)

would be redundant unless you read it as the author's own bitter reproach to her AND to himself for entertaining such a foolish hope. I.e., better to stamp it out at birth.

[PrinceMyshkin]

This is absolutely, positively true in the sense that the best poetry is "universal," meaning that its power transcends the banality of personal experience. That is the difference
between a good poem and a mere journal entry.

I have a wee quarrel with your concept of the universality of good poetry. My response is a mixture of Tip O'Neill's "All politics is local" and Blake's "To hold the world in a grain of sand..." Mustn't one, to begin with, observe that grain of sand as if it were unique?