I think tonight I will reread her first two books. Sexton, that is.

I want to live inside of Mary Oliver's Dream Work. These poems beg to be read and are the consolation I need today as I am faced with my own tendency towards attachment. This has little to do with Gipson directly, but I feel like Oliver's poetry is speaking to my own more than usual, and my poetry is part of the project. This poem is working on becoming ubiquitous, but I still want to post it in all of its relevance!

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

I need to be submitting to journals.

I am having a horrible time focusing today. I want to read all of Dream Work, work on my own poems, do yoga, bag the clothes I don't wear and take them to Goodwill. Maybe I am wasting my time by sitting here and trying to work when everything else seems so urgent.

From "A Rant Against Creative Writing Classes" by Dan Barden

"...the workshop promotes the idea to young writers that their writing is required reading, that an audience is guaranteed. When really, postworkshop, no one will ever be forced to look at their work again. It's the first thing I tell my students: If you could understand, really understand, that no one needs to read your work, then your writing would improve vastly by the time we meet in this classroom again."


Anne Sexton, referring to W.D. Snodgrass, in a letter to Carolyn Kizer:

"His poems are all truth (so to speak) but not the real truth yet. (that is if you think the greatness of a poem depends on its intrinsic truth to the action)" (108)

In a letter to Anthony Hecht:

"I don't think L.I. Ferry really a good poem of mine...too sentimental. But perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps I ought to allow my female heart more room...it seems to be the way I'm writing lately...my new poem too...but I'm going to harden up soon I promise myself...stop all the emoting around and get down to facts and objects" (127).


In a letter to Mrs. Willard Fuller:

"I feel, sometimes, sorry about my poetry...not as far as "the literary world" is concerned...but as far as the people in Wellesley and surrounding towns are concenred. It shocks them and I can understand why...they say it isn't anything 'like me'...'it is so depressing' or 'cruel'...and I know that it is, in truth like me inside. And, you see, 'inside' is the place where poems come from" (147).

From the Introduction to The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton by Maxine Cumin:

"In a terse eulogy Robert Lowell declared, with considerable ambivalence it would" seem, 'For a book or two, she grew more powerful. Then writing was too easy or too hard for her. She became meager and exaggerated. Many of her most embarrassing poems would have been fascinating if someone had put them in quotes, as the presentation of some character, not the author.'" (Cumin xx)

"...in Sexton's poetry the reader can find the poet again and again identifying herself through her relationship with the male Other, whether in the person of a lover or...in the person of the patriarchal final arbiter" (xxx).

"Women poets in particular owe a debt to Anne Sexton, who broke new ground, shattered taboos, and endured a barrage of attacks along the way because of the flamboyance of her subject matter, which, twenty years later, seems far less daring...Anne delineated the problematic position of women-- the neurotic reality of the time-- though she was not able to cope in her own life with the personal trouble it created" (xxxiv).