Backlisted - All My Pretty Ones by Anne Sexton

Episode Date: March 26, 2024

Award-winning poet Emily Berry joins us to consider the work and troubled life of Anne Sexton. We focus on her brilliant second collection All My Pretty Ones (1962). Sexton was a trailblazing American poet of the so-called 'confessional' school of the 1960s, one whose writing continues to provoke controversy and debate; her friends and contemporaries included Sylvia Plath and John Berryman. We hear from Sexton herself, in recordings of readings and interviews, and fronting own experimental jazz-rock ensemble, Anne Sexton and Her Kind, and also from her daughter Linda. Please note: Anne Sexton was an unflinching chronicler of her own struggle with mental illness, and this episode contains extensive discussion of suicide and sexual abuse. * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here which has book recommendations from our hosts and guests. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast which gives new life to old books. Today you find us in Weston, a small affluent town on the outskirts of Boston. We're in the slightly cramped dining room of a two-story modern colonial house in about 1962. The space is dominated by a tall, slim woman with dark bobbed hair and piercing blue eyes. She is smoking languidly, pencil in hand, pouring over a huge sheaf of papers, what appears to be a card table. Around her, books and papers are stacked in unruly piles, spilling out into the rest of the room. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, where people crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, the author of The

Year of Reading Dangerously. Our guest for this episode is Emily Berry. This is her first time on the podcast. Welcome, Emily. Hello. Hi, Emily. Emily is a poet, writer, and editor living in London. She is the author of three books of poems published by Faber and Faber, Dear Boy, 2013, Stranger Baby, 2017, and Unexhausted Time, 2022, and a co-writer of the breakfast bible a compendium of breakfasts her lyric essay in the secret country of her mind on dreams agoraphobia and the imagination appeared in the limited edition artist's book many nights by jackie kenney

she's editor of chief of the bedtime stories app Sleepworlds. And I have yet to share this with Emily Berry because I've saved it until this moment. I am a huge fan of Emily Berry's work. And so I'm actually having a bit of a fan moment being here on the internet talking to the poet Emily Berry. So my question to you, Emily, is why are you so good at poetry? That's a difficult starting question.

Okay, can we come at this a different way? Tell me about the app. I wasn't familiar with your app. What is your app, Sleep Worlds? Yeah, this is a new app that was set up last year and it it has stories some of the writers include joe dunthorne um and julianne pakiko i'm not quite sure how to pronounce her surname yeah we yes we we who we love um and basically this the way the stories work is there's no plot, as it were.

So they're like little scenes that are part of these worlds. Each story is a world and they're added to. And as you listen to them, you can kind of fall in and out. And it doesn't matter if you fall asleep. They're meant to be so good that you fall asleep. It's quite a weird brief for a writer. They're ambient, aren mean the idea is that they're they're good because there's quite a range of apps that offer these kind of stories but the idea is that this one is they are actually good literature wise but

at the same time they're not so gripping that you stay up all night trying to find out what happens so gripping that you stay up all night trying to find out what happens um and i'm yeah the editor so i sort of commission the writers and edit the stories and stuff and it's literally a dream job very good well many listeners use backlisted to aid their slumber so if you need should you need any tips on how to really drive people into the bed, we can do that. You know, my brother listens to this podcast because it reminds him of when we were children and I used to read to him at night. He says he finds it deeply soothing.

Is that right? Okay. Well, you have both got deep voices, which are statistically the most sought- after bedtime story voices so interesting so interesting unfortunately it's very sexist so men's voices are much more uh sought after in this sweet dreams after this show everyone the book we're here to discuss not i think a book that many people will use to put themselves to sleep is All My Pretty Ones, the second book of poetry by Anne Sexton, one of the most important and influential American poets of the mid-20th

century. It was first published in 1962 by Houghton Mifflin and cemented Sexton's reputation at the forefront of the new school of confessional poetry, which included Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, W.D. Snodgrass, and John Berryman. Confessional poetry was marked out by its intense personal focus and its willingness to deal in explicit detail with the facts of mental illness, sexuality, and death. All these themes are vividly present in All My Pretty Ones, but the collection takes its name from the line in Macbeth where Macduff discovers his wife and children have been brutally murdered on Macbeth's orders. Comprising 32 poems divided into five carefully

stretched sections, it contains some of Sexton's most famous poems including the title poem, The Truth the Dead Know, The Operation and Women with Girdle. You'll hear some of them later in the episode. This book was warmly received by critics and fellow poets alike. Sexton had studied with Robert Lowell and asked him for a blurb, which indeed he provided. He wrote of the poems that all one can say is that they are Sexton and therefore precious. Her friend Sylvia Plath was more fulsome, calling the collection superbly masterful, woobly in the greatest sense, and so blessedly unliterary.

But Elizabeth Bishop had perhaps the deepest insight. She refused to provide a blurb, but wrote to Sexton saying that, you began right off speaking in an authentic voice of your own. This is very rare and has saved you a great deal of time. Understanding Sexton's voice and why it continues to speak to so many readers is what we are here to explore. And when we come back from this little break, here to explore. And when we come back from this little break, we will go straight into hearing some poetry by Anne Sexton. But first, here's a word from our sponsors. This is an advertisement from BetterHelp. Everyone knows therapy is great for solving problems,

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That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamx. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. Okay. Understanding Anne Sexton's voice and why it continues to speak to so many readers is what we are here to explore. So first of all, let me ask you, Emily, the question that we ask everyone on Backlisted, where were you and who were you when you first encountered either this volume of poetry or Anne Sexton's work in general? Well, I'd love to say that I discovered her when I was a teenager,

because that seems like the most suitable time. But I think I discovered her when I was a teenager because that seems like the most suitable time. But I think it was probably when I was in my mid-20s when I was studying creative writing. And the first poem I came across or was introduced to was Her Kind from the first collection. And yeah, I just became kind of obsessed with that poem. I'm kind of like, I'm not really necessarily a completist when it comes to poetry. So I start off with one poem and I just really like it and I just read it over and over again. So I think with her kind, that's what happened. I mean, it's still one of the few poems that I know off by heart and I still kind of recite it to myself when I feel like doing something like that.

So it was only sometime later that I thought, oh, I should read some of this poet's other work. And she's a great poet to come to when you're just starting out as a poet because she's so permission giving. I mean, even now, like a lot of her work is so taboo breaking and writing about stuff that you wouldn't necessarily think you could write about. So, yeah, I think it was a kind of an important time in my own sort of development as a writer. I'm very keen that we get Anne Sexton's poetic voice in here before John and I talk. So, Emily, I wonder, could I ask you if you would read to us the first poem in All My Pretty Ones? Yeah. So, this is The Truth the Dead Know, and it has a dedication. For my mother, born March 1902, died March 1959, and my father, born February 1900, died June 1959.

Gone, I say, and walk from church, refusing the stiff procession to the grave, letting the dead ride alone in the hearse. It is June. I am tired of being brave. It is June. I am tired of being brave. We drive to the Cape. I cultivate myself where the sun gutters from the sky, where the sea swings in like an iron gate and we touch. In another country, people die. My darling, the wind falls in like stones from the white-hearted water,

and when we touch, we enter touch entirely. No one's alone. Men kill for this, or for as much. And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in their stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knuckle bone. Wow.

Emily, what aspects of Anne Sexton's work can we see straight away in that particular poem? Well, it's just so direct and immediate. It's kind of forceful and there's a kind of plainness to it, even though there's so much sort of drama and violence in the language in a way, drama and violence in the language in a way, it's not at all flowery. She's using mostly sort of Anglo-Saxon words. It's all like a lot of one-syllable words. And yeah, well, there's obviously the confessional aspect, which is alluded to with the dedication. We might want to raise the question of how we feel about the term confessional, but for want of a better term whatever value it had in the 1960s it drained away quite a long time ago didn't it yeah i mean

that she felt that and i'm sure we all yeah absolutely and it's sort of odd that it's only associated with like these four four or five poets they inaugurated it and then it doesn't seem to be used so much anymore thankfully we should say of those poets at least three came to a particularly unhappy end right yeah i mean berriman plath and and sexton all died by their own hand uh i wonder as well whether plath's comment there about the, what does she say, unliterary, that's true here, isn't it? In terms of what we would think of as literary poetry in the early 1960s, as you suggest, this is almost colloquial, not quite colloquial, but it's very plain. Yeah. And it's sort of looking at it from a contemporary point of view,

it's maybe I guess that stuff is less noticeable because it's much more common for people to write in a colloquial voice. But back then, this was very new and something that I understand because she hadn't been to college and she was just writing in a very sort of fresh way. And obviously she studied with Lowell, who was writing very personally as well. So there was that influence. But it is quite a structured poem. I mean, it's four stanzas or four lines, A, B, A, B, rhyme schemes. Maybe that's not what you first notice about it, but one of the things I really love about Sexton

is that she was really interested. Maybe, as you say, she didn't have a degree, but she was really interested in poetic form and in rhyme. She was obsessed with her rhyming dictionary and trying to find structure in things. And you can definitely see that in this poem. You don't, as I say, you kind of don't notice it when, because you're so grappling with the emotional intensity of it.

One of the things about her, I think, is the, Emily, as you say, like the confessional tag that got applied to her and other poets is is i mean we can see why that why that occurred but for me she's one of the great poets who writes poems about poems um and as regular listeners will know i love books about books those are the best books and so for me anne sexton is a mixture of that kind of know I love books about books those are the best books and so for me Anne Sexton is a mixture of that kind of performative but sincere depressive which I love and also she writes about what she's doing while she's doing it you know there are poems later in this collection that we'll come to that I think illustrate this more but but here in the truth the dead know it seems to me that the line at the end of the

third stanza men kill for this or for as much that's the john that's the anchor of that yeah poem for me what is the trade that i the poet am making here what is the what is the trade that I, the poet, am making here? What is the payoff? What do I give and what do I receive? John, can I ask you then, when and where did you first encounter the work of Anne Sexton? Well, I've got one of my embarrassing confessions to make. So I was studying English at Auckland University back in 1980. I guess it would have been 1981.

And there was a really, really good course on modern American poetry. And the week that Anne Sexton's poetry was discussed was the week I didn't go to the lecture. So I remember really being blown away by W.D. Snodgrass's Heart's Needle. I thought that was one of the most, and it still is one of my, it's one of the things I go back to. And being blown away by Skunk Owl by Robert Lowell, and indeed by pretty much all the poetry of Adrian Rich that I read at that period. But I've got this big, until Emily suggested this, I had a big blank space where I'd always felt that Anne Sexton,

I knew about her, but I had never read her. So that's one of the things I love most about this podcast, is this gave me a fantastic excuse to read lots of Anne Sexton. And again, I just feel I've had to recalibrate my understanding of modern American poetry. She's, I think, that important. And that, in a way, different, very different, I think, from the men, but also different from Hadrad Sylvia Plath and different from Plath and different from Adrian Rich as well. Emily, I've got a tangential question to ask. I know there's some discussion in the poetry world about how seriously we should take the

concept of the individual volumes of poetry as opposed to the individual poems or the collected works. You know, you've talked there very interestingly about how you came via a single poem, via a hit, and then decided you might buy the album. How do you feel? You know, when you're preparing one of your collections for publication, how concerned are you with the experience of reading the book as a book? Yeah, it's an interesting question because I think, Yeah, it's an interesting question because I suspect most poets when preparing their books, I certainly do think very carefully about the order of the poems and the shape of the book, what comes after what and so on, what's the beginning, what's the end. But most people, I would hazard a guess, don't read poetry collections in order. I always set out to

hazard a guess don't read poetry collections in order i always set out to and then i sort of get i get about those people are fools i get about three poems in i think oh i'll just kind of skip along a bit or let's see what the last poem is or whatever a good bit of advice i heard when putting together a poetry collection is to basically make sure your first obviously the first poem has to be a banger but you want your second poem to still be pretty good. So basically the first three have got to be the best and the last one, and then the rest of it, you know, just put it in however you want. It's so like an album, isn't it?

It's just like an album. I was going to say, like an album, you would program an album by putting the hits at the beginning of each side and a banger to go out on, and then the filler comes in in the gaps so uh that's depressing you didn't you didn't confess your anne sexton first first contact and it is a confession speaking of confessional uh things confessional podcast um i came to the once popular and now problematic poet anne sexton via the once popular and now problematic singer Morrissey.

Yes. Now, Morrissey is a long-time admirer of Anne Sexton's work and indeed has issued public proclamations, as is his want, declaring her a finer poet than Sylvia Plath, which, you know, he knows what he's doing there. He's just trying to get you to look at him, as indeed Anne Sexton was, which is why I think she likes him. But some time ago, I attended a Morrissey concert

where before the show, he has like a video montage of different bands and records and video clips. And there are things that you would expect. New York Dolls, Sparks, Iggy. And then there was a two-minute clip, or a black-and-white clip of a woman I didn't recognise reading a poem I didn't know. And we're going to hear that poem now and that clip.

But I'm going to say to listeners, if you go onto YouTube, you pause the podcast here and you go to YouTube and you watch Anne Sexton reading her poem, Wanting to Die, and it's called Wanting die film that home and then if you it's important that you watch it so um we'll come back to this discussion after we've listened to it and you've seen it 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. 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 needlepoint.

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 suicide 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 page of the book carelessly open, something unsaid, the phone off the hook, and the love, whatever it was, an infection. Now, as you'll know, listener, viewer, if you've just watched that,

I was struck by the poem, but I absolutely was smitten with the look Anne Sexton gives the camera at the end of that recording, as if to say, now, viewer, what are you going to do with that? And to me, that was a really genuinely a very powerful moment it's so unusual to see a poet performer in that era with an awareness of what the camera will do and the image that they're projecting and in a sense that's a kind of pre-rock and roll um which will come on to awareness of what the the media and the medium is able to do with the work. Emily, I described Anne Sexton's work as performative. And performative is a word that has a negative connotation, I think, in lots of ways at the moment. But I use it with Anne Sexton,

wholly positive. It's an acknowledgement of things she was good at. And they weren't just writing, they were also performing. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, her readings are incredible. It's not necessarily that common for poets to be able to present their work so well, unfortunately. I mean, it can be, but it's much more of a thing nowadays for people to work on their performance style that and obviously back then it wasn't at all and i know she was criticized sometimes for her approach to performances because it was sort of seen as i don't know showing off or sort of being a sort of actressy which wasn't considered appropriate when it's completely part of the poem it's not yes yeah

it's not to be separated from it really i mean i think for john as an attention seeker and again that's a that is a term with a negative connotation but it seems truthful in anne sexton's case it's a classic forgive me cf look at me by anita brookner it's a classic example of look at me so you can't see me. Simultaneously, the poems are about, in theory, full disclosure while simultaneously erasing the real person. So if I can project a simulacrum of myself to distract you from the real me, then you can't get me. That seems powerfully evident with Anne Sexton. I think that's probably true. Hard to say without knowing the person. I was reading in her biography that she said that she was always very disturbed before and after her

readings which seems to align with the idea that the performance was a, you know, a monumental effort and took a lot of preparation and obviously took a lot out of her as well. You know, and bearing in mind she was someone who was dealing with a lot of mental distress, keeping that all kind of somehow underneath the kind of showmanship is... I mean, you know, you were talking earlier about how to put together a collection. I mean, the culture really that she was writing in feels to me,

it's really fascinating that workshopping culture. She was in a workshop with a poet, John Holmes, and her friend, in a workshop with a poet, John Holmes, and her friend Maxine Coonham and George Starbuck, who were all, they were all poets. They all criticised one another's work. There was a sort of performative aspect to the way they got better. But she was dealing with genuine, genuine mental illness. I mean, when she was putting together this collection, her therapist, Dr Orne dr martin orne

went on holiday he seemed to go on holiday various moments during her life which always classic therapist behavior yeah classic therapist and she had a proper full-blown suicidal when she was trying to work out the she took the sequencing of her poems really, really carefully. And there's one brilliant thing in the biography, she wanted to dedicate the poem, The Fortress, which she'd written in a very positive kind of frame of mind. It's a poem about, as many of her great poems are about her relationship with her children, her daughter. But she wanted to dedicate it to her therapist. And he refused. He refused to do that. He said that unlike other doctors, psychiatrists are entitled to only one form of currency, money. Everything else costs the patients too much. I'm strangely attracted to that guy. costs the patience too much. I'm strangely attracted to that guy. Can you tell listeners a little bit about how Anne Sexton started writing poetry? That's the first issue.

But also how you feel about the relationship between why she started and then how she continued. relationship between why she started and then how she continued, because I think that's a very interesting thought to unpack. Yeah, it's interesting the role of therapy in her work sort of throughout her writing life. Well, she apparently wrote as a teenager, but was kind of put off by negative remarks from her mother. Who hasn't been? When she had her first daughter and had a breakdown after that, I think it was at that point she started seeing the psychiatrist, or it might have been after her second child because she had further problems then. And this psychiatrist, Martin Orne, suggested that she start writing more in earnest because he was impressed with something that she'd shown him.

And obviously, she took that to heart and then carried on writing from then on. And her relationship with him and with other therapists or psychiatrists plays out in the work. So there's a lot of poems that address him. I mean, at one point she had a sexual relationship with another psychiatrist, which is very disturbing from the therapeutic ethics point of view. And there's a sequence that was published posthumously called, I think, Letters to Dr. Y. I think the relationship between poetry and psychotherapy is really interesting. It's something that I think a lot about because my own experience of being in therapy has informed my writing quite a lot. And I know that some creative people think that being in psychotherapy

could be detrimental to your work because you might sort of talk it all out and get healed of your problem that's the thing that's creating the work in the first place. But that's definitely not been my experience and certainly didn't seem to be Anne Sexton's either. So I think it can be a very sort of generative thing for writers because it's working on the same whatever it is that brings these things to the surface, I think. I think in Sexton's case, the therapy is the catalyst for the work but offers little in the way of therapeutic value.

That's my observation from reading it. You know, it's almost like, rather than dealing with the problem, as I suggested earlier, it's a way of not dealing with it. It's a way of turning it into entertainment for other people and a way of, and that's not, sorry, that sounds overly critical in terms of, I think the poetry is incredible. But if we were to compare her with Plath, and there are whole books that have been written that do just this, you know, Plath is, it seems to me, more interested in the classicism of poetry from the off.

And Sexton comes to that, having discovered she has this preternatural gift as a result of it being suggested to her that she try writing poetry. She finds, outpours this stuff, which is simultaneously self-expression, but also material to turn into a more formal art form. John, did you find reading her poetry moving? Yes, I certainly find watching her perform her poetry moving because I think you see and hear the performance aspect. I think what you were touching on there andy that she's although they're very controlled and sometimes even ecstatic performances you feel that this is a person this is classic you know one skin too few she feels things i think really intensely you feel that she's a a conduit for all kinds of emotional energy. And she was obviously, you know, she's not an easy person to live with, but she had one of those

apparently affluent childhoods where what exactly happened to her, her mother was difficult. And, you know, there was sort of terrible stories of her mother kind of examining her and checking her. I know it was supposedly standard procedure in those days, checking her daily stools. And then there's a whole complicated relationship with her father who she sort of both admired, but then found controlling and distant and potentially abused her although it's very difficult to know nobody can quite that her analyst didn't think that that had really happened that she'd fantasized it what I feel with her work is although the poems are intense they're very under control certainly the poems poems in this collection, the early poetry, I think has an incredible restraint in terms of its language. You can see that she got a lot of

that formal control stuff from Robert Lowell, but reading Heart's Needle obviously set something free in her to talk about the she put the stuff of her own the stories of her own life but is she a reliable witness I think she always said that the eye in her poetry was was a bit of a con and was a bit was a bit of a trick yeah Berriman tried to say that as well and we know that wasn't true so that's fine um I would I would you know whatever you say and there are definite connections aren't there Emily, here's the thing that Anne Sexton does in her work, which I think is, I absolutely adore. And maybe we can find a poem that does this,

or maybe one of the poems you wanted to share with us does this. I love how Anne Sexton, both seemingly in her private life and in her work, does a wonderful thing where she turns off or on her charm at will at moments you never expect it to leaving you the person attending the cocktail party with her or reading the poem by her wrong-footed she loves to charm you, to give you the dying phrase and the wry wink, or the look to camera, in fact. And then she'll switch suddenly, so you don't know where you are. There'll be some really abrasive image or confrontational metaphor.

or confrontational metaphor. I'm thinking specifically, actually, while I say this, of there's a poem called To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph. Yeah, yeah. It's short. I'll just read it quickly. To a friend whose work has come to triumph. Consider Icarus, pasting those sticky wings on, testing that strange little tug at his shoulder blade,

and think of that first flawless moment over the lawn of the labyrinth. Think of the difference it made. There below are the trees, as awkward as camels, and here are the shocked starlings pumping past. and here are the shocked starlings pumping past and think of innocent icarus who is doing quite well larger than a sail over the fog and the blast of the plushy ocean he goes admire his wings feel the fire at his neck and see how casually he glances up and is caught, wondrously tunnelling into that hot eye. Who cares that he fell back to the sea? See him, acclaiming the sun and come plunging down, while his sensible daddy goes straight into town.

You know, that's a sonnet. I recognise that from A-level English. That's my first comment. Rhyming couplet to end it there. Nice. But also the sensible Daddy goes straight into town is a kind of pathetic switch, isn't it, from the kind of the rise up towards the sun um her idea that

the artist could burn alive and it would still be worth it the same theme as the starry night the same theme as the truth the dead know in a sense you know men kill for this it's that same idea better to immolate than be the sensible daddy going straight to town yeah it's like it's the it's a kind of paradox as well because at this people have commented that i think possibly it was her friend maxine keman that her poetry saved her life, kept her alive for as long as it did. But at the same time, it was consuming her as well. So it's like the same with Icarus.

He's got to do this. He's flying high and then that's that. Here's my point in relation. It's a self-dramatising gesture. This is what I mean. This is this thing that keeps coming back to me with Anne Sexton. It's performative. It's self-dramatising gesture. This is what I mean. This is this thing that keeps coming back to me with Anne Sexton. It's performative.

It's self-dramatising. It's, I am an artist. I am this person who will fly too close to the sun and burn. It's almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. And I was thinking exactly that, Emily. The idea that doing this may have prolonged her life, but equally burnt it up in a different manner than it would have been burnt away differently, perhaps. theme in poetry generally. I'm thinking of Plath's poem about the red comet that flies into the sun. So I don't know if it's unique to Sexton because of what happened to her and her life and everything. It's more noticeable. I think a lot of poets write about death, but when they do die

prematurely or in tragic circumstances, then we suddenly go, oh, my God, all that they've written about death so much. What does that mean? Kind of thing. There's like Auden's poem in the Musée des Beaux-Arts about Icarus. It's the polar opposite of this because, of course, as we know, Auden refused to die. And I love him, but he just keeps going, right? It's not an Icarus-style immolation for Auden. It's just like we keep going, we keep going.

Listen, we're going to take a little break, and when we come back, we're going to hear from Anne Sexton herself again with her poem The Starry Night, inspired by Van Gogh's painting. Welcome back. We're about to listen to Anne Sexton reading her poem, performing her poem The Starry Night, and in the collection, All My Pretty Ones.

It's prefigured by a quote of Vincent van Gogh's in a letter to his brother, Theo. Vincent writes, that does not keep me from having a terrible need of, shall I say the word, religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars. The Starry Night Vincent van Gogh in a letter to his brother That does not keep me from having a terrible need of Shall I say the word religion? Then I go out at night to paint the stars. The town does not exist except where one

black-haired tree slips up like a drowned woman into the hot sky. The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars. Oh, starry, starry night, this is how I want to die. It moves. They are all alive. Even the moon bulges in its orange irons to push children children like a god from its eye. The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars, oh starry, starry night. This is how I want to die, into that rushing beast of the night, sucked up by that great dragon to split from my life with no flag no belly no cry yeah emily it has the same image albeit with the moon and stars substituting for the sun of set the controls for the heart of whatever thing is going to destroy you. I wonder, could I ask your opinion?

How do you interpret the last lines of this poem? To split from my life with no flag, no belly, no cry. Yeah, I love this poem. I know that the line break there to split from my life is just, it's incredible. It's like, how can a line break be so good? I feel the same about in the first stanza. And it's an echoed sound except where one black haired tree slips up like a drowned woman into the hot sky. It's like this kind of... This is such great poetry.

I read it as almost like this ecstatic birth into death. So to split from my life, I imagine like a baby separating from its mother. Yeah. And in this vision, it's almost like going up into the sky and, how to describe it, sort of life is the mother birthing the soul into death. So, yes. So, it's a death image, isn't it? it seems to me to split from my life with no flag is to almost as you say look down on one's own life and make that the subject of what you write about it's confessional but of course it's not it's not confessional i always feel with sexton's poetry not all the time but often

it gives the impression of having been blurted out but that's the trick that's the trick because of course it hasn't been blurted out it's been extremely carefully revised and re-revised in order to give exactly that impression you know what the classic transformation of art you you you process it so it feels like the original thought but it's not the original yeah i'm really interested in in what is meant by no flag because it sort of suggests yeah um that this dramatic kind of transformation from life into death is being conceived of as happening without any sort of marker like you could say a flag was kind of showing it off in some way. I wonder whether a white flag as well.

It's no surrender. Is it? It's no flinching. No cry. Or is it about a sign, like giving no sign? I mean, maybe this is reading too much into it, but when she did finally die by suicide, she didn't tell anyone about her plans, which she had done with previous attempts. But it's kind of contradictory because obviously the description of this sort of ecstatic death, if that's what it is, is very flamboyant. So it's not really happening without a flag. It's happening with all these boiling stars and this witchy tree. She's got a poem later in the collection called The Black Art,

which is about the perceived differences between the poetry that women write and the poetry that men write. She starts it by saying, A woman who writes feels too much those trances and portents as if cycles and children and islands weren't enough as if mourners and gossips and vegetables were never enough she thinks she can warn the stars it's that imagery of the star again, the, the, the, the thing you're aiming for or can commune with. She thinks she can warn the stars. A writer is essentially a spy. Dear love.

I am that girl. That's the look to camera again. Yes, exactly. But there it is. It's that little, we know this was invented by fleabag and yet somehow it happened all these decades earlier so we need to acknowledge that john when and

sexton's biography was published when was this in the in the 1980s 1991 it was published how did that change how people perceived Anne Sexton it was broadly very well received biography it is if anyone is interested in Anne Sexton's life Dan Ward Middlebrook's biography is is I mean it's huge and invaluable because it's and she's she edited Sexton's work and as a writer as well so it's on that level it's good but the thing that made it controversial was that she Dr Martin Orne who was the therapist when Sexton does did her kind of you know thumbnail sketch of her life you know I was saved by poetry and my therapist got me writing poetry and I hadn't had a formal education and it was poetry that he was that therapist. But he handed over to Dan Ward

Middlebrook the transcripts of the sessions that he had with Anne Sexton, which is, I mean, he did it knowingly, but it is a massive kind of breach of patient psychiatrist, patient doctor protocol. You don't share the stuff that's passed between a therapist and this patient is sacrosanct. His defence was that she would have been happy for that to happen. And also it was done in consultation with Linda Sexton. But is it the biography that reveals the details

of her abusive relationship with her daughter? Yeah. Yes. Is it, Emily? I mean, her daughter has written a memoir, but I believe that Heather Clark, who wrote the recent Plath biography is now working on a new Sexton biography. Right okay we should hear from Anne's daughter Linda who

Sexton appointed as her literary executor just a few months before she died. I found in the beginning when I identified with her as a storyteller, as a woman, all those things I started writing when I was 11. I found the story she told about me like little girl, my string being my lovely woman, which is one of her best known poems. I found that to be a positive, something that, you know, let me shine a little bit as a child. Instead of being the hated child, I was the beloved child. So that was a good thing until later on when she began to write quite intrusive things about me. The loss of my virginity, a suicide attempt, things that I felt, you know, it's one thing for her to write so baldly and boldly and with such excruciating detail and tell that those stories i felt that was intrusive so that that was it was hard for the family it wasn't easy it was different than telling good stories or positive stories the

stories that came about in different ways. When she got to her poetry, the stories she told were steeped in honesty, but were also steeped in bold truths. You know, it seems to me that Linda, her daughter, has spent her life broadcasting the fact that she has made peace with her mother's memory by seeing her mother as an artist and seeing her in the round while acknowledging the abuse that she doled out was in turn something that had been done to Sexton when she was a child. I think it's interesting in that clip, Emily, that it's almost like the real lingering unfairness is focused on the intrusion, as she describes it, into their lives.

It's one thing for Anne Sexton to turn herself into a character, but another for it to do it to her children and make them tiny supporting characters in Anne Sexton's great story. Yeah, I mean, I think it's kind of recognised that she was a very complicated and difficult woman. And it seems unimaginable what it would be like having to have experienced something like that from your mother and then for your mother to be someone of such you know fame and to have to reckon with all of that in the public eye all credit to linda sexton for somehow managing to yes to kind of hold all of those things because obviously we live in a moment where these things are constantly coming up and the question of how you hold artists who have done horrendous

things alongside their work if you still consider their work to be important. And the people can only make their own judgments about that. It's so entwined, isn't it? The work, you know, and what I've read of Linda's account, which is actually some really beautiful kind of book in lots of ways about how she made peace with her mother. As you say, Andy, you kind of, in the end, I think with Anne Sexton, you could say she died in her early 40s. Her life was plagued by mental illness,

but she was also a Pulitzer Prize winning poet. I mean, she achieved in a tremendous amount through her art. That doesn't exonerate her from responsibility for her behaviour. But it's very, very difficult to pull her out of the context of the specific time and the specific family inheritance that she was dealing with. And she dealt with in lots of ways with amazing courage and and and clarity i think we look to poets in particular amongst artists to bring us back to bring us here in the straight world to bring us back messages from places we can guess exist

but would prefer not to go ourselves. Yeah, that's for sure. And it's not a question of them being nice or not nice or nasty or not nasty. It doesn't work like that. It's a question of them being able to remain open to whatever messages they receive and bring them back to us and sometimes in order to be open it might require an access via mental illness or it

might require an access via temperament or um you know she's writing about van gogh there and we've been talking on this show about the price paid by the person who flies too close to the sun but sends back a homing pigeon before they fall um with a little poem tied to its leg um singed wings which is not to exonerate and sexton or anyone from her behavior but I find her daughter's way of dealing with that instructive, which is she chooses not to see her mother as a demon, but as a complicated person capable of bad things. Can I read a little bit from The Fortress, which is a book,

it's kind of central poem in this collection, but I think if you're trying to figure out how on earth do people survive these things, how do you survive the relationship? This is about taking a nap with Linda. I won't read all of it, but just towards the end. It just says, darling, life is not in my hands. Life with its terrible changes will take you bombs or glands your own child at your breast your own house on your own land outside the bittersweet turns orange

before she died my mother and I picked those fat branches finding orange nipples on the grey wire strands. We weeded the forest, curing trees like cripples. Your feet thump-thump against my back and you whisper to yourself, Child, what are you wishing? What pact are you making? What mouse runs between your eyes? What ark can I fill for you when the world goes wild? The woods are underwater. Their weeds are shaking in the tide. Birches like zebrafish flash by in a pack. Child, I cannot promise that

you will get your wish. I cannot promise very much. I give you the images I know. Lie still with me and watch. A pheasant moves by like a seal, pulled through the mulch by his thick white collar. He's on show like a clown. He drags a beige feather that he has removed one time from an old lady's hat. We laugh and we touch. I promise you, love, time will not take away that. Beautiful.

Yeah. Beautiful. A beautiful flower growing from dark. Dark. Compost. Listen, we have to wind up soon. Emily, I'm going to ask you to read another poem of Anne Sexton's. But before we do that, I've waited 205, 206 episodes to be able to say this.

But the subject of this week's episode of Backlisted, Anne Sexton, had her own jazz rock combo called Anne Sexton and Her Kind. called Anne Sexton and Her Kind. For four years in the late 1960s and early 1970s, for copyright reasons, we can only play a snippet of one of their tracks. But enjoy a brief excerpt from Anne Sexton and Her Kind live in Constance, performing their setting of Woman with Girdle. Your midriff sags toward your knees

Your breasts lie down in air Their nipples as uninvolved as warm scarves Evolve this warm star. You stand in your elastic cage. Still not giving up the newborn and the old-born cycle. Come on, Light in the Attic, you could put that out. That really reminds me, there's the whole jazz and poetry scene. There's a really fantastic LP that came out on DRAM in the late 60s or early 70s called Crystal Telephone by Terry Durham. And if any listeners are familiar with that, I remove my tiny hat and salute you.

It really reminds me of that Emily did you were you aware of the work of Anne Sexton and her kind I haven't I was aware of its existence but I hadn't had the pleasure of hearing it it's an interesting combo for sure there's a little clip of her talking about the band which which is just very, very funny. It tells you quite a lot about her. Would you be bold enough, if that's the word, to recommend this to some of the other modern poets? Oh, I don't want them to know anything about it. I want to be the only one doing it. What kind of future would you like for this sort of thing? Would you like to record it and then be the hit record with the teenagers or something like that?

I'd like to reach a wider audience. And if a hit record with the teenagers would do it, then that would satisfy me. See, I really don't know where I'm going. I just know that I've never been there. That's jazz. You know, you heard that brilliant statement there from sexton very in the era saying well i don't know where about you know i want to know where i'm going if you're a long-time listener to this podcast you will recognize the sentiment of this

for these phrases this is from a letter that near the end of her life, Sexton wrote to Erica Young, in which she stated what she felt her aesthetic was. And this relates not just to the relationship between the life and the poetry and how we feel about volumes of poetry and single poems, but just things we talk about all the time on this podcast. And this is what she wrote to Erica Yong. The whole life of us writers, the whole product, I guess I mean, is the one long poem. It's all the same poem. It doesn't belong to any one writer. It's God's poem, perhaps, or God's people's poem. You have the gift, and with it comes responsibility. You mustn't neglect or be mean to that gift. You must let it do its work. It has more rights than the ego that wants approval. If you can feel you are in touch with experience, if you've, so to speak, stuck your finger into experience and got it right and can put it down so that others, even experienced tellers, can comprehend their own lives better, then you must get on with it.

The listener awaits. I mean, that's as good a manifesto as we've ever heard on this podcast. Emily, before we wrap up, do you have a before we wrap up do you have a poem or a section of a poem you could i'd love to read her kind which was my yeah gateway drug to anne sexton and it was also a very i think important poem for her she used to read it often as her opening poem in um her readings so we can read it as a closing poem maybe. Her Kind. I have gone out a possessed witch haunting the black air braver at night dreaming, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light. Lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.

A woman like that is not a woman quite. I have been her kind. I have found the warm caves in the woods, filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods, fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves, whining, rearranging the disaligned. A woman like that is misunderstood. I have been her kind. I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright roots, survivor, where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind.

It's just great. Follow that, John Mitchinson. I'm afraid that it's time for us now to leave the strange and intense and beautiful world of Anne Sexton. Huge thanks to Emily for inviting us to explore it, and to Nicky Birch for recording what we discovered on the journey. If you'd like show notes with clips, links and suggestions for further reading for this show,

and the 207 that we've already recorded, please visit our website at batlisted.fm. If you want to buy the books discussed on this or any of our other shows visit our shop at bookshop.org and choose Backlisted as your bookshop and we're still keen to hear from you on Twitter Facebook, Instagram Blue Sky, set to a jazz rock

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get not one, but two extra exclusive podcasts every month. It features the three of us talking and recommending the books, films and music we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight. For those of you who previously enjoyed our What Have You Been Reading slot, that's where you'll now find it. It's an hour of tunes, musings and superior book chat. Plus, a lot of listeners get their names read out accompanied by lashings of praise like this. Craig Fitzgerald, thank you. Richard Salt, thank you. Casey Sheehan, thank you. Daniel Mudford, thank you.

Helen Stitt, thank you. Jeanne Pacac, thank you. Francis Ambler, thank you. Niall Green, thank you. Julia Colton, thank you. And David Strange, thank you. Emily, before we go, is there anything else you would like to add that you feel we haven't covered on the topic of Anne Sexton or confessional poetry? Yes. I wanted to mention, and I just was thinking, oh, damn it, I didn't get to mention that, that Anne Sexton wrote a children's book with Maxine Kuhman called Eggs of Things. Eggs of Things, which is just such a great title.

Eggs of Things. I want to see that book. It's about these two little boys who find some frogs born in a pond and they take them and put them in a bath and all hell breaks loose. Frogs and toads are hopping around the house. So this is a whole other dimension to her that we didn't get a chance to explore. Are those books in print? Have any of us read any of those books?

They're not in print, I don't think. They're not. They're not in print, but it's worth going and looking at them, isn't it? There is. You can see Eggs of Things on the Marginalia website. Right. Okay.

Whilst there is a selected volume of Anne Sexton's poetry called Mercies, edited by her daughter, available from Penguin Modern Classics, certainly in the UK, the complete poems of Anne Sexton is not in print and has not been in print for some time. That's outrageous. It'll cost you £40 or £50 sterling at the moment to buy a copy. I know that to my cost.

I don't know if in the States it's not. it seems not to be available in the states as well so that's a separate issue which we don't have time to discuss my last thing it was just do you know there's a very famous quote from franz kafka which gets used all the time about books and i you love this well why it suddenly came into circulation as far as i can see it was first used as the kind of frontis, the epigraph to this book, which is, the books we need are the kind that act upon us like misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we're on the verge of suicide or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation. A book should serve as the axe for the frozen sea within us. I always liked doing that one. Print that on a tote bag. A book should serve as the axe for the frozen sea within us. I always like doing that one. Print that on a tote bag. Yeah, I love it.

That's funny. It's great. I always like to read that out when we're looking at cookbooks at work. Yeah, indeed. Indeed, yeah. Okay, well, listen, Emily, thank you so much. That has been every bit as enjoyable and revelatory for us. Huge.

As I hope it will be for listeners thanks for having me yeah all right thanks very much thanks nick see you in a fortnight bye