Anne Sexton: Teacher of Weird Abundance

Epilogue

119 Epilogue I . . . believe that the personal is not the same as “private”: the personal is often merely the highly particular. I think the personal has fallen into disrepute as sloppy because we have lost the courage and the vocabulary to describe it in the face of the enormous social pressure to “keep it to ourselves”—but this is where our most idealistic and our deadliest politics are lodged, and are revealed. —Patricia Williams Anne Sexton believed in the curative properties of writing; she believed that writing saved her life. Sexton felt that writing jarred her into a conscious awareness of her complicity in living out and suffering through the plot of the post–World War II American dream. Her history is imbued with unspeakable intrusions and pain—incest, suicidal despair, and instances of passively enduring the exploitative “care” of psychiatrists. “One must make logic out of suffering or one is mad,” Sexton told her students at Colgate University. “All writing of poems is sanity because one makes a reality, a sane world, out of insane happenings.”¹ Teaching offered Sexton the opportunity to show others a route out of depression and mental anguish. The route she took through poetry to ease her despair was often criticized by figures such as A. R. Jones, who felt that Sexton used writing to seek wholeness rather than awareness, thereby using poetry as therapy rather than using the poetic form to compose art.In his estimation,this need set her apart from her contemporaries: Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell. Responding to this criticism while teaching a course on poetry at Colgate University , Sexton notes: It is the split self, it seems to me, that is the mad woman. When writing you make a new reality and become whole. It is as if I were operating on myself and suturing on the arms and legs, placing the heart, settling the intestines. 120 ANNE SEXTON Much of my poetry is the poetry of a cripple, and yet the act of creation cures for a time. . . . In what ways am I a cripple still? ² Implicit in this statement is Sexton’s sensitivity to the fact that a cure is always provisional and that the provisional qualities of cure are precisely what can generate a sense of awareness and a capacity to remain wide awake.The danger, as I discussed in earlier chapters,is that narratives of cure too often induce us to suppress grief, feelings of loss, sadness, and ambivalence about separation. Narratives of cure are attached to a consoling practice that has traditionally worked to normalize persons in pain. In earlier chapters, I have considered the ways in which Sexton challenges such narratives in her writing and in her teaching. Louise DeSalvo (1999) traces the use of writing to cure—recognizing all along the potential dangers inherent in such a project. DeSalvo elaborates on a tradition of writing that Anne Sexton drew on as both a poet and a teacher, which was personal in nature. The urge to write, notes DeSalvo, is often provoked by pain,grief,or unnameable losses—subjective emotions felt by the poet. Elaborating on the work of Virginia Woolf, a writer who was her biographical subject for many years, DeSalvo discusses how Woolf’s need to write came out of the pain and acute sense of shame that accompanied her childhood.Virginia Woolf wrote, notes DeSalvo, to “rub out” her father’s violence and the shame she felt when she looked at her body. In “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf (1976) elaborates on why she turned to writing and what it accomplished for her: “I did for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest”(DeSalvo,1999,76).DeSalvo explains that Woolf did not simply write to vent about her past or achieve a kind of cathartic discharge of emotion that would in turn usher her into normality. Writing that simply declares depression or describes the trauma of sickness, loss, or death can in fact function as a means through which to evade the narrative and emotional truths of our lives. Extending the work of James Pennebaker and Sandra Klihr Beall (1986), DeSalvo concludes that “to improve health, we must write detailed accounts, linking feelings with events.The more writing succeeds as narrative—by being detailed, organized, compelling, vivid, lucid—the more health and emotional benefits...