Three by Sexton for general discussion

[ddgryphon]

I will post three poems here with some general background. All by Sexton, all from different periods.

I hope we can get some interesting discussion going about them in regards to revising/editing by comparing them.

[ddgryphon]

This poem appeared as the first item in her first collection To Belam and Part Way Back (1960). Note especially form including meter, rhyme and structure. She had editorial input on Poetry order, so it is significant that she chose this as her opening volley to the world of publishing. Please post thoughts with "You, Doctor Martin" in the Subject.


You, Doctor Martin

You, Doctor Martin, walk
from breakfast to madness. Late August,
I speed through the antiseptic tunnel
Where the moving dead still talk
of pushing their bones against the thrust
of cure. And I am queen of this summer hotel
or the laughing bee on a stalk

of death. We stand in broken
lines and wait while they unlock
the door and count us at the frozen gates
of dinner. The shibboleth is spoken
and we move to gravy in our smock
of smiles. We chew in rows, our plates
scratch and whine like chalk

in school. There are no knives
for cutting your throat. I make
moccasins all morning. At first my hands
kept empty, unraveled for the lives
they used to work. Now I learn to take
them back, each angry finger that demands
I mend what another will break

tomorrow. Of course, I love you;
you lean above the plastic sky,
god of our block, prince of all the foxes.
The breaking crowns are new
that jack wore. Your third eye
moves among us and lights the separate boxes
where we sleep or cry.

What large children we are
here. All over I grow most tall
in the best ward. Your business is people,
you call at the madhouse, an oracular
eye in our nest. Out in the hall
the intercom pages you. You twist in the pull
of the foxy children who fall

like floods of life in frost.
And we are magic talking to itself,
noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins
forgotten. Am I still lost?
Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself,
counting this row and that row of moccasins
waiting on the silent shelf.

[ddgryphon]

This work is the last poem in the last collection Sexton put together for publication (45 Mercy Street). It is entirely likely that she intended this to be her last statement as a living author as she chose to take her own life, planned and executed it, with cold, deliberateness. Though still playing with the order at her death, if I've read correctly the order of the poems has been preserved, with some left out due to their being too personal in nature to print until after her death (and perhaps the deaths of those she knew).

The Consecrating Mother

I stand before the sea
and it rolls and rolls in its green blood
saying, "Do not give up one god
for I have a handful."
The trade winds blew
in their twelve-fingered reversal
and I simply stood on the beach
while the ocean made a cross of salt
and hung up its drowned
and they cried Deo Deo.
The ocean offered them up in the vein of its might.
I wanted to share this
but I stood alone like a pink scarecrow.
The ocean steamed in and out,
the ocean gasped upon the shore
but I could not define her,
I could not name her mood, her locked-up faces.
Far off she rolled and rolled
like a woman in labor
and I thought of those who had crossed her,
in antiquity, in nautical trade, in slavery in war.
I wondered how she had borne those bulwarks.
She should be entered skin to skin,
and put on like one's first or last cloth,
entered like kneeling your way into church,
descending into that ascension,
though she be slick as olive oil,
as she climbs each wave like an embezzler of white.
The big deep knows the law as it wears its gray hat,
though the ocean comes in its destiny,
with its one hundred lips,
and in moonlight she comes in her nudity,
flashing breasts made of milk-water,
flashing buttocks made of unkillable lust,
and at night when you enter her
you shine like a neon soprano.

I am that clumsy human
on the shore
loving you, coming, coming,
going,
and wish to put my thumb on you
like The Song of Solomon.

[ddgryphon]

The final poem in this group is likely the actual final poem, though we can't know for certain. It is dated in this collection September 27, 1974. She took her life through asphyxiation (carbon monoxide) October 4, 1974.

It is not known if she considered this finished or if she even considered it something for publication. It may well be a simple private meditation. If anyone knows who "Foxxy" is I'd be interested in knowing.

Love Letter Written In A Burning Building

Dearest Foxxy,

I am in a crate,
the crate that was ours,
full of white shirts and salad greens,
the icebox knocking at our delectable knocks,
and I wore movies in my eyes,
and you wore eggs in your tunnel,
and we played sheets, sheets, sheets
all day, even in the bathtub like lunatics.
But today I set the bed afire
and smoke is filling the room,
it is getting hot enough for the walls to melt,
and the icebox, a gluey white tooth.

I have on a mask in order to write my last words,
and they are just for you, and I will place them
in the icebox saved for vodka and tomatoes,
and perhaps they will last.
The dog will not. Her spots will fall off.
The old letters will melt into a black bee.
The nightgowns are already shredding
into paper, the yellow, the red, the purple.
The bed--well, the sheets have turned to gold--
hard, hard gold, and the mattress
is being kissed into a stone.

As for me, my dearest Foxxy,
my poems to you may or may not reach the icebox
and its hopeful eternity,
for isn't yours enough?
The one where you name
my name right out in P.R.?
If my toes weren't yielding to pitch
I'd tell the whole story--
not just the sheet story
but the belly-button story
the pried-eyelid story,
the whiskey-sour-of-the-nipple story--
and shovel back our love where it belonged.

Despite my asbestos gloves,
the cough is filling me with black,
and a red powder seeps through my veins,
our little crate goes down so publicly
and without meaning it, you see,
meaning a solo act,
a creamation of the love,
but instead we seem to be going down
right in the middle of a Russian street,
the flames making the sound of
the horse being beaten and beaten,
the whip is adoring its human triumph
while the flies wait, blow by blow,
straight from United Fruit, Inc.

Septermber 27, 1974

[wordsheff]

I don't have the time to read them all right now, but I noted the rhyme scheme in the first one...HOW ORIGINAL!?

If it is original or not, i've never seen it before. and it worked brilliantly for me as a device to generate power.

[ddgryphon]

No, great reading, I'm just hoping some others pop in. I can't collect my thoughts on them right now, but plan to sit down and go through them again tonight and post my thoughts (Hopefully I'll get to Pit Stop too)

[P.H.Delarran]

DD, this is a great thread idea! i'll come back to it when i have more time. i recently started reading "Letters to Dr Y', a collection put together after her death. i picked it up at a garage sale somewhere years ago. i didn't know anything about the woman until recently. and still know very little. it will be interesting to investigate her through her poetry.

[ddgryphon]

Okay, finally some peace on Friday (never start anything on Friday that could end up creating work on Saturday -- one of our little office rules)

You, Doctor Martin: Well, there are a number of interesting elements in this -- the shifting rhyme scheme, the 6 rows of 7 lines (at sixes and sevens anyone?) and the shift from You to me. It begins about Dr. Martin, but ends with the protagonists self obsessions. There are images of life (bee, stalk, children, foxes) and images of death (broken lines, bones, gates, cutting throat). Cold and warmth.

I find the rhyme scheme interesting the first stanza establishes abc/abc/a, but the second stanza switches to abc/abc/a-b I say a-b be cause it is a dead-on rhyme with the a of stanza 1, and a near-rhyme for stanza two's b (stalk/chalk vs. smock/chalk) at which point the remaining stanzas focus clearly on abc/abc/b scheme. Not to over analyze, but A - the alpha or YOU, Dr. Martin, becomes B - me, the secondary as the poem shifts from You to me.

Contrast the first and last lines: You, Doctor Martin, walk/waiting on the silent shelf implying you walk, I wait.

Hrm, as someone once said. This is also striking because this is clearly a poem worked at. The broken lines carrying a sentence over lines and sometimes stanzas broken, like Jack's crown. How can putting together a shoe, help you put your life back together? Why do angry fingers tear it apart?

One of the most powerful things that strikes me about this particular piece is not the obvious imagery so much as the layers of implications in the word choice and images. The Shibboleth spoken (inclusion and exclusion in one word) Jack's broken crown and mental illness. Moccasins and walking, having no shoes and being unable to walk. The rich layered images, piled like they are simply compell you to look at it again and again. There are lines that scream out at you too:

I am queen of all my sins
forgotten. Am I still lost?
Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself,

I find particularly heart-wrenching.

I'll do the other two later and a comparison. Such a powerful, confessional, piece that grabs you and says "This ain't your momm's poetry sonny!" while at the same time being fragile and broken. What a way to announce "I am here -- and I have something to say, so listen up!"