In high school I thought East was chandeliers in subway stations, women in mink stoles and businessmen talking through gill slits. I liked writers that described the typography of road signs and calm portraits of restless farriers. My sophomore English teacher, likely sensing an ignorance, recommended a biography of Anne Sexton by Diane Middlebrook. Broaden your scope, she seemed to say, if not by topic then by region and form. “I don’t read poetry, but I read Anne Sexton - Fan 1985,” the preface read. Sexton became the first poet I truly explored; I didn’t know the confessional could be sonorous or housed in stanzas purposefully exposed to the elements, no line breaks, no punctuation to tidy or sanitize what is beautifully severe. A pathography follows Sexton, but this is not what I remember her for. No longer scavenging for someone to recognize how she might be of use, she wrote in blazing light, in the maximum value of a wave. “I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying poems away in a long box / It is my immortality box / All night dark wings flopping in my heart / Each an ambition bird / He wants to fly into the hand of Michelangelo / and come out painted on a ceiling / He wants to pierce the hornet’s nest / And come out with a long godhead,” she writes in The Ambition Bird. There is utmost life in Sexton’s irregular murmurs, whether this was apparent or not to her initially. There is a jazz band called “Her Kind” Sexton formed with Bob Clawson in 1968. There is an apology Sexton delivered at the Brockport Writers Forum, “One of my first teachers, John Holmes, said, and please forgive the misquote too, ‘Richard Wilbur said poetry is a window, not a door.’ I guess I was the door. Well, I’m sorry. If you could document the imagination, even some wit, of one life, however long it may or may not last, it might be of some value to someone some day.” There is Sexton urging life not lived close to the hot plate is abdication. She plunders the porcelain so we might dine out.
-Katie Calderon