September 2014 Books

Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters edited by Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames

Published: 1977

Rating: 5

Goodreads

Anne Sexton was a Pulitzer-winning poet who died by suicide at 45.  She was survived by her ex-husband and two girls.   Anne named her oldest, Linda as literary executor which was an extraordinary burden for a 21-year old.

The reading of all her mom's letters was a massive undertaking as Anne was a prolific correspondent who kept carbon copies of everything - how strange it must have been to be reading the thoughts from her vibrant, brilliant, mentally unstable deceased mother.  

Anne's letters were often like streams of consciousness - effusive, open, honest - complete with spelling and grammar errors.  To more accomplished poets, she would send her poems and ask for critiques, favors and references.  She gave few tidbits about her family, rather wishing for more time and less distraction to devote to her art.  Her letters sound as if she were talking on the phone - informal, conversational, almost child-like and immature.

She had a long correspondence with W.D Snodgrass who won the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for Heart's Needle, a poem that had a profound impact on her.  

...that when I read your poem, that first time....it walked out at me, and grew like a bone inside my heart.

People are afraid of people, especially poets...I read "Heart's Needle" and I changed.  It made me see myself new. In seeing you, in feeling your marvelous restrained sense of immediate loss, I saw my own loss in a new color.

Poetry and poetry alone has saved me.

This type of impact was what she looked for and what she wanted to write:

 I rather like being slugged, to walk away from the poem with old wounds reopened...let the poem bruise me.

Creative people must not avoid the pain they get dealt....hurt must be examined like a plague.

Poetry need not be dull...

About her poetry:

Only in a poem is the emotion intensified, sharpened, made acute and sometimes more than I knew I knew...

You see, I am given to excess.  That's all there is to it.  I have found that I can control it best in a poem....if the poem is good then it will have the excess under control...it is the core of the poem...there, like stunted fruit, but actual.

Words bother me. I think it is why I am a poet. I keep trying to force myself to speak of the things that remain mute inside.  My poems have only come when I have almost lost the ability to utter a word. To speak, in a way, of the unspeakable. To make an object out of the chaos...to say what?  A final cry into the void.

It wasn't until I learned to work my guts out that a true poem came into being...fight for the poem. Put your energy into it. Force discipline upon madness....Push for the stars, or at least go back and push one poem all the way up there.

Inside I feel like a cooked broccoli...the heads that fall apart when you cut them. The only time I'm tough in my own mind is when I'm seized by a poem and then determined to conquer it and let it live it's own peculiar life. All my toughness goes into my writing. 

She does write openly about her depression - this quote was particularly poignant:

...not been able to write, been lonely, been sadder that sad toads would be if they are as sad as their blinking eyes seem to be.

 Four months before she committed suicide, she wrote the following to Erica Jong:

I keep feeling that there isn't one poem being written by any one of us - or a book, or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem - a community effort if you will. 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....

...and if you can feel you are in touch with experience, if you've (so to speak) stuck your finger into experience and have got it right and can put it down so that others (even other experience tellers) can comprehend their own lives better, can crawl in closer to the truth of it, then you must get on with it! And keep right on.

After finishing, I wrote in by book journal:

WOW - what a woman - complicated.

What a life - tortured.

What an artist - ambitious, driven, obsessed. 

Next I plan to resume reading Anne Sexton: A Biography by Diane Middlebrook and Linda Gray Sexton's second memoir, Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide.

 The Merlin Trilogy by Mary Stewart

Published as trilogy: 1980

The Crystal Cave (1970)

The Hollow Hills (1973)

The Last Enchantment (1979)

Rating:5

Goodreads

and

 The Wicked Day (Merlin #4) by Mary Stewart

Published: 1983

Rating:5

Goodreads

While on vacation this week, I've been transported back in time to the magical and heroic days of Merlin the sorcerer and Arthur, bastard son of King Uther Pendragon who succeeded him as High King when he took the sword in the stone, the subsequent battles whereby the new King and his Companions subdued the factions and brought peace to his kingdom, his own bastard son Mordred by half-sister Morgause, the barren but much loved Queen Guinevere - the cast of characters are larger-than-life and believable.

I found this YouTube interview with Mary Stewart who passed away earlier this year. It is interesting that she did not intend to write a series but ended up doing so based on the request of her publishers and fans. I am glad she did. 

In the interview, she is talks about the TV series done by BBC and how she was pleased with the adaptation. I plan to watch as it is available via streaming Netflix. This is good as I found myself wishing that someone like Peter Jackson would make movies out of the books.

For anyone who is interested in the Arthurian legend, I would highly recommend.

August 2014 Books

So far, August has been a month of eclectic reading, anchored by a deeper interest in poetry - see post on Josh's blog.

Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems by Billy Collins
Published: 2001
Rating: 4
Goodreads

I was so happy to find this at a used bookstore during our summer vacation on the Cape.  Despite owning three out of the four books that furnished the selected poems in this collection, I bought it for the fifteen new (to me) poems from The Apple That Astonished Paris and twenty additional poems.

Books

by Billy Collins

From the heart of this dark, evacuated campus

I can hear the library humming in the night,

a choir of authors murmuring inside their books

along the unlit, alphabetical shelves,

Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son,

each one stitched into his own private coat,

together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.

I picture a figure in the act of reading,

shoes on a desk, head tilted into the wind of a book,

a man in two worlds, holding the rope of his tie

as the suicide of lovers saturates a page,

or lighting a cigarette in the middle of a theorem.

He moves from paragraph to paragraph

as if touring a house of endless, paneled rooms.

I hear the voice of my mother reading to me

from a chair facing the bed, books about horses and dogs,

and inside her voice lie other distant sounds,

and horrors of a stable ablaze in the night,

a bark that is moving toward the brink of speech.

I watch myself building bookshelves in college,

walls within walls, as rain soaks New England,

or standing in a bookstore in a trench coat.

I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves,

straining in circles of light to find more light

until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs

that we follow across a page of fresh snow;

when evening is shadowing the forest

and small birds flutter down to consume the crumbs,

we have to listen hard to hear the voices

of the boy and his sister receding into the woods.

The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali Translated and Commentary by Sri Swami Satchidananda

Published: 1978

Rating: 5

Goodreads

Yoga and meditation have become an important and integral part of my self-care.  It is a surprising path, materializing at this five-year juncture of my grief journey.  I have taken an additional step by signing up for a 200-hour yoga training course at a local studio that begins next month.  This is one of several books on the assigned reading list. 

I've always associated yoga with the physical postures in a traditional yoga class such as downward dog, warrior one, child's pose, etc.  But as stated in the introduction of this book, the real practice of Yoga is the "understanding and complete mastery over the mind" and "for thousands of years the Yogis have probed the mysteries of the mind and consciousness…"

If there is a text or "bible" for yoga, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali would be it; a systematic compilation of ideas and practices written by a person or persons known as Patanjali in the timeframe estimated between 5000 B.C to 300 A.D. 

Sutra literally means "thread".  There are 200 sutras or short sayings divided into four sections:  Contemplation, Practice, Accomplishments and Absoluteness. 

"Within the space of these two hundred short sutras, the entire science of Yoga is clearly delineated: its aim, the necessary practices, the obstacles you may meet along the path, their removal, and precise descriptions of the results that will be obtained from such practices."

The author encourages the slow, careful study and practice of the sutras.  I imagine this book will be an important reference on my yogic journey. 

Audiorecording The Voice of the Poet: Anne Sexton
Published: 2000
Rating: 4
Goodreads

Anne Sexton had a brilliant but tragic life.  Winner of the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection, Live or Die, she began writing poetry in her late twenties, as a way of recovering from a mental breakdown after the birth of her second child.

She wrote in the manner of a "confessional poet" - searingly open, honest autobiographical poems which explore deep feelings of pain and anguish, often related to her battle with mental illness.

I liked the small book that accompanied the library-borrowed audio recording as it had the poems she read and some of her thoughts about poetry:

Poetry "should be a shock to the senses.  It should almost hurt." 

I don't think I write public poems.  I write very personal poems but I hope that they will become the central theme to someone else's private life. 

I would like to be a photographer if the camera could work the way fingers work.  I like to capture an instant.  A picture is a one-second thing - it's a fragile moment in time, I try to do it with words.

I found this YouTube video of Anne reading the powerful, haunting poem about suicidal ideation.

Wanting to Die

By Anne Sexton

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.

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 needle point.

Even the corneas and the leftover urine were gone.

Suicides have already betrayed the body.

Sill-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, suicides 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 hook

and the love, whatever it was, an infection. 

After learning about her life, I wanted to know what happened to her girls. What impact did the tragic death of their mother have on them?  

Her eldest daughter, Linda Gray Sexton, is also a writer and became the the literary executor of her mother's work at the young age of twenty-one.  I am currently reading her first memoir, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton.  It is difficult reading about what is was like to live with a mentally unstable, artistically possessed mother.

All of her poems can be found online at Poemhunter.

I have just ordered the following books:

Anne Sexton: A Biography by Diane Wood Middlebrook
Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrat in Letters edited by Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames
The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton 

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
Published: 1999
Rating: 5
Goodreads

There is much that I can relate to in this novel and its protagonist, Gogol Ganguli whose parents immigrated to America from Calcultta as like his, my parents also immigrated from an Asian country, Korea.

How does a young couple with no familial support survive the difficult task of raising children in a completely foreign culture?

And the children who are born in the US - how do they navigate the pull between immersion in the strong American culture while at school and with their friends and the equally strong Asian culture while at home?

I love Lahiri's writing - it is clear, concise and poignant.  She is a master at creating full, round characters within a paragraph or two.  She places the reader in the scene, either observing or in the character's head so that we feel what they feel…we understand why they do what they do….we become empathic and compassionate readers in her hands.

Here is one of my favorite quotes - how Gogol's mother, who has recently given birth, likens being a foreigner to pregnancy:

For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is sort of a lifelong pregnancy - a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts.  It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to discover that that previous life had vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding.  Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect. 

I would highly recommend - especially if you have a large block of uninterrupted time as you will not want to put it down!

Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton by Linda Gray Sexton
Published: 1994
Rating: 5
Goodreads

This is a brutally honest, searing, soul-searching exploration of a daughter's life, bound to her mentally unstable, highly artistic mother who committed suicide when she was a 21-year old student at Harvard University.

Anne Sexton's mental illness defined their family - the suicide attempts, multiple hospitalizations, bizarre behavior, domestic violence and abuse of all kinds: mental, emotional, physical and sexual - until she ended it by sitting in her running car with the garage doors closed.  She was forty-five years old.

When I say brutally honest, this is what I mean:

I say these words to know them better: I wished for my mother to die.  As much as I dreaded her suicide, I also craved it. I longed for the freedom from the tyranny of her many neuroses that seemed, in that last year, to have overtaken her personality. By that last summer I did not like her anymore.  Anne was her mental illness.  Only once in a while did I see a glimmer of her shine through the demands of this noise child dressed in adult clothing. The woman I had loved was already gone. 

I say these words to know them for the first time and to admit my greatest guilt: in the lat months of my mother's life I chose to ignore her cry of loneliness.  I refused to maker her last days less painful. In the end, I left her to die alone. 

In the margins of the book, I wrote, "WOW - crazy honest - first and foremost with herself.  Takes guts.  Takes courage to admit the truth."

Anne named her literary executor and so Linda found herself involved in two big projects: editing Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrat in Letters, published just three years after Anne's death and assisting biographer Diane Middlebrook in her research and writing of Anne Sexton: A Biography, published in 1991.

She also became of fiction writer and published four novels:

• Rituals
• Mirror Images
• Points of Light
• Private Acts

In the introduction written in 2010, Linda Gray Sexton lets us know that this is part one - the examination of her mother's life and the affect on her own whereas part two, called Half in Love (Surviving the Legacy of Suicide), she "relentlessly examined my mother's death and my death wish."

For when Linda was turning forty-five years old, the same age as Anne was when she died, she also suffered from depressions and suicidal ideation which led to three attempts - how was she going to survive the terrible legacy of suicide?

I may have to take a break before starting Half In Love.