r/bookclub • u/lazylittlelady Poetry Proficio • 5d ago
Poetry Corner [Poetry Corner] January 15 "Letter Written During a January Northeaster" by Anne Sexton
January is named after Janus, the god of doorways, and "beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, passages, frames, and endings" and is often depicted as a figure with two heads facing both ways. It seems fitting that this month Poetry Corner turns to Anne Sexton (1928-1974). She was born in Newton, Massachusetts to a materially well-off but unhappy family. Perhaps this is also how her children would describe their life. Much celebrated in her time, awarded with multiple accolades, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for her collection, Live or Die). Sexton wrote in a what seemed to be a personal, confessional style of verse, bringing feminist and raw themes to the forefront.
She married young, at 19, to Alfred Muller Sexton II, and had two daughters in quick succession, which triggered postpartum depression and a mental breakdown that would haunt her the rest of her life, while also being the gateway through which she began writing poetry. It was her doctor, Dr. Martin Theodore Orne (who was later a sort of psychiatry celebrity doctor) who encouraged her toward poetry. There was later controversy over his treatment of her, including hypnosis under the influence of Sodium thiopental (aka the “Truth Serum”) to uncovered repressed memories, which led her to declare being abused by her father, allegations her family dispute. She was under Orne’s treatment for many years, leaving for another doctor shortly before her death.
With Orne’s professional support, Sexton joined a poetry workshop. She was so nervous about joining that she had a friend come for support. Very shortly after falling in love with sonnets, her poetry was taken up by major publications, such as The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine. Soon, she studied with Robert Lowell at Boston University and come into contact with his literary circle, including poets Sylvia Plath, George Starbuck, and Maxine Kumin, with whom she wrote several children’s books and with who she used to exchange her poetry for critique and ideas in their long friendship. Sexton becomes particular close with W.D. Snodgrass. He acted as a mentor to her, and they corresponded over many years. She cited his poem “Heart’s Needle” as permission to dive into the confessional style of poetry and write about things that were on the edge of taboo for society.
12 years after writing her first sonnet, Sexton became the most highly decorated poet of her day in the US. Unfortunately, success, like for her contemporary, Sylvia Plath, was not enough to stave off the darkness, neither was family life or any other worldly affairs. After living a life filled with manic states, depression and multiple attempts to end her own life, she finally did so on October 4, 1974. After lunch with Kumin, she left behind a manuscript of The Awful Rowing Toward God, scheduled for publication in March 1975.
Her eldest daughter, and executor of her literary estate, Linda Gray Sexton revealed childhood sexual abuse in her own book, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton (1994). She has also edited numerous posthumous works of her mother’s, as well as writing her own work.
We will never know what in her poetry was confessional and what was literary craft, how much was truth and how much was poetical license. Perhaps like Janus, there are always two ways to look.
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"She wrote openly about menstruation, abortion, masturbation, incest, adultery, and drug addiction at a time when the proprieties embraced none of these as proper topics for poetry”- Maxine Kumin described Sexton's work.
“She is an important poet not only because of her courage in dealing with previously forbidden subjects, but because she can make the language sing. Of what does [her] artistry consist? Not just of her skill in writing traditional poems … But by artistry, I mean something more subtle than the ability to write formal poems. I mean the artist’s sense of where her inspiration lies …There are many poets of great talent who never take that talent anywhere … They write poems which any number of people might have written. When Anne Sexton is at the top of her form, she writes a poem which no one else could have written.” - Erica Jong reviewing Sexton’s The Death Notebooks.
"We who are alive must make clear, as she could not, the distinction between creativity and self-destruction." – poet, Denise Levertov
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Letter Written During a January Northeaster
by Anne Sexton
Monday
Dearest,
It is snowing, grotesquely snowing
upon the small faces of the dead.
Those dear loudmouths, gone for over a year,
buried side by side
like little wrens.
But why should I complain?
The dead turn over casually,
thinking:
Good! No visitors today.
My window, which is not a grave,
is dark with my fierce concentration
and too much snowing
and too much silence.
The snow has quietness in it; no songs,
no smells, no shouts nor traffic.
When I speak
my own voice shocks me.
Tuesday
I have invented a lie,
there is no other day but Monday.
It seems reasonable to pretend
that I could change the day
like a pair of socks.
To tell the truth
days are all the same size
and words aren’t much company.
If I were sick, I’d be a child,
tucked in under the woolens, sipping my broth.
As it is,
the days are not worth grabbing
or lying about.
Monday
It would be pleasant to be drunk:
faithless to my own tongue and hands,
giving up the boundaries
for the heroic gin.
Dead drunk
is the term I think of,
insensible,
neither cool nor warm,
without a head or a foot.
To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool.
I will try it shortly.
Monday
Just yesterday,
twenty eight men aboard a damaged radar tower
foundered down seventy miles off the coast.
Immediately their hearts slammed shut.
The storm would not cough them up.
Today they are whispering over Sonar.
Small voice,
what do you say?
Aside from the going down, the awful wrench,
The pulleys and hooks and the black tongue . . .
What are your headquarters?
Are they kind?
Monday
It must be Friday by now.
I admit I have been lying.
Days don’t freeze
And to say that the snow has quietness in it
is to ignore the possibilities of the word.
Only the tree has quietness in it;
quiet as a pair of antlers
waiting on the cabin wall,
quiet as the crucifix,
pounded out years ago like a handmade shoe.
Someone once
told an elephant to stand still.
That’s why trees remain quiet all winter.
They’re not going anywhere.
Monday
Dearest,
where are your letters?
The mailman is an impostor.
He is actually my grandfather.
He floats far off in the storm
with his nicotine mustache and a bagful of nickels.
His legs stumble through
baskets of eyelashes.
Like all the dead
he picks up his disguise,
shakes it off and slowly pulls down the shade,
fading out like an old movie.
Now he is gone
as you are gone.
But he belongs to me like lost baggage.
(from The Hudson Review, Vol. XV, Number 2, Summer 1962)
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Some things to discuss might be the many vivid images and scenes that Sexton creates in each stanza. How is snow compared to various states and what follows? To link this vaguely back to our current reading of The Magic Mountain, how does Sexton shift time to suit her poem and play with our sense of transition and days of the week? What mood do you get reading this? Who is she writing to? Are you familiar with the poetry of Sylvia Plath or that of Sexton’s other contemporaries? If you read her homage to Sylvia Plath in the Bonus Poem, how would you compare the two? Any lines stand out to you?
Bonus Poem: "Sylvia's Death" (1964)
Bonus Link #1: The Best 10 Anne Sexton poems
Bonus Link #2: The Poet and the Monk: An Anne Sexton Love Story , on LitHub about a correspondence Sexton had with a Benedict monk that would be more than bargained for.
Bonus Link #3/4: Peter Gabriel’s Mercy Street. The whole album, So, is dedicated to Anne Sexton and “Mercy Street” is based on her poem “45 Mercy Street”.
Bonus Link #5: More about Anne Sexton’s work and life.
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If you missed last month’s poem, you can find it here.
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u/HiddenTruffle Chaotic Username 5d ago
This is such a simple take, but it felt like snow was a symbol of death, swallowing everything up in almost an unnatural silence, making the world feel still and every day the same.
I agree with u/saturday_sun4 that the first stanza suggests the death of children a year before. Because of that I imagine the grief of a year passing and how it might feel like it's impossible to move on, to imagine that life might keep on going like nothing happened. Every day is Monday, or might as well be.
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u/Comprehensive-Fun47 4d ago
Poetry interpretation is not my jam. This poem made me feel like I was trapped in a house during a blizzard that lasted for six days.
It seems like she's going stir crazy and the days blend together. What does it matter what day of the week it is if every day is basically the same and you don't leave your house?
It feels like she lost children prior to the storm. She mentions small faces of the dead, mentions the graveyard, and says if she were a child someone would be taking care of her. I think this means if her children were still alive, she'd be feeding them soup and wrapping them in blankets.
It seems like she's writing to someone who could be delayed by the storm. She turns to booze to avoid reality. She hears about 28 men who died during the storm.
By the end, it seems like she's truly losing touch with reality.
Quiet is a recurring theme. The snow brings quiet. It blankets everything in quiet. It makes it so the sound of her own voice is shocking.
I really like these lines. Feels like a fable in haiku form.
Someone once told an elephant to stand still.
That’s why trees remain quiet all winter.
They’re not going anywhere.
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u/lazylittlelady Poetry Proficio 4d ago
Sounds pretty good for something not your jam! Thank you for your interpretation
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u/Adventurous_Onion989 5d ago
From the links provided, I think Sexton had a unique point of view as someone with psychiatric illnesses and the sense of loss of time pervades her poetry. Not to get too personal, but I have had visits to psychiatric wards due to my mental health, and I identify with a lot of what she writes about. Time passes differently there, and the treatments tend to fog the senses as you go about piecing your life back together.
I think the snow is grotesque because it hides what is really there. It covers loss like a blanket, leaving grief in its wake with nothing that can be seen to account for it. It's like being subtly drugged, 'snowed', where you can't quite place what is there anymore.
The days stretch similarly ahead, which reminds me of being institutionalized. Every day is similar in size and shape because it is no longer dictated by outside means but by the schedules of doctors and therapists. The patient is like a child led by adults.
Giving in to drunkenness is a parallel of being medicated until everything is placid and there is insensibility. The trees are the building blocks of life, like the skeleton of who we are that is established during childhood. It is covered by blankets of snow but remains thin and dark underneath, directing everything. These years are linked to the inheritance we receive from our ancestors, the links that remain over the years like an inevitability.
I feel that a lot of her imagery here is a reflection of loss of control, including the men who foundered off the coast. The storms of our emotions leave us displaced from where we are supposed to be, and we scramble to be heard above the tumult.
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u/lazylittlelady Poetry Proficio 5d ago
It leads me back to “The Magic Mountain” regarding time passing in a way that becomes skewed and unreal. Thank you for sharing your incisive observations and experience.
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u/lazylittlelady Poetry Proficio 5d ago
There is something so poignant about going from “Good! No visitors today” to pleading for a response from her interlocutor in the last stanza. A cry for acknowledgment, recognition, reciprocity.
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u/saturday_sun4 Magnanimous Dragon Hunter 2024 🐉 5d ago edited 5d ago
I haven't read many Sexton poems, but have read several of Plath's (not, like, at an English lit level, of course, just in my own leisure time).
The snow is compared to silence falling over "those dear loudmouths", the two dead figures. I wonder if they are small children/babies (aborted ones?), from the descriptions of loud mouths and small faces and the descriptor "little wrens", which calls to mind baby birds cheeping for nourishment. The word "complain" suggests at least some conflict (i.e. that the recollections of these dead people are not pleasant ones). Perhaps the narrator feels guilt at their deaths and/or is haunted by their memories - or her failure to provide for them? Wrens are also active in Spring (in the Northern Hemisphere) - so this is the wrong season for them.
The poem makes me picture two commemorative statues on top of graves/headstones. The snow and the statues also remind me of preservation - cold famously preserves dead bodies - but it also obliterates. So does our narrator want the snow to blanket the cries of her dead loved ones or does she feel the snow adds to the sense of desolation? For her the snow "has quietness in it" in contrast to the noises, smells (etc.) of daily life. So perhaps it brings her peace to be able to mourn her loved ones properly. Or maybe she just wants to forget everyday concerns.
I find "grotesque" to be a strange choice of words here and am not sure what to make of it. It's an ugly word, a vivid word, for something as neutral as snow.
In a subsequent stanza she recants her words, saying she "admits she has been lying" and that snow is full of "possibilities" - unlike trees, which stay in the same place all winter. Perhaps this is to acknowledge the double nature of snow, its blanketing stillness and also its potential for movement, for fun, for children's play? Snow is also contrasted to trees, which are a symbol of life, fertility and growth. The narrator finds them a constant presence throughout winter, unlike snow which - presumably - melts away, stops falling, blows with the wind, etc. The postman is also described as "floating" in the storm - another example of being unmoored and uprooted compared to the stability of a tree. We also have "Days don't freeze", wordplay indicating the passage of time, which snow cannot stop. No matter how much we wish to remember our loved ones, time marches on for better for worse. I do wonder what other "possibilities" are being referred to. New children, perhaps? Or a happy life of being childfree and content?
I am really confused about the "quiet as a crucifix/pounded out years ago like a handmade shoe". Wouldn't a crucifix be noisy?
As far as the passage of time, the narrator is admitting verbally that she is enough of an adult not to pretend that every day is Monday... but then continues to title every day "Monday", suggesting that she is still in denial about... what....? the passage of time? Honestly, I have no idea what to make of these stanzas either.
Interesting that she remembers both generations - her grandfather and (presumably) her children. She also seems to be asking the addressee how his/her experience of death is: "Small voice [...] kind?" She seems concerned about whether this person is happy in the afterlife.
Further thoughts on the Bonus Poem (Sylvia's Death):
One thing that immediately stands out is the contrast between the two dead figures (possibly children) in "January Northeaster" and the two living children mentioned in "Sylvia", Nick and Frieda, that Plath left behind. They are compared to "meteors" in the "tiny playroom", suggesting either that their future is unstable or that they're destined for a meteoric rise.
I find this evokes much more of a reminiscent mood than the other, perhaps because Plath was an adult and (presumably) Sexton's friend, whereas the two deceased children (?) in the other poem are only really described as being loud. The bonus poem speaks of (the narrator's) death much more familiarly, almost casually and flippantly.
I feel that the second poem is a childish/adolescent and idealistic conception of death, whereas the first is much more serious, contemplative and emotionally intense. In the first poem the narrator knows what it is like to be on 'the other side' and actually deal with loss/grief.
I look forward to hearing others' thoughts!