"Portrait of an Old Woman on the College Tavern Wall" by Anne Sexton

Portrait of an Old Woman on the College Tavern Wall by Anne Sexton : The Poetry Foundation

The Campus on the Hill by W. D. Snodgrass : The Poetry Foundation

Recently I visited once again the University of Indiana in Bloomington, one of my very top choices for most beautiful campus and most pleasant college town in the United States. Almost every campus building is grandly made of local limestone, so there’s an architectural harmony that I’ve found unusual in large state universities. In the midst of those acres of lofty academic structures is a small woods. 

For a large school, the campus is well-defined relative to the town. A half-mile of shops, restaurants and bars connects the university to the town square, its courthouse dominating from on high. (Majestic courthouses seem to be an Indiana tradition).

To this outsider, the strained town-gown relationships portrayed in  Breaking Away, the famous bicycling movie, are not immediately apparent, but what non-resident knows that real scoop?

As I walked around, I felt like photographing every stone and student. All those stories . . . .  Then there's my tendency toward sentimentality about campuses and the college life in general; it led me once again to look for new poems that were related to scenes I'd witnessed. I couldn’t have gotten luckier, thanks again to Poetry Foundation. What a luxury, to wander so easily and casually through all kinds of verse and commentary.

At least for now, I love Anne Sexton’s “Portrait of an Old Woman on the College Tavern Wall.” If it weren’t so new to me, I’d say it’s as powerful and important as W.D. Snodgrass’s “Campus on the Hill,” posted here September 9, 2010. We'll see how Sexton's poem holds up, with its haunting interplay of different voices.

"The Campus on the Hill" by W. D. Snodgrass. What Is College?

 Portrait of an Old Woman on the College Tavern Wall by Anne Sexton : The Poetry Foundation

The Campus on the Hill by W. D. Snodgrass : The Poetry Foundation

If anyone wants to revisit the discussion of the college experience, I'm all ears.

By the way, I've just learned that yesterday's poet, Dean Young, earned his MFA at Indiana. 

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Confessionalism, continued

Left: Torso of a Giant, Jean Arp, 1964, Detroit Institute of Art




In the April 22 visitor comments here, Brenda writes:

“Do/did you ever have your students write essays based on the poetry style you are reading? In this case, the students would write confessional themes?

“Or is that too introspective, for students to reveal that much?

“In high school, our English teacher used to bring in huge photos of street scenes and we had to write an essay of what we thought was going on.”

Brenda, I like your English teacher’s assignment. I’ve done that kind of thing with descriptive essays, but I've only encouraged, not required students to imitate authors’ styles. There’s just never enough time for all good things, so I figured that the really motivated students would try it on their own if I pointed out the possible benefits (some did, some benefited, others not so much).

Sometimes kids have written somewhat confessional stuff, but I’d never ask or require them to; in fact I've cautioned them against it. I've encouraged them to base poems, stories and essays on personal experience and to try to see in their lives what's universally human. But confessional work takes that up several notches, and, as you say, those kinds of revelations can quickly become risky—going too public on too much intimate stuff and regretting it later, or getting into psychologically dangerous territory, or getting me sued.

Here’s my impression, not a fact: kids who want to reveal too much about themselves tend to be histrionic personalities and will do it without my asking or despite my forbidding it. They’re exhibitionists, and that's the heart of confessional work. "Look at me. I'm willing to say anything if you'll just look at me."

Are they honestly inviting me to share important human experience, or more grandiose, abstract pursuits of beauty and truth? Or do they just want readers, including me, to celebrate the wonderfulness of their dirty underwear, their self-indulgent escapades, their mental crucifixions of their parents, teachers, siblings, lost loves?

So I'm wary about such personalities among the professional poets. Anyone who writes for a public has some exhibitionist tendencies (yes, that includes me); but these days we have a convenient new expression for excesses, and we should heed the warning: “TMI: too much information.” Maybe the younger you are, the more you should think about that.

Aren’t there things that reasonable people (shall I call them “normal”?) wouldn’t dream of making public? And despite the voyeur in us all, we usually don’t want to hear it. Confession might be good for the penitent, but it's lousy hard work for the listener. Ask any shrink or priest.

In addition to their skill with language, edging up to, or crossing, that line of audience discomfort is at the heart of the power in Plath, Sexton, and other confessional poets. “Watch me say what others are afraid to say.” However, those professionals can go too far, and adolescents or young adults most certainly can—restraint and judgment are not traits often ascribed to the young.

Of course, the flip side is poetry or fiction so distant, formal, or academic that we feel a robot wrote it. The author didn’t emote, so how can we? I think some readers feel that way about Wallace Stevens and Richard Wilbur, to mention a couple of notables who have appeared on Banjo52 at one time or another.

So, Brenda, maybe that begins to respond to your questions as well as inducing a very fine nap for you and any innocent bystanders. But let me add one more note about confessional matters: in poetry and in life, I think it’s possible that we suffer from too little self-revelation rather than too much. Formality or reserve or custom, or whatever, are forms of artifice, dishonesty, fear, and conventionality that can deaden meaningful communication as much as confessionalism can turn it into a ten-cent carny act.

So where’s the boundary? This is why most (not all) multiple choice exams in English classes are an affront and a cheat.

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Robert Penn Warren's Sonnet, "Mortal Limit"

Robert Penn Warren, Mortal Limit


I shouldn't be pleased to have my species, with me in it, labeled "item" and "rot," but I think "Mortal Limit" ends up with a much more positive perspective on mortality and humanity than the Anne Sexton poems did. Maybe because we are only capable of seeing things from an anthropomorphic point of view, don't we identify with the hawk, occasionally soaring upward into a thinness of atmosphere for a glimpse of what is beyond the mountain range and beyond mortality? Barring that, are we not at least cheering the hawk because he has achieved that vision, however temporary it must be?

Notice too that the poem is a sonnet, most obviously Shakespearean because of the rhyming couplet at the end, but also Petrarchan with the shift of thought at line nine, so that there's also the octave and sestet that define the Italian form.

I find that I sound here at the blog as if I favor fixed forms more than free verse, yet I don't think that's the case. I simply ask poetry to be rich and precise in language as well as compelling in thought. The universal themes have been done; that was more or less always true. So the task of each poet and each era is to see those ideas anew--in language or shades of thought or both. As I scout poems for the blog, it just so happens that I've hit on traditional forms more than I expected to. Maybe I do have an unconscious bias in favor of them, but I think there's a lot of coincidence in this too: I like yapping about precision and complexity, and perhaps the traditional forms lend themselves to that more obviously than free verse does.

Maybe this sets the table for our discussion-to-come about confessional poetry, which is easy to see as self-indulgent and sloppy. I think Plath and Sexton put the lie to that, especially since both began their commitment to writing with sonnet after sonnet and other fixed forms. How does one develop from that kind of carefulness to the theatrics and perhaps narcissism of their later work?

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Anne Sexton's "The Truth the Dead Know." Anne Sexton on Film

The Truth the Dead Know by Anne Sexton : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

YouTube - Anne Sexton at home - 1 (VOSE)

On YouTube, there's a treasure trove of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, among others, reading their work. This clip also shows Sexton at home, and I found it curiously disturbing. I suppose I encountered the same trite questions we often ask about suicides: she was so bright, she was attractive, she liked center stage, she could take herself lightly--or at least not gravely--about the





theatrics of reading aloud, she had a husband in a time when that mattered, she was a late bloomer but rising star in poetry . . . . In short, we could say she seemed to have everything. My somewhat educated brain knows how irrelevant those factors can be in mental illness, yet the thoughts persist. And would I have enjoyed lunch or sharing an office with Anne Sexton in real life?

As for the poem, "The Truth the Dead Know," I'm interested in your reactions. I hear a bit of Emily Dickinson's tight, tough language and unexpected rhymes and images, including the motif of stone. I wonder if the poem is a good example of fixed form forcing the author into creativity in the form of words and thoughts she might not have discovered if the rhyme and meter hadn't forced her there. I wonder how many contemporary free verse--or simply sloppy--poets pause to wonder about this. Some great writers have. Consider some titles: "The Caged Skylark," "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," and "Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent's Narrow Room."

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"The Starry Night" by Anne Sexton

Enough of the fatuous cheerfulness in the last few posts. I'm interested in your reaction to this poem. I wonder about the issue of motive in the speaker, of cause and effect, of Eliot's "objective correlative." Yet I find the poem curiously effective and efficient. And disturbing.

And by the way, I like the Van Gogh painting.

Visitors here might find themselves more responsive than usual in loving or hating the poem. The Poetry Foundation's commentary is once again helpful as an introduction to confessional poetry in general as well as Sexton's work and critical assessment of it.

The Starry Night by Anne Sexton : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

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