I was introduced to Anne Sexton’s work in second year university by a friend named Emma. At that point in my life I felt pretty lost and I wasn’t really interested in extracurricular study (I wasn’t interested in curricular study, either) but I remember Emma insisted on photocopying a stack of Anne Sexton poems and giving them to me outside the university theatre.
What struck me immediately about Sexton’s work was the sculpted brutality of it, the pain and wit that flashed with atomic heat on the page, and those devastating last lines. One of the poems was ‘For My Lover, Returning to his Wife’, where a man is answering ‘the call, the curious call’, by going back to his ‘singular’ and ‘solid’ wife and his children ‘like delicate balloons resting on the ceiling’. The depth of emotion, the balance of resignation and fury, is all there in a poem pregnant with regret, with life and death-dealing last lines — ‘She is solid. / As for me, I am watercolour. / I wash off.’ From there, I was addicted to her work and have aspired to attain that balance of raw emotion and delicately honed form.
I will often tell students that you must work hard to become better at poetry, and I believe it, but a part of me thinks that a true poet is born with a certain pair of eyes, ‘soft eyes’ as Bunk from The Wire might say, that take in the small and the large simultaneously, eyes that can see through walls of brick, skin and history, to the pained and pain-inflicting heart of things.
I am a man and I grew up in a totally different era (albeit one still rampant with sexism), so I will never truly understand how taboo it was for a woman at that time to talk so openly about suicide, sex, menstruation, madness and divorce. However, what I could feel was a visceral sense of what her poetry cost her, the price of bravery, and the reckless self-awareness of the true poet.
Nowhere is this more true than in ‘Wanting to Die’ (you can find footage of Sexton reading it herself on YouTube), about the strange, ‘almost unnameable lust’ of wanting to commit suicide, ‘a drug so sweet that even children would look on and smile.’
It is so important in poetry to come up with startling and fresh imagery, revelatory keyholes to monumental issues so much larger than us, and here, with mastery, Sexton surprises us with shimmering, alluring language to describe something that is often unspeakable. Of course, this is given extra resonance by the fact that Sexton did take her own life in 1974, after many attempts. Although she was talking about suicide personified, waiting for her, she might have been talking about what we do as poets when she spoke of wanting to ‘so delicately undo an old wound’.
I once tried to steal a copy of Anne Sexton’s collected works, which was $50, but it was too thick to stuff down the front of my pants. I later scored one for cheap ($7) at a second-hand bookstore in Berkeley. I still own that collected works of Anne Sexton, even though it is now ragged, and I dip into it whenever I need inspiration. She helps me with writer’s block, she helps me be brave.
About the Writer
Omar Musa is a Malaysian–Australian author, rapper and poet from Queanbeyan. He is the former winner of the Australian Poetry Slam and the Indian Ocean Poetry Slam. He has appeared on ABC’s Q&A and received a standing ovation at TEDx Sydney at the Sydney Opera House. His debut novel Here Come the Dogs was long-listed for the Miles Franklin Award, the International Dublin Literary Award and he was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Young Novelists of the Year in 2015.
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