https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn en-us 2018-01-04 01:24:06 UTC 2018-01-04 05:46:59 UTC hello@padlet.com namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218662464 The writing in Anne Sexton's few journals reveals the eternal nay-saying of the internal critic. "I am too dramatic," she lamented, wishing instead to take "words in hand and speak out in unprecedented honesty."]]> 2018-01-04 01:34:44 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218662464 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218671565 That Sexton suffered from insecurity and doubt about the originality of her work is no wonder:]]> 2018-01-04 04:38:22 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218671565 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218671648 She was in constant search of closeness and security in her relationships, yet she harbored terrible fears of public interactions: "Somebody sees me, and I see myself through them. Then it's all gone, the whole world falls apart."]]> 2018-01-04 04:40:05 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218671648 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218671774 While her writing may not have been evidence of schizophrenia, it often did hinge on farming her unconscious for associations, images, and metaphors]]> 2018-01-04 04:42:23 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218671774 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218671792  In a description of The Death Notebooks , the last collection published before her suicide, Sexton defines several of the key features of her own poetry: "the poems will be very Sexton ... intense, personal, perhaps religious in places.]]> 2018-01-04 04:43:01 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218671792 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218671905 In "For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further," a poem Sexton sent privately to Holmes, she responded to his objections to her style and choice of subject.]]> 2018-01-04 04:45:28 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218671905 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218671929  "For John" is conciliatory in tone rather than confrontational, and it demonstrates a maturity that likely took Holmes by surprise.]]> 2018-01-04 04:45:48 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218671929 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218671977 Still, Sexton understood Holmes's fear of the exposure of private demons, a fear she described in the poem as "an invisible veil between us all."]]> 2018-01-04 04:47:09 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218671977 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218671989 As real as this veil might be, in the final lines of "For John" Sexton captures the intense, unmediated intimacy that might be possible if the veil could drop:


]]> 2018-01-04 04:47:31 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218671989 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218672000 Between "my kitchen" and "your kitchen," "my face" and "your face," there is only a single breath, the hair's width of a comma. For Sexton saw her poems not as mere release, but as efforts towards connection.]]> 2018-01-04 04:47:50 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218672000 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218672026 The eloquence and earnestness of her defense demonstrated to Holmes that she had a mission for her poetry; she was after much more than a messy and imagistic purge of emotion]]> 2018-01-04 04:48:11 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218672026 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218672029 The writing of "For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further" was a kind of assertion of independence, but Sexton was not turning her back on the growth she had experienced in Holmes's workshop]]> 2018-01-04 04:48:27 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218672029 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218672443 the final poem, "Live," ended the book on a positive, life-affirming note. For some this was too obvious or programmatic an ending; others complained that the finale lacked the polish of the earlier poems in the collection]]> 2018-01-04 04:58:42 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218672443 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218672449 As much as Sexton's family and friends might have liked to construe "Live" as a sign that she had finally chosen life over death once and for all, the cry of "Live, Live " belongs to the poem's persona, not to the poet herself.]]> 2018-01-04 04:58:47 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218672449 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218672522 2018-01-04 05:00:18 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218672522 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218672904  her poem "O Ye Tongues" considers the same problem of origins as Eliot's "East Coker." It also, like his "Burnt Norton," debates the limitations and failures of language.]]> 2018-01-04 05:08:23 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218672904 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218672990 It is in "Hurry Up Please It's Time," however, that Sexton's contemplation and negotiation of Eliot's writing are most fully realized. The poem enters into a critical dialogue with Eliot's The Waste Land, making sophisticated and purposive use of multiple personae, self-reflexively contemplating questions about memory, language, and subjectivity, and juxtaposing private introspection and public display. It raises questions about spirituality and secularization, innocence and experience, male and female identity, and, ultimately, about life and death.]]> 2018-01-04 05:10:42 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218672990 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673010  The poem offers a sustained explication and defense of personal writing by addressing and refuting limited and limiting perceptions of confessionalism, and by confidently engaging with Eliot's influential thought and practice.]]> 2018-01-04 05:11:25 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673010 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673027  It is impossible to overstate the importance of "Hurry Up Please" to an understanding of Sexton's work. It functions as a manifesto of her poetics, it provides a resume of many of the concerns of earlier poems, and it invokes and challenges the terms of the assumed dichotomy between Sexton's "personal" poetry and Eliot's impersonalism.]]> 2018-01-04 05:11:43 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673027 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673041 Sexton's poem dramatizes an urgent--hence the title--quest, not just for an answer to the questions posed in the opening lines ("What is death, I ask. / What is life, you ask") but for an appropriate discourse in which to contemplate them]]> 2018-01-04 05:12:14 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673041 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673150 As in The Waste Land, the idiom changes repeatedly throughout the poem: from the simple and childlike (the appeal to the mother in section four, and the nursery rhyme rhythms and allusions throughout) to the learned and contemplative: "learning to talk is a complex business." The narration shifts tenses, moving from the present ("This is the rainy season") to the past ("Once upon a time we were all born") to anticipation of the future ("One noon as you walk out to the mailbox / He'll snatch you up")]]> 2018-01-04 05:16:08 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673150 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673170 As in The Waste Land, the idiom changes repeatedly throughout the poem: from the simple and childlike (the appeal to the mother in section four, and the nursery rhyme rhythms and allusions throughout) to the learned and contemplative: "learning to talk is a complex business." The narration shifts tenses, moving from the present ("This is the rainy season") to the past ("Once upon a time we were all born") to anticipation of the future ("One noon as you walk out to the mailbox / He'll snatch you up")]]> 2018-01-04 05:16:47 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673170 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673197 Sexton's poem refers to the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, to the Sibyls of classical mythology, and to Buddhist texts. Like Eliot's "The Hollow Men," her poem inserts incomplete fragments of prayer or Gospel, borrowing a line from the Book of Common Prayer ("Forgive us, Father, for we know not") which is, itself, a borrowing from the Gospels ("Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" [Luke 23.34]).]]> 2018-01-04 05:17:22 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673197 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673230 Sexton's poem juxtaposes the intense and mystical and the superficial and mocking, hence the refrain "La de dah" which mimics Eliot's "Weialala leia / Wallala leialala" and in so doing subverts its serious and incantatory potential. Indeed, Sexton's line parodies the presumptuous erudition of Eliot's phrase, mimicking its intonation and transforming it into a slang reference to snobbery. (34)]]> 2018-01-04 05:18:21 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673230 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673254 "Hurry Up Please" combines the popular, the contemporary, the emphatically and purposefully American, as for example in section two: "Peanut butter is the American food / We all eat it, being patriotic," with the spiritual and transcendent. It posits that the American dream (the "Holy Grail" of domestic bliss) is in fact a nightmare, hence the lament: "Milk is the American drink. / Oh queen of sorrows." Sexton returns to this theme later in the poem where references to "jello," "milk," "juice," and "peanut butter" again identify America with consumption and thus inevitably with expulsion--a process which is represented throughout the poem by scatological metaphors:]]> 2018-01-04 05:18:58 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673254 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673276 The first two lines of "Hurry Up Please" foreground the dialogic or discursive nature of confessional poetry; the fact that, as Michel Foucault and Leigh Gilmore have argued, in order that the confession be realized, there must be an "I" and a "you," a speaker and a reader, a penitent and a confessor. ]]> 2018-01-04 05:19:38 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673276 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673326  Sexton's lines also make explicit the ontological questions ("What is death, I ask. / What is life, you ask.") that remain merely implicit in Eliot's poem, and foreground the quest framework which underpins both texts. The insistence and juxtaposition of the opening antitheses ("death" and "life") invite us to anticipate a further one. We expect to find the verb "ask" completed with "answer" ("I ask. / [...] you answer") and we are disconcerted when we realize, particularly at such an early stage, that there may not be any answers. This introduces a primary uncertainty, one which persists throughout, and even motivates, the whole poem]]> 2018-01-04 05:21:20 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673326 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673359 The speaker asks a question--of the reader, Eliot, a therapist, a spiritual advisor, God?--but is unable to command a response. The inability or refusal of the addressee to offer any answers signifies a general loss of faith in the power of religion, or of the secular religion of psychotherapy, neither of which can provide the satisfaction which they had once seemed to promise.]]> 2018-01-04 05:21:59 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673359 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673371 The implied dialogue with which "Hurry Up Please" opens is made explicit at the end of the first section with the emergence of an "Interrogator." This may represent a religious or psychiatric confessor, hence the reference to "seven days," which connotes the weekly rite of confession to the priest or weekly therapeutic hour. The interrogator's role is to question "Anne":]]> 2018-01-04 05:22:23 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673371 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673480 This scripted exchange serves to unsettle our sense of the identity of the speaker of the poem (the "I" with which it opened) and of the relationship between "I" and "Anne" and the poet "Anne Sexton." The presence of these multiple characters also serves to confirm the dramatic or theatrical nature of confession, which may not be a "true" reflection of lived experience, but a staged spectacle.]]> 2018-01-04 05:27:34 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673480 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673492 The dialogue with the "Interrogator" permits Sexton both to make reassuring points about the therapeutic promise of confession ("one day is enough to perfect a man" [my emphasis]) and to exercise the voice of cynicism or doubt; the voice, indeed, of a Jonah. For Anne's response ("I watered and fed the plant") alludes to the Biblical parable wherein God proves his power to a doubting Jonah by creating and then destroying a great plant (Jonah 4.6-11). The Biblical allusion is important, too, because it reiterates the death wish of the poem's opening lines. Jonah in the Bible, like the poem's opening speaker, is tormented by his longing for death, complaining bitterly: "it is better for me to die than to live" (Jonah 4.3)]]> 2018-01-04 05:28:06 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673492 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673504 Indeed, the opening couplet of "Hurry Up Please It's Time" is most significant in respect of its subtle allusion to the Sibyl of Cumae--the subject of Eliot's epigraph to The Waste Land. His epigraph refers to the mythological story of the Sibyl who, granted a wish by Apollo, asked for prolonged life, but neglected to ask for continued youthfulness.]]> 2018-01-04 05:28:52 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673504 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673548 The speaker in "Hurry Up Please," too, is caught between life and death. She is tormented by the scrutiny of her audience (the "executioners" and "interrogator" in Sexton's poem, the young boys in Eliot's epigraph). That she is displayed like an anatomical specimen in a glass bottle replicates the metaphor of the inverted glass bowl which is central to another Sexton poem, "For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further." It also replicates Sylvia Plath's image of the "Bell Jar." (40) In each case, the glass jar signifies the control and public display of the female subject.]]> 2018-01-04 05:30:00 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673548 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673556 The confessional poet, like the Sibyl of Cumae, is caught and objectified by the gaze of her audience and resorts to what seems to be the only comprehensible language--the language of the body. Here, in "Hurry Up Please," the private self is put on public display. The gesture mocks the self-exposure of confessional writing, developed subsequently in this poem, and elsewhere, in metaphors of sexual display and prostitution, and treats the corrupting business of poetry with contempt. (41) The dual meaning of "Nirvana" conflates the spiritual and the vulgar (common, popular) promise of confessionalism.]]> 2018-01-04 05:30:09 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673556 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673609 The poet repeated the same word god at the end of some neighboring stanzas. The poetic device is a kind of epiphora.]]> 2018-01-04 05:31:24 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673609 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673900 The poem is an intensely female experience, with a strong and powerful voice. The first line of the poem clearly describes her unusually honest approach towards poetry, and her forthright, unflinching focus on feminist themes and human body. ]]> 2018-01-04 05:37:09 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673900 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673962  She has been living with company of death for long that her heart is being mutilated so deeply. She is no longer able to look upon things as it is with her suffering heart. She observes the world through the veil of obscenity. She tries to overcome this outright lie by covering her naked mind. She reaches a point where she wonders if life is some kind of act, which no one wants to act in.  Probing further into life she finds a silver lining of hope. She is able to find an answer in the chaos like a dream a perfect life with a perfect family, but even they take her love for granted and make her just an instrument in their life.]]> 2018-01-04 05:39:27 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673962 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673985 The rhetoric here becomes defensive, as though anticipating criticism of such self display and testing the limits of confessional discourse. How far can the speaker go before the audience ("executioner"/Eliot?) tires of her? How "personal" can she be?The metaphor of undressing invokes contemporary hostility against confessional self-revelation, or the "unbuttoned style of reminiscence," as Jonathan Raban has termed it. (45) "Tom" is, of course, Thomas Stearns Eliot, here addressed with more familiarity, and more contempt, than the apostrophe "Mr. Eliot" in Sexton's "Sweeney."]]> 2018-01-04 05:40:25 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218673985 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218674149 In the second stanza of section two, Sexton's speaker adopts a further dramatic role; that of "Ms. Dog." Caroline Hall speculates that "Ms. Dog" is inspired by Eliot's waste land dog (47) and although this is one possible influence, we should also note that Sexton had likened herself to a dog (servile, inhuman) on a number of other occasions. ]]> 2018-01-04 05:45:03 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218674149 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218674183 Sexton is explicit about the connection between money (the green paper) and poetry (in particular the performed poem, or "song"). Indeed, she confesses: "I wish I were the U.S. Mint, / turning it all out." The metaphor of "turning it out," particularly with its aural pun on "churning," indicates that confession is not, after all, some sacred calling or irrepressible release. It is a fabrication, a "made" or manufactured product of American consumer society.]]> 2018-01-04 05:45:48 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218674183 namendiola18 https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218674228 "Ms. Dog," like "Anne" in earlier sections, is represented in the third person and thereby emphatically dissociated from the original speaker, indeed, the speaker is not certain who this performing subject is, hence: "Who's that at the podium?" This emphasizes the autonomy of the public persona]]> 2018-01-04 05:46:42 UTC https://padlet.com/namendiola18/xqtgsmhdn7cn/wish/218674228