[lit-ideas] Re: Anne Sexton
- From: Mike Geary <jejunejesuit.geary2@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 28 Nov 2014 18:46:56 -0600
Interesting, Lawrence. I've always loved her "prurience." But then that's
just me -- a furious cock.
On Mon, Nov 24, 2014 at 9:53 PM, Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
> I’ve been accumulating large numbers of books on poetic criticism but also
> the poetry being criticized if I didn’t happen to have it. One of the
> books of poetry was *The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton. *Sexton was born
> in 1928 just six years before me so I was reading her stuff, some of it, as
> it was published and was appalled by a lot of it. She could be outrageous
> – not like Sylvia Plath whom she admired but taking up subjects that most
> people would find . . . personal stuff most of us just don’t want to read
> about. Consider these titles
>
>
>
> “Menstruation at Forty”
>
> “The Celebration of my Uterus”
>
> “The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator”
>
> “Angel of Fire and Genitals”
>
> “The Fury of Cocks”
>
>
>
> Have you ever read a poem and shook your head at it the whole time you
> were reading? A lot of her poetry was like that for me, but some of it was
> surprisingly good – especially stuff she wrote while she was
> institutionalized. In the end I got rid of her books, but then recently I
> read something indicating that her reputation has been rehabilitated. Who
> am I to say that can’t happen after discovering that Billy Harkness was
> fictitious? So I’ll read some and try to avoid poetry with titles like the
> above, but sometimes the titles are misleading.
>
>
>
> Lawrence
>
>
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