Arthur and Kevin's Nellorat ([info]nellorat) wrote,
@ 2008-07-15 10:00:00
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Coincidence
Reading poems from Anne Sexton's The Awful Rowing Towards God and seeing that we just bought Tom Disch's The Word of God: Was Anne Sexton rowing towards Thomas Disch? And is that why they both committed suicide?

Mood: irreverent

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Rising Tides, or Row, Row, Row Your Boat
(Anonymous)
2008-07-16 12:53 pm UTC (link)
The next-to-last book I finished at home (as opposed to the train, which is a whole other world) was an anthology of 20th Century women's poetry called *Rising Tides.* It came out in 1973 (although this edition was able to note that Anne Sexton died in 1974, "a probable suicide"), and contained poems from both Plath and Sexton.

It was an interesting collection, prompting me to a bit of William Lee Brammer's Arthur Fenstemaker in *The Gay Place" questioning -- where he asked his butler if it was "any easier bein' a colored man?", Barba and Chester's anthology made me wonder whether it had gotten any easier being a woman -- but it pretty much left me where I was with Plath and Sexton: the former strikes me as a little glib (your pain is real, but you diminish a Holocaust sufferer/survivor's by likening it to theirs), while Sexton, having been *To Bedlam and Part Way Back,* is trying to complete the journey.

Obviously, she didn't do it, but she kept on long enough to see her daughters grow up (Plath died before her son was a year old), to see seven volumes of poetry published and to leave behind material for three posthumous collections: *The Awful Rowing Towards God,* *45 Mercy Street* and *Words for Dr. Y.*

Since daugher Linda was largely responsible for the last, my theory was that Sexton, in the end, was looking for Mercy Street (we all need a little mercy now, sings Mary Gauthier), a Heaven on Earth, rather than for a God in Heaven.

Oh, and since Sexton died first, I imagine that Disch was rowing towards her, rather than the other way around.

Ahoy! Kayo!

The Anonymous Sparrow bids you a good day and continued irreverence, for, to rewrite Meredith, "a witty Nellorat is a treasure; an irreverent Nellorat is a power."


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