the confines of the poem

I've been thinking some lately about the course of events that led me to believing that poetry was a valid and necessary pursuit. Why is it that I love this particular art form so very much, when most folks think it's rarified and elitist at best and utter nonsense at worst. And truth be told, I keep coming back to one small classroom experience that I had in high school.

Whenever I sheepishly confess to some new acquaintance that I went to private school (what good liberal wants to confess to such a privileged childhood?), and an all-girls' school at that, I frequently feel like I have to disillusion folks of all the rich-bitch, spoiled-brat, silver-spoon, socially-oblivious stereotypes that they might hold about such institutions. And this feeling is, of course, ridiculous. The stereotypes are all true. But they're also not true at all. But I don't really want to delve into the good and bad of single-sex private education. I should say, however, that I got really lucky in terms of teachers-- and in terms of the rather subversive methods some of them employed in order to impart the desire for abstract thinking to us. They didn't just teach us how to do it... they made us WANT to do so. Or at least, they made ME want to.

So, anyway, I had one particularly no-adjective-positive-enough sort of teacher for my junior year advanced English class. She later went on to become the book editor for The Nashville Scene, the independent free paper to which I often refer for great film reviews. But I have a very specific memory of a discussion we once had in that English class about how writers come to terms with and make decisions about which parts of themselves they want to make public and which parts they'd rather obfuscate in their work. Truth be told, I think writers have less control over where they draw the line between what they actually display and what they actually hide... though, we do like to put forth the valiant effort, right? However, I think the discussion was an important one to have with 15- and 16-year-old girls. Mostly, I think this is true because it plants the idea that writing can be more than just catharsis or therapy or confessions. It can, after all, be a vehicle for communication that doesn't have to be anywhere near as self-involved as all that. It's true, you write about yourself no matter what your write-- because you're you and you can't escape being you-- but it's hard for readers to care about your work if it's ONLY about you, right? In this way, objective distance as an artistic discipline can be a tremendously useful tool.

And the poem that my great teacher used as an illustration of this negotiation between the writerly private and the writerlypublic?

The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator

The end of the affair is always death.
She's my workshop. Slippery eye,
out of the tribe of myself my breath
finds you gone. I horrify
those who stand by. I am fed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Finger to finger, now she's mine.
She's not too far. She's my encounter.
I beat her like a bell. I recline
in the bower where you used to mount her.
You borrowed me on the flowered spread.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Take for instance this night, my love,
that every single couple puts together
with a joint overturning, beneath, above,
the abundant two on sponge and feather,
kneeling and pushing, head to head.
At night alone, I marry the bed.

I break out of my body this way,
an annoying miracle. Could I
put the dream market on display?
I am spread out. I crucify.
My little plum is what you said.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Then my black-eyed rival came.
The lady of water, rising on the beach,
a piano at her fingertips, shame
on her lips and a flute's speech.
And I was the knock-kneed broom instead.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

She took you the way a woman takes
a bargain dress off the rack
and I broke the way a stone breaks.
I give back your books and fishing tack.
Today's paper says that you are wed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

The boys and girls are one tonight.
They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies.
They take off shoes. They turn off the light.
The glimmering creatures are full of lies.
They are eating each other. They are overfed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.


--Anne Sexton, from Love Poems



I do so love this poem-- not because it's dirty and not because it was so audacious when it was first published in 1967 and not because it is so very evocative of heartbreak. I love it because it contains within it both a metaphorical exploration of self and a very literal one. And because, even outside of its subject matter, Sexton's sense of language is paramount. Simply put, I find more artistic rigor here than I find titillating confession.

And the fact that this was the sort of work put before me at a formative age, I think, had a great deal to do with my falling ass over teakettle in love with poetry. Would I have ever seen this poem had I not sat in Margaret Renkl's English IIIA class? Maybe so. But would it have been presented to me in a fashion that affected the course of my life and my artistic aspirations? Maybe not. But as it stands, this poem represents, to me, the greatest possibility for engagement with the world that writing can hold. Bless its little heart for finding such a prominent position in my personal mythology!