Word: poetes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Anne Sexton was a popular, Pulitzer-prizewinning poet who was capable occasionally of a dark brilliance. She had a favorite palindrome: RATS LIVE ON NO EVIL STAR. The trick has first of all its bright little surprise of words, and then, on second look, a deeper, perverse magic -- a double negative of meaning that ends in a metaphysical buzz. RATS LIVE ON EVIL STARS would work in a sane world, or else RATS LIVE ON NO GOOD STAR...
Anne Sexton was Ophelia, all grown up and turned into suburban mother and basket case. She was an obsessive who used up all the oxygen in the room. Now, posthumously, the poet, the generator of her own myth, is achieving a certain celebrity at the expense of the family that put up with her for years. Her version of the story, elaborately unpretty, is the one being told, the tale that survives. Her family gets dragged into the nightmares of its most disturbed and most articulate member. Literature 1, Life...
...centered, half cracked. She abused her children. In episodes of rage she would seize her daughter Linda and choke or slap her, and one day she threw the little girl across the room. Linda says that when she was older, in her teens, her mother sexually abused her. The poet had many love affairs during her 24-year marriage, including a long sexual involvement with her psychiatrist -- a disgraceful breach of medical ethics on the doctor's part. Sexton actually paid for these appointments. (A second psychiatrist, Dr. Martin Orne, raised a different question of ethics by turning over...
Some members of the family are outraged. They think the biography opens windows on a universe of Sexton's own disturbed imaginings -- which, being a good biography, it does. Two of the poet's nieces, Lisa Taylor Tompson and Mary Gray Ford, sent a letter to the New York Times Book Review in which they try to rescue the family from Anne's messy version. They assert the rights of the sane and normal. "We take pride in her art and her accomplishment," the nieces write. "But we strenuously object to the portrayal of people we knew as libidinous, perverted...
...sanity screams at the innuendo, like a gull blackened in an oil spill. It wants to cleanse itself. The poet's version has the power of her black magic, her words on paper. "Where others saw roses," the nieces write, "Anne saw clots of blood." The sick, brilliant woman has the inestimable advantage of being dead and therefore beyond examination on questions of who abused whom...