Lawrence Kessenich is one of the managing editors of the literary magazine
Ibbetson Street. He is also a former editor at Houghton Mifflin and worked with Diana Hume George and Diane Wood Middlebrook on the
Selected Poems of Anne Sexton as well as a subsequent biography. He was generous enough to send this essay about his experiences to the
Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene.---Doug Holder
The Awful Rowing Toward Anne Sexton
by Lawrence Kessenich
From the first time I read one of her poems, I was in love with Anne Sexton. She was the poet I wanted to be. Her work was original, profound, self-deprecating, spiritual—and had a sense of humor to boot:
God loafs around heaven
without a shape
but He would like to smoke his cigar
or bite his fingernails…
…
He does not envy the soul much.
He is all soul
but he would like to house it in a body
and come down
and give it a bath
now and then.
. She played with words:
even its murders lined up like broken chairs
*
the skull with its brain like eels
*
they suck the childhood out of the berries
I was entranced by Sexton’s skill, her brutal honesty, her humor. And when it came time to consider graduate schools in creative writing, I dreamed of forsaking Milwaukee for cosmopolitan Boston, of sitting at her feet in a Boston University lounge to learn how she worked her magic.
I was on the verge of applying to graduate schools—including BU—one fall day when I went shopping at the local market. There I ran into a fellow student from one of my poetry classes, a few semesters before. She asked how I was going about choosing the creative writing programs I would apply to. I told her that I’d been advised to seek out programs where poets I respected were teaching. She asked who those poets were, and I told her. When I mentioned Anne Sexton, she interrupted, saying, “Oh, it’s too bad about her…”
At that point in my life, I wasn’t paying much attention to the news, so I had no idea what she was talking about. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Didn’t you hear?” she said. “Sexton committed suicide a couple weeks ago.”
I was stunned. The thought of that vital life having snuffed itself out was profoundly disturbing. Yes, there was darkness in her poetry, but the humor that often accompanied it had led me to believe that she had a firm grip on life, despite its contradictions. I was deeply saddened by the fact that not only would I never study with her, but I would never even see her read her poetry in person. The kicker was that I later learned Sexton had committed suicide on my birthday, October 4th.
Flash forward almost two decades. I am an editor at Houghton Mifflin—Anne Sexton’s publisher, as I am always proud to tell people. For years, I’ve read for Houghton Mifflin’s annual New Poetry Series—including Carolyn Forche’s first book—and my interest in poetry is known around the office. The editor-in-chief, Austin Olney, approaches me and asks if I’d like to work with two scholars, Diana Hume George and Diane Wood Middlebrook, who are putting together Selected Poems of Anne Sexton. Austin is a pretty reserved old Yankee, but I’m tempted to throw my arms around him and give him a hug.
I did not get to help select the Sexton poems that would go into the book—and, of course, having my own strong feelings about her poetry, I thought there were poems that should have been included and poems that could have been left out. But it was one of the great honors of my life to be the editor who guided the book through the publishing process at Houghton Mifflin—a book that is still in print, 24 years later.
Houghton Mifflin had also contracted with Middlebrook to write a biography of Sexton, and when the editor originally assigned to that book left, I was asked to take it over. For several years, I was Middlebrook’s sounding board at Houghton Mifflin, and I will never forget one call from her. After we exchanged pleasantries, she got to the reason for her call. “You’ll never guess what I have in a box under my desk,” she said. I told her I couldn’t imagine. “Tapes of Anne Sexton’s sessions with her therapist.” My reply was, “Well, you just guaranteed that the book will be controversial!” And indeed it was, though by the time it was published, I was no longer in the business.
I also met Sexton’s daughter Linda during my involvement with these two books, and got comfortable enough with her to tell her the story of my wanting to study with her mother—and of the coincidence of Sexton’s suicide occurring on my birthday. “Well, I’ve got an even more dramatic coincidence,” she replied. “My son was born on the anniversary of the day she died.”
So, despite my sadness over never getting to meet or study with Anne Sexton, I feel privileged to have played a small part in keeping her legacy alive. I believe she is one of our finest poets. Her work speaks to me as powerfully and eloquently today as it did more than three decades ago.
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Well-Lindsay Slattery, one of my Creative Writing Students at Endicott College in Beverly, Mass., sent me a poem dedicated to Allen Ginsberg–the author of the groundbreaking poem Howl. Lindsay works at MASS LEAP, a Somerville-based literary outreach program founded by Jade Sylvan.
Alpha Coyote
In memory of Allen Ginsberg
I would have liked to touch your beard
Pick out the crumbs of dried marijuana leaves
The bits of paper and crumpled issues of Time
The resin and left over America blown to bits of bits.
And maybe when I got down to your chin,
I’d seal my eyes with the unreliable glue of wavering will
And maybe I’d feel Peter Orlovsky’s final caress.
I’d know what it feels like to be somebody else’s angel
In the vast watery tundra of a too-hot-too-cold glacial hell
In the narrow, busy streets and dank allies of an urban hell
In the nocturnal hours trapped inside the abnormal
Toes and fingers and belly button and genitals and
Screaming silently for whatever peace you found—hell.
And all any of us want is to exist without being spotted
Or pegged for dead because of the lead we take and
The balls we have to say “I don’t have any plans for the future.
I don’t want your founding fathers in my pockets
Or your dreams planted immovably behind my corneas
So kindly piss off and leave me to my silly words.”
Silly words were all you needed. Silly words and love.
And even what you needed was never to be taken seriously
Because life is only about eighty years long, hopefully less.
And why waste eighty years being in a suit and tie,
Hetero sexual, a nurse, a phony, a bull dog, an asshole
Or anything other than the one who alternates walking
And running down the street, singing each to each a song
About being oneself and living sans fear and pissing off
Everyone who has the nerve to be asleep at three AM.
We’ve come to know no matter what anyone tells you, eighty years
Is a really long time, and we’re not making the best of it
Because it’s too short, we’re making the best of a LONG struggle.
An honest to jehova zeus flying spaghetti monster struggle,
And by those three we’ll spend it soaking up knowledge
If we can, and by those three we’ll spend it ranting,
Mad as we might sound or little sense as we make…
We’ll spend it like you did, high on Peyote and ink and quill.
We’ll sop it up and waste it to everyone else and enjoy
The taste of the neon fruits you threw at our heads
Because they made us think. And we needed to think.
– Lindsay Slattery
Advertise with the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene! http://tinyurl.com/ddjcal
Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene http://dougholder.blogspot.com
Doug Holder's CV: http://dougholderresume.blogspot.com
Ibbetson Street Press http://ibbetsonpress.com
ISCS PRESS http://www.iscspress.com
Ibbetson Street Press Online Bookstore http://www.tinyurl.com/3x6rgv3
