Carnegie Vacation Scholarship: Week 2

Week two began with the kind of sunshine that called for outside study. This week’s subject, Anne Sexton, was someone who I had really only heard about in relation to Sylvia Plath and their competitive overlap of life and poetry – Sexton commented after Plath’s suicide that the death had been stolen from her.

I chose To Bedlam and Part Way Back, Sexton’s first published collection, as the main point of focus this week, and constantly castigated myself for not picking up the work sooner. Like Plath, Sexton’s poems have the physical force that acts so astutely in presenting mental health struggles to a reader. I read and re-read these poems, underlining (in pencil, of course, I’m not a barbarian) my favourite lines, turns of phrases and moments of genius – something of which Plath’s Ariel bears similar markings.

The biography I chose to refer to, Diane Wood Middlebrook’s Anne Sexton: A Bibliography, was full of the same life – an engaging read. Sexton’s own words of course, were the key in my research, but there was plenty of this too. I also made use of A Life in Letters, a collection of Sexton’s own correspondence collected by her daughter, Linda Gray Sexton, from which the project title comes: ‘Talk to my poems, and talk to your heart – I’m in both: if you need me’. Sexton wrote to, not about. Her poems are a budding conversation, and for this they have an immense power in confessional verse.

The collection itself is poignant and pure. Sexton’s gift is her ability in shaping poems that are at once considered and natural. Where rhyme should act as a constraint Sexton slips through the bars and smiles, begging the question ‘how did you do that?’.

This was my task then – to consider my own poetry and put into practice something I had discussed about a year or so previously with my poetry mentor John Glenday – to use rhyme almost unnoticeably, secondary to the poem itself. I remember that the poem I produced for this exercise gave me a new appreciation for the sounds of the words I used, the flow of the story and its song.

My objective notes for this week looked like this:

Write….

The struggle of living – of existing in the space made for you – the expectations and the reality of what you can offer - stark truth, bitterness? Story teller voice – natural inclusion of rhyme, the structure of the story, of self and others - relationships with family - expressing a need to reconnect and understand the self in relation to others - experiences of therapy and openness in wanting out but realising own limitations.

The poetry this week flowed like a conversation. I began with an idea and talked it out to myself, lay it across the notebook like a new ribbon and cut it to size. This week I paid attention to the structure of my work as an interplay with the sound, the ideas that rose from the words I chose. Sexton’s ideas of the poetry of language itself loomed large in my mind and I pushed myself to find the way ways to say, to speak, what I had experienced.

My family has always played a large role in managing my mental health – being little more than a child when I started displaying symptoms has made it very difficult for me to have a sense of self that is not necessarily shaped by my mental health. I feel like whoever I might have been without depression and anxiety has been stolen from me and whatever is left is something less than it might have been, now out of my reach. In this I feel my family have been cheated of me – of whatever expectations might have been seen in me as a child that never materialised to adulthood.

I think this was why my mother having my little sister when I was seventeen was a huge turning point for me. I didn’t react well to the news – I was bitter and angry and, as I see now, in need of more parental care than I supposed might be left for me sharing a house with a new-born. I moved out, and then, several months later, when I woke to a text and a sister, moved back in that day and found the role I needed. One daughter brought back the other for mum.

Being a sister was a role I hadn’t had time to consider – my two brothers had been practice of course, but with the necessary love-hate relationship that close ages entail. Like Sexton’s children became her focus of getting better, so too did K. for me. I stopped self-harming and let my scars heal into something that could be explained later, with more time, not something red and raw and ugly between us. I went to work with purpose, saving enough to buy a house and set roots in the real world. In this and more I gave myself more time and started considering K.’s time ahead, those milestones I’d get to be part of – first words, first walk, first day of school – so believing in someone else made the future seem more natural, and culminated in my own ‘first day of school’ a year before K. – September 2015, arriving at Moray College UHI for the first day of my Literature degree.

Confessional poetry needs this ability to look at yourself keenly. For me, poetry allows me to make sense of my actions and really pushes me to find how my thoughts take shape and lead my actions. Healing is not linear, or sensible, but it requires introspection – constant, deep introspection – because you have to know what healthy is for you, to come back to yourself.

Reading Sexton this week reminded me how much of mental health isn’t about yourself, but the people around you. Friends, family - your mental health affects them too. Wanting to get better and more capable for yourself is a difficult task, made much easier with the incentive of those around you. If you can’t get better for you, do it for others. For me, I needed to see the future in someone else before I wanted it, and understand my role in the family as something more than the one I’d slunk away from in depression.

The poems I wrote this week feed from the ideas of family I noted as essential in Sexton’s work and my own life. I tried to encapsulate the drive of love and self-knowledge that pervades To Bedlam and Part Way Back. Again, this week surprised me with how much my research led into the consideration of my own struggles and made my poetry much more essential as a result, allowing me to look into my life from a more detached viewpoint to tell my story.

Thus ends week two of the project, with several more poems sent to Ian, and a feeling somewhat peaceful. Lots of study and writing in warm sun will do that to you. Next week is break week – interrupted by the weekend in Munich to attend a Nature Writing Seminar with Robert McFarlane hosting [blog to follow], which leads neatly onto a week in Edinburgh for the Scottish Poetry Library. So whatever peaceful feeling this week has left me will be gleefully eviscerated by that time!