Aural-gasm: Scissor Sisters, "Night Work"

I’m less of a music snob than you likely believe me to be; in fact, if you’d asked me two months ago, I probably would have confused the Scissor Sisters with Le Tigre or some other hazily riot grrl band. On a whim I grabbed their first two albums, which quickly became my personal soundtrack as I danced around my apartment, packed it up, moved to my new one, stomped through the streets of Cambridge, sat in coffeeshops around Harvard Square tapping my foot wildly, &co&co. It was as if I’d returned to my old haunt—The Wave, in Norfolk, and found myself woozy and suddenly dancing on stage. Fortunately, the sheer fun of listening to the band dispelled the melancholy of homesickness, and I eagerly anticipated their new one—enter Night Work. Whether you’ve never heard of them—or you have—or you hate them—or you hate music on principle—you should feel obligated to allow this album at least two listens, and come to the revelation that no other album will as perfectly slide into the discomforting heat and ennui of this summer.

Imagine your favorite dance-band revisiting Footloose, Dirty Dancing, and Flashdance, tossing in a stash of poppers and meth, twisting it with a healthy dose of anonymous semen, and finally emerging from that skeezy back-alley to keep on dancing. This is, without question, a rather naughty album; one to dance to, certainly, but more importantly, one to fuck to. It’s got the energy and the Velveeta-drip of the 80s but brings with it the tainted despair of our post-romance, post-social, post-internet age. The album runneth over with runaways, hookers, “sexual gladiators” (as Ian McKellen so wisely says on the album’s final track), tweakers, dirty dancers, terrifyingly deluded stalkers, and lovers who will almost certainly never see one another again (or if they do, say on the T for instance, they’ll studiously avoid one another’s eyes and continue to cruise the other passengers).

Poem(s) o'the Day: Anne Sexton, "For My Lover, Returning to His Wife," "The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator"

Two more from Sexton's Love Poems--one of my faves ("For My Lover"), and one that's just wonderfully striking ("Ballad").

--

For My Lover, Returning to His Wife

She is all there.
She was melted carefully down for you
and cast up from your childhood,
cast up from your one hundred favorite aggies.

She has always been there, my darling.
She is, in fact, exquisite.
Fireworks in the dull middle of February
and as real as a cast-iron pot.

Let's face it, I have been momentary.
A luxury. A bright red sloop in the harbor.
My hair rising like smoke from the car window.
Littleneck clams out of season.

Poem(s) o'the Day: Anne Sexton, "The Touch," "The Kiss"

I'm tackling Sexton's fourth volume, Love Poems, this week, and as such, expect beautiful meditations on romantic attachment and intimacy...GOTCHA. Sexton doesn't title a collection 'Love Poems' only to offer orthodox lyrics ruminating on a cuddle-hour on a pleasant, lilac-drenched spring day. These are poems about broken people (even literally, as in "The Break") reaching out for contact, only to be shredded and chucked back into a chaotic and meaningless world. There are married men and women parting to return to their 'proper' spouses, girls awakening into a violent and invasive sexuality, lonely hollow-people crying into their pillows as they masturbate themselves into temporary oblivion. It's not all bad; one poem is a joyous celebration of the uterus, another is a really hot short piece about the sensuality of barefeet and telling your fella to 'pierce me at my hunger mark.' But largely, Sexton's romantic topography is one pockmarked by people unable to fathom identity and existence, begging for a release from inward-looking (and thus annihilating) solitude, even if it means just the single moment of orgasm that removes you from your self. Bodies are always already failed caverns in which we're all trapped, and sometimes allow others to use up in the hope that they'll stay with us forever. But they don't.

In short, these are precisely the kind of 'love' poems I can support--indeed, the only sorts I can 'love' in some sense. It's perhaps Sexton's most subtle work--it doesn't dazzle with the precise language of To Bedlam and All My Pretty Ones, doesn't drown you in surrealism and madness as with Live or Die, doesn't draw blood and cackle like Transformations does, or meditate ceaselessly and despairingly on religion in the last three volumes, The Book of Folly, The Death Notebooks, The Awful Rowing Toward God. I suppose that's why I so often forget how much I adore these poems--they brush against you delicately, bruising but not piercing the flesh, and leave a sensual smoke behind. Much recommended. Here are two samples:

The Touch
For months my hand had been sealed off
in a tin box. Nothing was there but subway railings.
Perhaps it is bruised, I thought,
and that is why they have locked it up.
But when I looked in it lay there quietly.
You could tell time by this, I thought,
like a clock, by its five knuckles
and the thin underground veins.
It lay there like an unconscious woman
fed by tubes she knew not of.

Poem(s) o'the Day: Sexton, "Consorting with Angels," "Sylvia's Death"

Behind. Sunday was hangover-from-hell day. Monday was exhausted-from-idiocy-in-class day. Yesterday was holy-shit-I've-got-so-much-to-do-for-my-directed-study-meeting-tomorrow day. Thus, three poems, all from Sexton's third collection, Live or Die (which is what I'm working on this week in my directed study). She won the Pulitzer for this collection, actually, and re-reading it, I'm beginning to see why. It's as though everything Sexton had already or would soon tackle was in top form in this collection. There are the inklings of her later desperate grasping towards a nebulous god figure; there're incredible musings on the excesses and failures and joys of the (mostly female) body; mothers and daughters and their strange bonds abound; suicide and madness are dealt with in some of the most philosophical poems of her career. It's just lovely. Unfortunately, many of the best poems of the collection ("Flee On Your Donkey," "Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman," "A Little Uncomplicated Hymn," "Cripples and Other Stories," "Live") are also incredibly long, so I'm sharing three that I enjoy, but that are also relatively short and easy to type up.

--

Consorting with Angels
Anne Sexton

I was tired of being a woman,
tired of the spoons and the pots,
tired of my mouth and my breasts,
tired of the cosmetics and the silks.
There were still men who sat at my table,
circled around the bowl I offered up.
The bowl was filled with purple grapes
and the flies hovered in for the scent
and even my father came with his white bone.
But I was tired of the gender of things.

Last night I had a dream
and I said to it...
'You are the answer.
You will outlive my husband and my father.'
In that dream there was a city made of chains
where Joan was put to death in man's clothes
and the nature of the angels went unexplained,
no two made in the same species,
one with a nose, one with an ear in its hand,
one chewing a star and recording its orbit,
each one like a poem obeying itself,
performing God's functions,
a people apart.

Poem(s) o'the Day: Yeats, "Leda and the Swan"; Sexton, "Housewife"

Two short poems today--and one ISN'T ANNE SEXTON??? Nah, it's my favorite W.B.Yeats poem. The Sexton one is one I used to think as a bit of a throwaway, but have since recanted. By the way-is this a good idea? Is anyone reading? Frankly, I guess I'll continue posting either way, but of course, I'm totally paranoid and wonder if this thing (the poem-a-day) seems like an exercise in narcissism, or my attempt to seem literarily-holier-than-thou.

Like I said before, I'm really doing this--at least to my conscious knowledge--as a way of blogging regularly without having to bore you with the details of my boring life. I'm not interesting, or rather, my life is not interesting. This is something I've come to realize over the past four or five months. My days are filled with the same things, placed as if on a loop. I wake up; I eat; I shower; I eat; I go to a coffeeshop; I read; I read; I read; I read; I eat; I read; I read; I booze; I sleep. That is my life. Everyday. I'm not sure if I'm dissatisfied. In all honesty, it seems there's nothing to be but content--nothing throws me on either side of the fence, I guess. In short, I have little to blog about. I don't have as much time to keep on the culture wars I'm certain are raging out there--I'm not all that current on current events, because I'm bogged down (mostly) in writing from people who've died decades ago. It's a bit tough to capture my interest these days, because everything begins to seem a bit like deja vu. I've seen or heard it before and perhaps if I tried to focus, I could appreciate it, but I'm just tired or lazy or busy. So yes. That's my apologia for the status and style of the blog at this point.

---



Leda and the Swan (1924)
W.B. Yeats

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
by the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
he holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
the feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
but feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
the broken wall, the burning roof and tower
and Agamemnon dead.

Being so caught up,
so mastered by the brute-blood of the air,
did she put on his knowledge with his power
before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

--

Housewife
Anne Sexton

Some women marry houses.
It's another kind of skin; it has a heart,
a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.
The walls are permanent and pink.
See how she sits on her knees all day,
faithfully washing herself down.
Men enter by force, drawn back like Jonah
into their fleshy mothers.
A woman is her mother.
That's the main thing.

---

Some commentary after the jump...

Poem o'the Day: Anne Sexton, 'The Operation'

Since I've been a bit bad this week, this'll be a bigger, better, faster, harder post. A long Sexton poem, and a link to an incredible mini-film of her at her home. Found it on youtube the other evening, and was struck--of course by her beauty, I guess everyone was, but also by the sheer radiance, the wonderful humor. It's difficult to imagine someone so full of life taking their own, but as you probably know, she also suffered from severe mental illness, and was in and out of institutions throughout her life. I'm re-reading Diane Middlebrook's biography on her, and it's tough not to be taken in. In any case, here we are.

Anne Sexton at home, Part I
AS at home, Part 2














---
The Operation
Anne Sexton

I.

After the sweet promise,
the summer's mild retreat
from mother's cancer, the winter months of her death,
I come to this white office, its sterile sheet,
its hard tablet, its stirrups, to hold my breath
while I, who must allow the glove its oily rape,
to hear the almost mighty doctor over me equate
my ills with hers
and decide to operate.

It grew in her
as simply as a child would grow,
as simply as she housed me once, fat and female.
Always my most gentle house before that embryo
of evil spread in her shelter and she grew frail.
Frail, we say, remembering fear, that face we wear
in the room of the special smells of dying, fear
where the snoring mouth gapes
and is not dear.

Poem o'the Day: Anne Sexton, 'A Story for Rose...'

So I missed a day. Maybe you'll have two tomorrow. Sure, this whole thing is a bit of a dumb idea, but at least it will keep me blogging regularly during the busy semester, not to mention I can use it to double as both blogging and 'research' inasmuch as I'll hopefully post at least a few thoughts about each poem. Like I said, expect Sexton for a while (though I've got an inkling that Yeats and Maxine Kumin may appear this week).

---

"A Story for Rose On the Midnight Flight to Boston"
Anne Sexton

Until tonight they were separate specialties,
different stories, the best of their own worst.
Riding my warm cabin home, I remember Betsy's
laughter; she laughed as you did, Rose, at the first
story. Someday, I promised her, I'll be someone
going somewhere and we plotted it in the humdrum
school for proper girls. The next April the plane
bucked me like a horse, my elevators turned
and fear blew down my throat, that last profane
gauge of a stomach coming up. And then returned
to land, as unlovely as any seasick sailor,
sincerely eighteen; my first story, my funny failure.
Maybe, Rose, there is always another story,
better unsaid, grim or flat or predatory.

Poem o'the Day: Anne Sexton, 'Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward'

Since I know I likely won't be able to post as frequently anymore--though I hope to do something later tonight, when my work is finished--I think I'd like to post a poem a day in here. Perhaps every couple of days, but this way, I can share ones that strike me--which should be particularly persistent this semester, with my directed study on female poets after World War II. Of course, this also means that the poems will almost invariably be Anne Sexton for the next 4-5 weeks (this is how long I'm working with her), and then a couple of weeks of Plath, but hopefully others will sneak in now and again, and certainly, at the end of the semester, there'll be more variety (I've got Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Denise Levertov, Sharon Olds, Louise Gluck, Maxine Kumin, and Sarah Hannah for the last 4-5 weeks). Anyhow, here's one for today.

It's from AS's first collection, To Bedlam and Partway Back. Re-reading this collection, I'm rather astonished. I've read it in part or in full probably three times now, and have certainly read some of the more famous poems about a million times ("Her Kind" of course, and "The Double Image," and my two personal favorites, "Some Foreign Letters" and "For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further"), but oddly, the collection itself is very different to what I remember. First, it's not strictly confessional--there are a half dozen or more that are like little stories, narratives of other lives (though still I think Sexton's interest lies in sort of marginalized or silenced individuals--the 'cripples' of life, as she would probably remark). There's a positively anomalous, really odd (but quite good) little poem that features the nuclear holocaust and life on Venus ("Venus and the Ark"), and then quite a few that are clearly--well, to my mind anyhow--exercises, little workbooks Sexton tried her hand at. She's still finding her voice in this collection. It's less biting, less pop cultural, less assured than the later ones. But it's also beautifully tender, attentive to the most minute of details and experiences, and brave in a way that I don't think anyone quite does like Anne Sexton.

That said, this is "Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward"--one of the little 'narrative' poems. I'll post the first stanza here, and you can click 'read more' if you'd like. Obviously, I don't own the rights to this poem.

Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward
Anne Sexton

Child, the current of your breath is six days long.
You lie, a small knuckle on my white bed;
lie, fisted like a snail, so small and strong
at my breast. Your lips are animals; you are fed
with love. At first hunger is not wrong.
The nurses nod their caps; you are shepherded
down starch halls with the other unnested throng
in wheeling baskets. You tip like a cup; your head
moving to my touch. You sense the way we belong.
But this is an institution bed.
You will not know me very long.