Live or Die: Poems

by Anne Sexton

Overview

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize: A gripping poetry collection mapping the thorny journey from madness to hope

With her emotionally raw and deeply resonant third collection, Live or Die, Anne Sexton confirmed her place among the most celebrated poets of the twentieth century. Sexton described the volume, which depicts a fictionalized version of her struggle with mental illness, as “a fever chart for a bad case of melancholy.” From the halls of a psychiatric hospital—“the scene of the disordered scenes” in “Flee on Your Donkey”—to a child’s playroom—“a graveyard full of dolls” in “Those Times . . .”—these gripping poems offer profound insight on the agony of depression and the staggering acts of courage and faith required to emerge from its depths.
 
Along with other confessional poets like Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, Sexton was known for grappling with intimate subjects traditionally considered taboo for poetry such as motherhood, menstruation, and drug dependence. Live or Die features these topics in candid and unflinching detail, as Sexton represents the full experience of being alive—and a woman—as few poets have before. Through bold images and startlingly precise language, Sexton explores the broad spectrum of human emotion ranging from desperate despair to unfettered hope.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781504034340
Publisher:	Open Road Media
Publication date:	04/05/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	90
Sales rank:	470,626
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning American poet born in Newton, Massachusetts. She attended Garland Junior College for one year and briefly worked as a model. She married Alfred Muller Sexton II at age nineteen, and in 1953 gave birth to a daughter. Shortly after, she was diagnosed with postpartum depression. When Sexton attempted suicide after the birth of her second daughter, her doctor encouraged her to pursue her interest in writing poetry, and in the fall of 1957, she enrolled in a poetry workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education.
 
Like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, W. D. Snodgrass (who exerted a great influence on her work), and other Confessional poets, Sexton offers the reader an intimate view of the emotional anguish that characterized her life. The experience of being a woman was a central issue in her poetry, and though she endured criticism for bringing subjects such as menstruation, abortion, and drug addiction into her work, her skill as a poet transcended the controversy over her subject matter. Sexton’s poetry collections include To Bedlam and Part Way Back, All My Pretty Ones, Transformations, and Live or Die, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967. In 1974 at the age of forty-six, Sexton lost her battle with mental illness and committed suicide.

Read an Excerpt

Live or Die

Poems

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By Anne Sexton

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Copyright © 1966 Anne Sexton
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3434-0

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CHAPTER 1

    AND ONE FOR MY DAME

    A born salesman,
    my father made all his dough
    by selling wool to Fieldcrest, Woolrich and Faribo.

    A born talker,
    he could sell one hundred wet-down bales
    of that white stuff. He could clock the miles and sales

    and make it pay.
    At home each sentence he would utter
    had first pleased the buyer who'd paid him off in butter.

    Each word
    had been tried over and over, at any rate,
    on the man who was sold by the man who filled my plate.

    My father hovered
    over the Yorkshire pudding and the beef:
    a peddler, a hawker, a merchant and an Indian chief.

    Roosevelt! Willkie! and war!
    How suddenly gauche I was
    with my old-maid heart and my funny teenage applause.

    Each night at home
    my father was in love with maps
    while the radio fought its battles with Nazis and Japs.

    Except when he hid
    in his bedroom on a three-day drunk,
    he typed out complex itineraries, packed his trunk,

    his matched luggage
    and pocketed a confirmed reservation,
    his heart already pushing over the red routes of the nation.

    I sit at my desk
    each night with no place to go,
    opening the wrinkled maps of Milwaukee and Buffalo,

    the whole U.S.,
    its cemeteries, its arbitrary time zones,
    through routes like small veins, capitals like small stones.

    He died on the road,
    his heart pushed from neck to back,
    his white hanky signaling from the window of the Cadillac.

    My husband,
    as blue-eyed as a picture book, sells wool:
    boxes of card waste, laps and rovings he can pull

    to the thread
    and say Leicester, Rambouillet, Merino,
    a half-blood, it's greasy and thick, yellow as old snow.

    And when you drive off, my darling,
    Yes, sir! Yes, sir! It's one for my dame,
    your sample cases branded with my father's name,

    your itinerary open,
    its tolls ticking and greedy,
    its highways built up like new loves, raw and speedy.

    January 25, 1962


    THE SUN

    I have heard of fish
    coming up for the sun
    who stayed forever,
    shoulder to shoulder,
    avenues of fish that never got back,
    all their proud spots and solitudes
    sucked out of them.
    I think of flies
    who come from their foul caves
    out into the arena.
    They are transparent at first.
    Then they are blue with copper wings.
    They glitter on the foreheads of men.
    Neither bird nor acrobat
    they will dry out like small black shoes.
    I am an identical being.
    Diseased by the cold and the smell of the house
    I undress under the burning magnifying glass.
    My skin flattens out like sea water.
    O yellow eye,
    let me be sick with your heat,
    let me be feverish and frowning.
    Now I am utterly given.
    I am your daughter, your sweet-meat,
    your priest, your mouth and your bird
    and I will tell them all stories of you
    until I am laid away forever,
    a thin gray banner.

    May 1962


    FLEE ON YOUR DONKEY

    Ma faim, Anne, Anne,
    Fuis sur ton âne ... Rimbaud

    Because there was no other place
    to flee to,
    I came back to the scene of the disordered senses,
    came back last night at midnight,
    arriving in the thick June night
    without luggage or defenses,
    giving up my car keys and my cash,
    keeping only a pack of Salem cigarettes
    the way a child holds on to a toy.
    I signed myself in where a stranger
    puts the inked-in X's —
    for this is a mental hospital,
    not a child's game.

    Today an interne knocks my knees,
    testing for reflexes.
    Once I would have winked and begged for dope.
    Today I am terribly patient.
    Today crows play black-jack
    on the stethoscope.

    Everyone has left me
    except my muse,
    that good nurse.
    She stays in my hand,
    a mild white mouse.

    The curtains, lazy and delicate,
    billow and flutter and drop
    like the Victorian skirts
    of my two maiden aunts
    who kept an antique shop.

    Hornets have been sent.
    They cluster like floral arrangements on the screen.
    Hornets, dragging their thin stingers,
    hover outside, all knowing,
    hissing: the hornet knows.
    I heard it as a child
    but what was it that he meant?
    The hornet knows!
    What happened to Jack and Doc and Reggy?
    Who remembers what lurks in the heart of man?
    What did The Green Hornet mean, he knows?
    Or have I got it wrong?
    Is it The Shadow who had seen
    me from my bedside radio?

    Now it's Dinn, Dinn, Dinn!
    while the ladies in the next room argue
    and pick their teeth.
    Upstairs a girl curls like a snail;
    in another room someone tries to eat a shoe;
    meanwhile an adolescent pads up and down
    the hall in his white tennis socks.
    A new doctor makes rounds
    advertising tranquilizers, insulin, or shock
    to the uninitiated.

    Six years of such small preoccupations!
    Six years of shuttling in and out of this place!
    O my hunger! My hunger!
    I could have gone around the world twice
    or had new children — all boys.
    It was a long trip with little days in it
    and no new places.

    In here,
    it's the same old crowd,
    the same ruined scene.
    The alcoholic arrives with his golf clubs.
    The suicide arrives with extra pills sewn
    into the lining of her dress.
    The permanent guests have done nothing new.
    Their faces are still small
    like babies with jaundice.

    Meanwhile,
    they carried out my mother,
    wrapped like somebody's doll, in sheets,
    bandaged her jaw and stuffed up her holes.
    My father, too. He went out on the rotten blood
    he used up on other women in the Middle West.
    He went out, a cured old alcoholic
    on crooked feet and useless hands.
    He went out calling for his father
    who died all by himself long ago —
    that fat banker who got locked up,
    his genes suspended like dollars,
    wrapped up in his secret,
    tied up securely in a straitjacket.

    But you, my doctor, my enthusiast,
    were better than Christ;
    you promised me another world
    to tell me who
    I was.

    I spent most of my time,
    a stranger,
    damned and in trance — that little hut,
    that naked blue-veined place,
    my eyes shut on the confusing office,
    eyes circling into my childhood,
    eyes newly cut.
    Years of hints
    strung out — a serialized case history —
    thirty-three years of the same dull incest
    that sustained us both.
    You, my bachelor analyst,
    who sat on Marlborough Street,
    sharing your office with your mother
    and giving up cigarettes each New Year,
    were the new God,
    the manager of the Gideon Bible.

    I was your third-grader
    with a blue star on my forehead.
    In trance I could be any age,
    voice, gesture — all turned backward
    like a drugstore clock.
    Awake, I memorized dreams.
    Dreams came into the ring
    like third string fighters,
    each one a bad bet
    who might win
    because there was no other.

    I stared at them,
    concentrating on the abyss
    the way one looks down into a rock quarry,
    uncountable miles down,
    my hands swinging down like hooks
    to pull dreams up out of their cage.
    O my hunger! My hunger!

    Once,
    outside your office,
    I collapsed in the old-fashioned swoon
    between the illegally parked cars.

    I threw myself down,
    pretending dead for eight hours.
    I thought I had died
    into a snowstorm.
    Above my head
    chains cracked along like teeth
    digging their way through the snowy street.
    I lay there
    like an overcoat
    that someone had thrown away.
    You carried me back in,
    awkwardly, tenderly,
    with the help of the red-haired secretary
    who was built like a lifeguard.
    My shoes,
    I remember,
    were lost in the snowbank
    as if I planned never to walk again.

    That was the winter
    that my mother died,
    half mad on morphine,
    blown up, at last,
    like a pregnant pig.
    I was her dreamy evil eye.
    In fact,
    I carried a knife in my pocketbook —
    my husband's good L. L. Bean hunting knife.
    I wasn't sure if I should slash a tire
    or scrape the guts out of some dream.

    You taught me
    to believe in dreams;
    thus I was the dredger.
    I held them like an old woman with arthritic fingers,
    carefully straining the water out —
    sweet dark playthings,
    and above all, mysterious
    until they grew mournful and weak.
    O my hunger! My hunger!
    I was the one
    who opened the warm eyelid
    like a surgeon
    and brought forth young girls
    to grunt like fish.

    I told you,
    I said —
    but I was lying —
    that the knife was for my mother ...
    and then I delivered her.

    The curtains flutter out
    and slump against the bars.
    They are my two thin ladies
    named Blanche and Rose.
    The grounds outside
    are pruned like an estate at Newport.
    Far off, in the field,
    something yellow grows.

    Was it last month or last year
    that the ambulance ran like a hearse
    with its siren blowing on suicide —
    Dinn, dinn, dinn! —
    a noon whistle that kept insisting on life
    all the way through the traffic lights?

    I have come back
    but disorder is not what it was.
    I have lost the trick of it!
    The innocence of it!
    That fellow-patient in his stovepipe hat
    with his fiery joke, his manic smile —
    even he seems blurred, small and pale.
    I have come back,
    recommitted,
    fastened to the wall like a bathroom plunger,
    held like a prisoner
    who was so poor
    he fell in love with jail.

    I stand at this old window
    complaining of the soup,
    examining the grounds,
    allowing myself the wasted life.
    Soon I will raise my face for a white flag,
    and when God enters the fort,
    I won't spit or gag on his finger.
    I will eat it like a white flower.
    Is this the old trick, the wasting away,
    the skull that waits for its dose
    of electric power?

    This is madness
    but a kind of hunger.
    What good are my questions
    in this hierarchy of death
    where the earth and the stones go
    Dinn! Dinn! Dinn!
    It is hardly a feast.
    It is my stomach that makes me suffer.

    Turn, my hungers!
    For once make a deliberate decision.
    There are brains that rot here
    like black bananas.
    Hearts have grown as flat as dinner plates.

    Anne, Anne,
    flee on your donkey,
    flee this sad hotel,
    ride out on some hairy beast,
    gallop backward pressing
    your buttocks to his withers,
    sit to his clumsy gait somehow.
    Ride out
    any old way you please!
    In this place everyone talks to his own mouth.
    That's what it means to be crazy.
    Those I loved best died of it —
    the fool's disease.

    June 1962

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Live or Die by Anne Sexton. Copyright © 1966 Anne Sexton. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Publisher's Note,
And One for My Dame,
The Sun,
Flee on Your Donkey,
Three Green Windows,
Somewhere in Africa,
Imitations of Drowning,
Mother and Jack and the Rain,
Consorting with Angels,
The Legend of the One-eyed Man,
Love Song,
Man and Wife,
Those Times ...,
Two Sons,
To Lose the Earth,
Sylvia's Death,
Protestant Easter,
For the Year of the Insane,
Crossing the Atlantic,
Walking in Paris,
Menstruation at Forty,
Christmas Eve,
KE 6–8018,
Wanting to Die,
The Wedding Night,
Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman,
A Little Uncomplicated Hymn,
Your Face on the Dog's Neck,
Self in 1958,
Suicide Note,
In the Beach House,
Cripples and Other Stories,
Pain for a Daughter,
The Addict,
Live,
Acknowledgments,
About the Author,