I just saw this interview link which has been released today by The Paris Review to celebrate Ann Sexton’s Birthday and I have added it to my Facebook page. I thought to add it through an excerpted paragraph and hyperlink onto the Poethead blog also.
There is an existent link to Ann Sexton’s Transformations also available on the Poethead blog which will be carried at the end of this short piece, along with the Paris Review Interview on ‘The Art of Poetry No 15’ by Barbara Kevles.
” Until I was twenty-eight I had a kind of buried self who didn’t know she could do anything but make white sauce and diaper babies. I didn’t know I had any creative depths. I was a victim of the American Dream, the bourgeois, middle-class dream. All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children. I thought the nightmares, the visions, the demons would go away if there was enough love to put them down. I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can’t build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out. The surface cracked when I was about twenty-eight. I had a psychotic break and tried to kill myself. “
(excerpted Interview with Ann Sexton , The Paris Review )
Briar Rose
Consider
a girl who keeps slipping off,
arms limp as old carrots
into the hypnotist’s trance,
into a spirit world
speaking with the gift of tongues.
She is stuck in the time machine,
suddenly two years old sucking her thumb,
as inward as a snail,
learning to talk again.
She’s on a voyage.
She is swimming further and further back
up like a salmon,
struggling into her mother’s pocketbook.
Briar Rose , by Ann Sexton (Transformations)
The Art of Poetry No.15
‘Transformations’ , Ann Sexton’s Fairy-tales by Poethead
Chris Murray 