Hello, clioooooo and newfilosofee!

Thanks for the Follow.

lknyc:

theshell:

I would also like to nap in class with Mr. James Franco.

 Rough night? At least he has his notebook open…

"If you start out depressed, everything's kind of a pleasant surprise."

(via photomoto)

I am the love killer; or what happens when you read Anne Sexton when you are young

iwannotowidigdo:

bibliotheque:

It is June. I am tired of being brave.

-Anne Sexton

To those who don’t live there, Florida appears to have one season: brutal, unending summer. While this is somewhat accurate, those of us who have spent at least a whole year in Florida know that there is a distinct summer here and she is a cruel mistress. It was the hottest June of my life the summer I turned seventeen and a half. I had grown awkwardly into my skin, my bones slowly breaking down and growing again, the alien hips and breasts taking up room beneath my sunburned skin. I had gotten highlights sometime in the spring, blonde streaks throughout my dark hair, the touch up sessions leading to an entirely dark blonde head of hair, lightened eyebrows. I didn’t want to be myself so I figured this person would do for the time being.

I had passed my driver’s license test in May and I drove my dad’s old Land Cruiser all over the city that summer. My family still owned their condo on the beach, where Fort Lauderdale and Pompano Beach met, and as soon as school let out in early June, I spent the summer lazying around, making chicken burritos and forgetting to put on sunscreen. I called my family almost every day to say hi but I spent most of those days alone, not seeing anyone, not my friends, not the man I had started seeing. I packed lightly for this time, only bringing the things I thought I’d get use out of: two white bikinis, a small bottle of yellow nail polish, a pair of brown Havianas, a crocheted taupe sundress that my great-grandmother had made for me, three empty journals, a few pens with blue ink, and a dogeared copy of The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton.

I always spent the school year volunteering at the local library, where I did little work but lots of reading. Towards the end of the school year, a tall slender librarian who I had spoken to maybe twice caught me reading The Bell Jar behind a cart of non-fiction books one day and squinted at me.

“You should really read Anne Sexton if you like Plath,” she said, before turning on her heel and walking away.

I skimmed through Live or Die in the poetry section and was intrigued by Anne and her metaphors. I bought a copy of The Complete Poems the next day so I could write in it and fold the pages to my heart’s content. With that, Anne and I headed to the Atlantic shore for three months.

The volumes in Complete Poems are set up in chronological order and I started at the beginning of the tome in order to get to know Anne. The front cover has her sitting on the floor, short pants, white buttoned shirt, casual sandals. Her face is open and earnest, her long fingers and toes relaxed as she stares into the camera. The introduction by her dear friend and fellow poet Maxine Kumin gives insight into the tumultuous Anne Sexton of legend. Her work is described by her contemporaries as powerful and female, a standout against the rest of her fellow confessional poets. Kumin details Anne’s battles with mental illness and her struggle to maintain control of her mind through her art. Before reading many of her poems, I had a feel for the kind of woman Anne Sexton was: difficult, anxious, haunted, passionate, glamorous, dramatic, courageous. She wasn’t the staid poetess of past eras, she was a flesh and blood person. I felt a kinship from one stormy mind to another.

I woke every morning and went down to the sand, full of milky coffee, my teeth freshly brushed. I sat on a towel, my toes pressing into the sand as I diligently read all the poems in that book. Like most reading Sexton for the first time, I loved “Her Kind” and “Music Swims Back To Me”, the classics. I went for a swim whenever the noon sun began to burn my shoulders, my arms and legs pushing me away from shore as I floated and became one with the waves. I came back to my towel to get dry, the water turning into salt crystals on my skin as I continued to read. I rested on my side when I read the first poem of the book that really struck me in the gut, “Young”.

A thousand doors ago
when I was a lonely kid
in a big house with four
garages and it was summer
as long as I could remember,
I lay on the lawn at night,
clover wrinkling over me,
the wise stars bedding over me,
my mother’s window a funnel
of yellow heat running out,
my father’s window, half shut,
an eye where sleepers pass,
and the boards of the house
were smooth and white as wax
and probably a million leaves
sailed on their strange stalks
as the crickets ticked together
and I, in my brand new body,
which was not a woman’s yet,
told the stars my questions
and thought God could really see
the heat and the painted light,
elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight.

I felt the familiarity of my own childhood and growing up, the pure sensation of having every sense overwhelmed with memory. I had been constantly reading since I was two years old but I hadn’t felt pangs like these in quite a while, if ever; I had recognized myself as human before in literature and the written word but never so strongly as a woman, with all of the uncertainty that came with my new body and feelings. I devoured the book, poems about abortion and heartbreak and children. I took notes in my journal and wrote down my thoughts for the days and weeks that followed. I reread the poems I liked most and wrote my own verses in smeared blue ink. I began to look at myself in the mirror more often, letting my eyes learn my new body and not feel ashamed of it.

Sometime in July I went to the drugstore and bought a box of hair dye in my natural color. I took it back to the condo and dyed my long bleached hair in the bathtub, dabbing some dye on my eyebrows for good measure. I washed it out thirty minutes later and saw a version of me familiar yet new, a change from the girl who sat at the edge of the sink minutes before. I was aglow with a confidence I barely knew. I called the man who had taken me to dinner early in the summer, who I had ignored for weeks, and asked him to come over. He drove over after dinner and we sat on the balcony, the night balmy with an ocean breeze. I wore a swimsuit as I did permanently then, my legs tucked under the skirt of my dress as he talked. My head filled with words but not his, just line after line of New England imagery. I finally looked at him as he placed one hand on my tan foot.

“Your hair looks good dark like that,” he said, his thumb stroking the smooth yellow nail polish I had been applying and reapplying on my toes all summer.

“It’s my natural color.” I carefully gazed at his broad forehead as he looked at my eyes.

He leaned forward and pressed his mouth against mine. I felt his hand grip my foot as my lips parted, my eyes closing. We kissed in the space between our chairs as the moon reflected off our skin, the same words filling my head as his tongue filled my mouth.

Oh then
I stood up in my gold skin
and I beat down the psalms
and I beat down the clothes
and you undid the bridle
and you undid the reins
and I undid the buttons,
the bones, the confusions,
the New England postcards,
the January ten o’clock night,
and we rose up like wheat,
acre after acre of gold,
and we harvested,
we harvested.

That man ended, that summer ended, that time ended. My Anne Sexton fever cooled but never entirely died. I always leafed through the folded pages of Complete Poems, perusing the retold fairy tales in Transformations now and then. I didn’t think about Anne Sexton too much until I was 20, having lost that confidence of almost 18, depressed and exhausted in therapy. Once a week I stared at my psychologist’s face as it contorted into what I assume she thought a calming expression was. I watched her ask the questions that you’re supposed to ask 20-year-olds with the old ennui, the sounds from her mouth swirling around my head.

I couldn’t articulate to my parents what was wrong with me and so I sat in front of this woman as she tried to help me shake the depression that kept me in bed in the same clothes for days at a time and then sent me on road trips where I drove without a destination or even a map, picking locations based on which road sign seemed most appealing. I could feel myself floating away, the heavy feeling in the pit of my stomach not enough to keep me in my day to day life. I felt my mind working as ever but I couldn’t make breakfast or go to class or keep a lunch date; I forgot how to be a normal person, how to live amongst people and so I forgot how to feel much of anything. I stopped going to therapy and learned the walls of my apartment by sight and touch.

I went home and napped, rather, slept for hours at a time, missing entire days and nights at times. I hadn’t read a book in months but one night, close to sunrise actually, I pulled The Complete Poems off my bookshelf. I leafed through Live or Die , focusing on the last lines of “Live”, scanning them with my tired eyes again.

So I say Live
and turn my shadow three times round
to feed our puppies as they come,
the eight Dalmatians we didn’t drown,
despite the warnings: The abort! The destroy!
Despite the pails of water that waited,
to drown them, to pull them down like stones,
they came, each one headfirst, blowing bubbles the color of cataract-blue
and fumbling for the tiny tits.
Just last week, eight Dalmatians,
3/4 of a lb., lined up like cord wood
each
like a
birch tree.
I promise to love more if they come,
because in spite of cruelty
and the stuffed railroad cars for the ovens,
I am not what I expected. Not an Eichmann.
The poison just didn’t take.
So I won’t hang around in my hospital shift,
repeating The Black Mass and all of it.
I say Live, Live because of the sun,
the dream, the excitable gift.

It wasn’t one moment, or word, or even that poem. Maybe it was that entire night of reading how I used to and losing myself in something other than my own mind. I went to bed as the sun was rising and felt my eyelashes flutter against my cheeks as I drifted to sleep. I read Sexton religiously and began reading the other things I had loved before I was depressed and new things as well: Vonnegut, Borges, Kafka, Bachelard, Hemingway, Tom Robbins, graphic novels, McCarthy, O’Connor. Sexton was foremost in my mind as I put pen to paper, my fingers to my keyboard, and began to write again. It physically hurt to write even simple thoughts, I felt as if I was expelling something inside me. I could feel everything inside me leaving my body as it hit the page, contained in sentences and paragraphs and pages rather than breaking me from the inside. I haven’t stopped writing since then, it has become a source of revelation, a painful joy as I ache and part with the things I feel and am aware of.

On an October afternoon in 1974, Anne Sexton came home from lunch with her friend Maxine Kumin and put on her mother’s old fur coat. Having locked herself in the garage, she sat in her car and started the engine, committing suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning at age 45. Anne Sexton wrote for almost twenty years, joining a poetry workshop at her psychiatrist’s suggestion after her first manic episode in 1954. She published several collections of poetry, wrote a play, and won a Pulitzer Prize for 1967’s Live or Die. Writing kept her alive for almost twenty years as she struggled with mental illness; poetry became her refuge, her outlet, and she flourished as she battled, growing with each line of verse written.

When I first read Sexton’s poetry, I recognized the pain instantly. I knew the dark place where these words had taken shape and I was drawn in by this raw power. Sexton’s work walks a fine line between the unbearable pain of the world and the exquisite joy that comes from the feeling of knowing you are alive. In the darkest of her poems, Sexton exudes a life force that is blinding. Anne Sexton lived her life till it burst at the seams. Her mind and her words were too much for this world, much like her fellow confessional poets; Robert Lowell literally clutching his seizing heart in a taxicab in New York City, Sylvia Plath sealing herself away from her children as she took her own life. Sexton’s words breathe on the page, gasping for more air as they shout to the reader. Her words live even now the way she did: grasping, fighting, beaming with an honesty that is refreshing and astounding today as I write myself, yearning for that kind of truth and awareness in my work. I want to feel my bones and breath in every phrase, see my fingerprints on the words I write. I want to write as I live, fully or not at all.

When a life is over,
the one you were living for,
where do you go?

I’ll work nights.
I’ll dance in the city.
I’ll wear red for a burning.
I’ll look at the Charles very carefully,
weraing its long legs of neon.
And the cars will go by.
The cars will go by.
And there’ll be no scream
from the lady in the red dress
dancing on her own Ellis Island,
who turns in circles,
dancing alone
as the cars go by.

-Anne Sexton

dederants:

doltbelt:

placebokatz:

yay, aves

Those who can laugh without cause have either found the true meaning of happiness or have gone stark raving mad.

dederants:

bestillmysoul:

letmyvaginaglow:

cherryblonde:

(via ursofuckinspecial)

I’m mad.

Stark raving, motherfucker.

Stark raving in this corner!

Yep: mad. 

ladymiseria:

causticsalad:

No day but today.

 This show/movie was fantastic. Watch it and be inspired….today.