I’ll begin with the poet who has been the most constant influence in my own writing, Anne Sexton.  Steeped in personal demons and  depression, her life was nothing less than, well, human. Though she couldn’t find a way through the darkness in her life, her work stands as a guidepost always reminding me that poem and poet are inexorably bound, each filling the needs of the other.

ugh, that was kind of heavy. it only gets more so from here. In my estimation, there is one Sexton poem which stands apart from her collected body, Wanting to Die. As an undergrad, I had this stuck on the wall above my typewriter (that dates me, doesn’t it?).  I don’t think that I really got it back then, but looking back, this poem taught me that the practice of poetry demands an unbearable & uncomfortable nakedness… the kind of exposure that happens only between you & whatever force of creation you hold dear.

ok. that’s it. let’s go.

** Wanting to Die**

Since you ask, most days I cannot remember. I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage. Then the almost unnameable lust returns.

Even then I have nothing against life. I know well the grass blades you mention, the furniture you have placed under the sun.

But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.

Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy, have taken on his craft, his magic.

In this way, heavy and thoughtful, warmer than oil or water, I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.

I did not think of my body at needle point. Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone. Suicides have already betrayed the body.

Still-born, they don’t always die, but dazzled, they can’t forget a drug so sweet that even children would look on and smile.

To thrust all that life under your tongue!– that, all by itself, becomes a passion. Death’s a sad Bone; bruised, you’d say,

and yet she waits for me, year after year, to so delicately undo an old wound, to empty my breath from its bad prison.

Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet, raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon, leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,

leaving the page of the book carelessly open, something unsaid, the phone off the hook and the love, whatever it was, an infection.