The Blimp Photo Doesn't Go With the Post, I'm Just Thinking About Blimps Today

In an attempt to back-up all my Word files before my computer dies--a death that's slowly taking place beneath my fingertips--I started reading some old manuscripts I had started with poems I had forgotten about.

I look back at how I used to write and it was much more playful. I wrote poems about Ritz crackers and Jack Kerouac on Mt. Rushmore and really, I didn't seem to care what the subject was, I was only writing to fool around a bit.

Of course there are poems in these files that are quite unfinished (even though I thought they were done) and poems I reread trying to figure out what I was talking about. But I'm finding that there's a good number of them I still like and it seems they just got placed in the Goodwill box when I made room for new works. (The lamp wasn't broken, it just didn't fit in the living room anymore.) And so goes the life of my poems, placed in a box.

I have take 2 or 3 of these poems and added them to my current manuscript (a deed I'm not sure I will be happy about 2 months from now), but for a few days, I'm going to let them hang out with the new stuff, see if they can blend in with the new stuff, the stuff that in a few years I'll have placed in another box to make room for the next batch of new poems, the beauties I will want to share with the world--how we love our new babies the most.

Happy 95th Birthday, Nana & Anne Sexton to Page 101

My nana turns 95 today! Doesn't she look great?! My mum (the other lady in the photo) comes in at a young 72. My husband calls them "hearty French stock." I can only hope I'll look as good.

Happy Birthday, Nana!

___________
The Anne Report:

I'm a hundred pages into the Anne Sexton biography and the situation, her life, her history, is extreme & complex. A good friend of mine said a student in her class recently gave an oral presentation on Sexton. The student stood in front of the class and said, "Anne Sexton was crazy & hated her kids." Oh it life was only that black and white. No. It's not that simple. It's a gray area. From what I understand, Sexton seemed to be suffering from a bi-polar disorder along with post-partum depression. She had a terrible chemical imbalance. She wasn't crazy, she was in a manic state and needed medication.

I think we need to remember the time this took place. It started in the 50's and she ultimately killed herself (after numerous suicide attempts) in 1974. There wasn't as much help available for women as there is now. Yes, there was abuse that took place in regards to her daughters and things I have no tolerance for, but I find myself also seeing her as the abused child and the circle of abuse continuing because she never learned how to stop it or love herself.

How easy it is to say she was crazy, hated her kids, and "she wasn’t a poet, she was a housewife who used poetry as therapy." Wouldn’t it be simple if all our lives could fit into one sentence? It’s much to complex. Sexton was doing what many mothers today are trying to do—myself included—not lose herself. I can’t praise her for how she handled the situation, she is the exact opposite of me in so many ways and did things that I personally could never do, but I can see beyond the labels—crazy, abuser, sex-starved, adulteress, lunatic—and see her as someone who wanted desperately wanted to have a purpose and poetry gave that to her. It probably helped her keep her alive for as long as it did.