How Poet Anne Sexton And Painter Barbara Swan Reimagined Grimms’ Fairy Tales For the Feminist 1970s

“I was able to do something maybe wilder than I would have on my own,” the Boston artist Barbara Swan would say about her illustrations for Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston poet Anne Sexton’s 1971 book of poems inspired by the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.

In this book, “Transformations,” Sexton reimagines the old folk stories for the feminist 1970s. Her poems are observational and acid and witty. She begins with pointed interludes about society, then retells the fairy tales with contemporary references and snarky asides and probing “psychological relationships” (as Swan put it).

“Inside many of us / is a small old man / who wants to get out,” Sexton writes in “Rumpelstiltskin.” “He is a monster of despair. / He is all decay. / He speaks up as tiny as an earphone / with Truman’s asexual voice: / I am your dwarf. / I am the enemy within. / I am the boss of your dreams.”

Swan’s interpretations in scratchy pen accented with a bit of gray wash—featured in “Barbara Swan: Drawings for ‘Transformations’” at Boston’s Alpha Gallery through Feb. 28—are intimate and barbed and funny.

An old witch hugs the young Rapunzel, who she’s imprisoned (Sexton depicts them as lovers), close to her. (Pictured at top.) Red Riding Hood’s woodsman presses his ear to the grandmother-wolf’s belly to detect traces of the grandmother and girl swallowed inside. The Twelve Dancing Princesses sneak off for midnight revels in a composition that might suggest lady parts. Snow White and her queen stepmother rival each other in the magic mirror.

“Her stepmother / a beauty in her own right, / though eaten, of course, by age, / would hear of no beauty surpassing her own,” Sexton writes in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” “Beauty is a simple passion, / but, oh my friends, in the end / you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.”

“There’s a sort of dramatic theatrical sense of confrontation … in the Queen and little Snow White, between the aging beauty and the young beauty, and this is a universal theme,” Swan said in Smithsonian Archives of American Art oral history interviews in 1973 and ’74. “She sent me ‘Snow White’ and the minute I read it, I called her up and I says, oh, my God, Anne, I says, I love that poem, and I says I’ve got to tell you I identify with that poor old queen and Anne says so do I.”

Swan says in her drawing “you get the old queen and she’s—I put, you know, false eyelashes and she’s been to the hair dresser. She’s got every part going for her. On the other hand, to me, Snow White is terribly smug and complacent and all she’s got going for her is she’s so damn young, you know.”

Barbara Swan “Self-Portrait with Bottles and Envelopes,” 1982, oil on canvas. (Courtesy of Alpha Gallery)

Swan (1922-2003) was born in Newton. She studied art history at Wellesley College, then art-making at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts from 1943 to ’47. There she became steeped in the abject Boston Expressionism of Karl Zerbe, the head of the painting department (she was his teaching assistant during her fifth year), and other teachers there—the subjective views, the emotional color, the agitated brushwork, the warped realism, the continued interest exploring the psychology of people.

Many of Swan’s artworks from the 1940s and ‘50s were portraits of friends and family. She liked to begin with the eyes and work out. Unusual for the macho, male-dominated American art world of the time, she sometimes places you in a mother’s perspective—as in her 1956 painting “The Nest,” a self-portrait gazing down from above her head as she nurses her infant son.

During the 1960s, her style became cooler as she embarked on a long series of still-life paintings of tall cylindrical bottles filled with water, a classic painting subject to explore and toy with perception and realist rendering. She depicted the ways glass and water become lenses warping our vision of people, dolls, eggs,  striped fabric and pictures (Renaissance paintings, Edvard Munch, 19th century American scenes, magazines). She also seemed to contemplate women and sexuality in our society in charged still-lifes of naked dolls, old timey erotica and vintage gossip magazines that became surreal scenes when looked at through the warping lenses of her bottles in paintings like “Inner Life” (1977), “Blonde Hussy” (1986) and “Les Femmes” (1990).

Swan met Sexton (1928-1974) when they were both part of the first group of Bunting Fellows at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study (now the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study Harvard University) in Cambridge in the early 1960s. The idea seems to have been to foster collaboration between women in differing fields.

“She’s a confessional poet and we have this great rapport because we understand this gut thing between the human and the human condition,” Swan said in Smithsonian Archives of American Art oral history interviews in 1973 and ’74.

Their first collaboration may have been a poster or broadside built around Sexton’s poem “For The Year Of The Insane.”

“She has had a great deal of emotional trauma. She’s been institutionalized. She’s had breakdowns and this is all very much in her poetry,” Swan said. (Sexton would commit suicide in 1974.)

In the introduction to “Transformations,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote: Anne Sexton “domesticates my terror, examines it and describes it, teaches it some tricks that will amuse me, then lets it gallop wild in the forest once more,”

Swan said, “I make out fine collaborating with her because, you see, my work, if you look around, you know, there’s this kind of haunting sense of personal and tragic sense in some of my prints and—and the kind of human relationship which is full of a certain kind of haunting anguish. So when I moved into Anne’s world, I found that it was very—I was comfortable dealing with that kind of image.”

WONDERLAND

Anne Sexton / And one for my dame

 

and one for my dame

By Anne Sexton

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,

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.

Anne Sexton / The Witch's Life

Anne Sexton

THE WITCH’S LIFE

by Anne Sexton

When I was a child
there was an old woman in our neighborhood
whom we called The Witch.
All day she peered from her second story window
from behind the wrinkled curtains
and sometimes she would open the window
and yell: Get out of my life!
She had hair like kelp
and a voice like a boulder.

I think of her sometimes now
and wonder if I am becoming her.
My shoes turn up like a jester’s.
Clumps of my hair, as I write this,
curl up individually like toes.
I am shoveling the children out,
scoop after scoop.
Only my books anoint me,
and a few friends,
those who reach into my veins.
Maybe I am becoming a hermit,
opening the door for only
a few special animals?
Maybe my skull is too crowded
and it has no opening through which
to feed it soup?
Maybe I have plugged up my sockets
to keep the gods in?
Maybe, although my heart
is a kitten of butter,
I am blowing it up like a zeppelin.
Yes. It is the witch’s life,
climbing the primordial climb,
a dream within a dream, 
then sitting here
holding a basket of fire.

Anne Sexton / The Black Art

 

Anne Sexton

THE BLACK ART 

by Anne Sexton

A woman who writes feels too much,
those trances and portents!
As if cycles and children and islands
weren’t enough; as if mourners and gossips
and vegetables were never enough.
She thinks she can warn the stars.
A writer is essentially a spy.
Dear love, I am that girl.

A man who writes knows too much,
such spells and fetiches!
As if erections and congresses and products
weren’t enough; as if machines and galleons
and wars were never enough.
With used furniture he makes a tree.
A writer is essentially a crook.
Dear love, you are that man.

Never loving ourselves,
hating even our shoes and our hats,
we love each other, precious, precious.
Our hands are light blue and gentle.
Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.
But when we many,
the children leave in disgust.
There is too much food and no one left over
to eat up all the weird abundance.

Anne Sexton / Poetry

 

Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton

POETRY

Anne Sexton was born in Newton, Massachusetts and raised in Weston, Massachusetts. One of the most popular poets of mid-20th century America, Sexton’s impressive body of work continues to be widely read and debated by literary scholars and cultural critics alike. According to Diane Hume George, “Anne Sexton’s poetry tells stories that are immensely significant to mid-twentieth-century artistic and psychic life. Sexton understood her culture’s malaise through her own, and her skill enabled her to deploy metaphorical structures at once synthetic and analytic … Sexton explored the myths by and through which our culture lives and dies: the archetypal relationships among mothers and daughters, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, gods and humans, men and women. She perceived, and consistently patterned in the images of her art, the paradoxes deeply rooted in human behavior and motivation. Her poetry presents multiplicity and simplicity, duality and unity, the sacred and the profane, in ways that insist on their similarities—even, at times, their identity. In less abstract terms, Sexton made explicit the intimacy of forces persistently treated as opposites by the society she lived in.”

The daughter of a successful businessman, Sexton’s childhood was materially comfortable but not happy. Her relationships with her parents were difficult, perhaps even abusive. Sexton’s closest confidante was her maiden great-aunt. She attended boarding school and after graduation enrolled in Garland Junior College for one year. Sexton later described Garland as a “finishing” school. At age 19, she married Alfred “Kayo” Sexton II. While Kayo was serving in Korea, Anne became a fashion model. In 1953, she gave birth to her first child and in 1955, her second. Sexton suffered from post-partum depression, and after the birth of her first daughter she suffered her first breakdown and was admitted to a neuropsychiatric hospital. Other institutionalizations followed. Sexton struggled with depression for the remainder of her life. She committed suicide at age 46.

In treatment, her therapist encouraged her to write and in 1957 Sexton joined writing groups in Boston that eventually led her to friendships and relationships with the poets Maxine Kumin, Robert Lowell, George Starbuck, and Sylvia Plath. As Sexton told Beatrice Berg, her writing began, in fact, as therapy: “My analyst told me to write between our sessions about what I was feeling and thinking and dreaming.” Her analyst, impressed by her work, encouraged her to keep writing, and then, she told Berg, she saw (on television) “I. A. Richards [a poet and literary critic] describing the form of a sonnet and I thought maybe I could do that. Oh, I was turned on. I wrote two or three a day for about a year.” Eventually, Sexton’s poems about her psychiatric struggles were gathered in her first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), which recounts, as James Dickey wrote, the experiences “of madness and near-madness, of the pathetic, well-meaning, necessarily tentative and perilous attempts at cure, and of the patient’s slow coming back into the human associations and responsibilities which the old, previous self still demands.”

Sexton’s work is usually grouped with other Confessional poets such as Plath, Lowell, John Berryman, and W. D. Snodgrass. In an interview with Patricia Marx, Sexton discussed Snodgrass’s influence: “If anything influenced me it was W. D. Snodgrass’ Heart’s Needle. … It so changed me, and undoubtedly it must have influenced my poetry. At the same time everyone said, ‘You can’t write this way. It’s too personal; it’s confessional; you can’t write this, Anne,’ and everyone was discouraging me. But then I saw Snodgrass doing what I was doing, and it kind of gave me permission.” Sexton’s books after To Bedlam and Part Way Back included All my Pretty Ones (1962), Live or Die (1966), which won the Pulitzer Prize, Love Poems (1969), the play Mercy Street (1969). Transformations (1972), a series of retellings of Grimm’s fairy tales is often described as her least overtly “confessional” and most feminist work. Sexton’s last published collection was The Death Notebooks (1974); posthumously published volumes included The Awful Rowing toward God (1975), 45 Mercy Street (1976), and Words for Dr. Y: Uncollected Poems with Three Stories (1978).

Sexton’s work was enormously popular during her lifetime and she was the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Frost Fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, the Levinson Prize, the American Academy of Arts and Letters traveling fellowship, the Shelley Memorial Prize, and an invitation to give the Morris Gray reading at Harvard. She also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, grants from the Ford Foundation, honorary degrees, and held professorships at Colgate University and Boston University. Despite her many achievements, critical discussions of her work tended to focus on the apparently autobiographical elements of her verse. Dickey’s admonishment of Sexton’s second book was somewhat typical: “Miss Sexton’s work seems to me very little more than a kind of terribly serious and determinedly outspoken soap-opera.” Yet Sexton’s canniness about the power of fiction, the uses of fact and imagination, and the poem—or poet—as essentially performance mean that no simple equations between poet and poem, life and art, can be drawn. In an early essay on both Bedlam and Pretty Ones, Beverly Fields argued that Sexton’s poetry is mostly misread. She contended that the poems are not as autobiographical as they seem, that they are poems, not memoirs, and she went on to analyze many of them in depth in order to show the recurrent symbolic themes and poetic techniques that she felt make Sexton’s work impressive. Recent scholars such as Gillian White have focused on Sexton’s manipulation of voice and audience to suggest her work warrants more, or different, scrutiny than it has previously received.

One of Sexton’s earliest champions, Erica Jong, reviewing The Death Notebooks assessed Sexton’s poetic significance and contended that her artistry was seriously overlooked: “She is an important poet not only because of her courage in dealing with previously forbidden subjects, but because she can make the language sing. Of what does [her] artistry consist? Not just of her skill in writing traditional poems … But by artistry, I mean something more subtle than the ability to write formal poems. I mean the artist’s sense of where her inspiration lies …There are many poets of great talent who never take that talent anywhere … They write poems which any number of people might have written. When Anne Sexton is at the top of her form, she writes a poem which no one else could have written.”

POETRY

Pablo Neruda / For everybody

For everybody 

by Pablo Neruda
Translated by Jodey Bateman

Pablo Neruda / Para todos

I can't tell you quickly
What I ought to tell you,
Say man, pardon me, you'll know
That even though you don't listen to my words
I never took time off to weep or sleep
And that I've been with you when I couldn't see you
For a long time and I'll be there till the end.

I understand that many people are thinking,
"Say, what's Pablo doing?" I'm here.
If you look for me on this street
You'll find me with my violin
Ready to sing
And to die.

It's nobody's problem
Not for them, nor for you,
And if you listen well, in the rain,
You will be able to hear
That I come back and go away and stay.
And you'll know when I must leave.

If my words aren't heard
Don't doubt that I'm the one I was.
There is no silence that doesn't end.
When the moment arrives, wait for me,
And let everyone know that I'm coming
To the street, with my violin.

From Plenos Poderes / Fully Empowered (1962)

Pablo Neruda / To wash a child

To wash a child

by Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda / Para lavar a un niño

Only the most ancient love on earth
will wash and comb the statue of the children,
straighten the feet and knees.
The water rises, the soap slithers,
and the pure body comes up to breathe
the air of flowers and motherhood.

Oh, the sharp watchfulness,
the sweet deception,
the lukewarm struggle!

Now the hair is a tangled
pelt criscrossed by charcoal,
by sawdust and oil,
soot, wiring, crabs,
until love, in its patience,
sets up buckets and sponges,
combs and towels,
and, out of scrubbing and combing, amber,
primal scrupulousness, jasmines,
has emerged the child, newer still,
running from the mother's arms
to clamber again on its cyclone,
go looking for mud, oil, urine and ink,
hurt itself, roll about on the stones.
Thurs, newly washed, the child springs into life,
for later, it will have time for nothing more
than keeping clean, but with the life lacking.

From Plenos Poderes / Fully Empowered (1962)

Pablo Neruda / Water

WATER

by Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda / Agua

Everything on the earth bristled, the bramble
pricked and the green thread
nibbled away, the petal fell, falling
until the only flower was the falling itself.
Water is another matter,
has no direction but its own bright grace,
runs through all imaginable colors,
takes limpid lessons
from stone,
and in those functionings plays out
the unrealized ambitions of the foam.

From Plenos Poderes / Fully Empowered (1962)

Fracture by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

 

Fracture

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

West Africa, c. 15th century to 19th century

The men arrive. Slave ships are anchored.
The men arrive. The traders gather.
The men arrive. The traders march.
The men arrive. The war is waged.
The men arrive. The fire comes.
The men arrive. The people run.
The men arrive. The chase begins.
The men arrive. The dead abandoned.
The men arrive. The iron sounds.
The men arrive. The people march.
The men arrive. The sea. The sea.
The men arrive. The traders haggle.
The men arrive. The silver laughs.
The men arrive. The castle groans.
The men arrive. The door opens.
The men arrive. The water welcomes.
The men arrive. The mourning longs.
The men arrive. Our names shall scatter.

 

Beyoncé

'Beyoncé is not a woman to be messed with' – Lemonade review

Beyoncé’s imperious sixth album sees her turn her attention to her marriage, with witheringly powerful results

Alexis Petridis

Mon 25 Apr 2016 14.46 BST

D

ishearteningly billed as “a conceptual project based on every woman’s journey of self knowledge and healing” – a description that makes it sound like something agonisingly earnest you’d go out of your way to avoid at the Edinburgh Fringe – Beyoncé’s sixth solo album touches on a lot of potent topics. Quite aside from the presence of her much-discussed single Formation, a meditation on race that originally appeared in the middle of Black History Month, there are lyrical references to slavery, rioting and Malcolm X and a ferocious guest appearance by Kendrick Lamar that jabs at Fox News and police brutality and ends with something approaching a call to arms.

In an era when pop doesn’t tend to say a great deal, there’s obviously something hugely cheering about an artist of Beyonce’s stature doing this: she increasingly seems to view her success and celebrity as a means to an end rather than something to be maintained at all costs. Nevertheless, Lemonade is an album less about politics than something more personal. It’s more preoccupied with the state of her marriage than it the state of the world, overshadowed by her husband Jay Z’s alleged infidelity. If you want to compare her to an old soul legend, it’s more Here, My Dear than What’s Going On: for all its brilliance, Formation feels oddly tacked-on at album’s end, arriving after All Night, a track that sounds remarkably like a grand finale.

Given the amount of lurid media speculation about the Knowles-Carter union, you could have reasonably expected Beyonce to step discreetly around the subject of what you might call Hova’s legova, for fear of giving the gossip mags further fuel: perhaps a knowing allusion here and there, the odd bitter reference to the press intruding on her personal life. But no: in the film that accompanies the album, premiered last night on HBO, she does everything to express her displeasure at her husband’s behaviour short of appearing holding aloft a pair of scissors in one hand and Jay Z’s severed testicles in the other.

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She’s seen tearfully committing suicide, smashing things up with a baseball bat, destroying cars by driving over them in a monster truck and throwing her wedding ring at the camera, as well as reciting the alarmingly visceral poetry of Warsan Shire – best known as the author of that oft-quoted line about how no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark – much of which sounds less like the words you usually hear issuing from an R&B divas mouth than something the late Richey Edwards would have come up with around the time the Manic Street Preachers made The Holy Bible: “till the blood spills in and out of uterus, wakes up smelling of zinc, grief sedated by orgasm”.

The album itself is no less bracing in its approach than the film. “Suck on my balls, I’ve had enough,” she sings on Sorry, shortly before threatening to leave and take their daughter with her. “Big homie better grow up”, she adds, a direct allusion to the title that Jay Z gave himself during his guest appearance on her 2003 single Crazy in Love. The music, too, slowly works itself up into a righteous frenzy of anger, shifting from the becalmed misery of opener Pray You Catch Me via via the sparse simmer of Hold Up – which rather wittily borrows its chorus from the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s paean to undying devotion, Maps, and its hook from Andy Williams’ Can’t Get Used To Losing You – before finally boiling over on the fantastic Don’t Hurt Yourself: a ferocious, distorted vocal as commanding as anything she’s recorded, wrapped around samples from Led Zeppelin’s When the Levee Breaks and a guest appearance from Jack White. Indeed, without wishing to encourage someone towards the divorce courts, she’s so good at the hell-hath-no-fury stuff that it’s almost disappointing when the mood eventually lightens and she declares everything well in her marriage once more.

Not everything here works as well as that, or the weird, affecting mixture of defiance and vulnerability found on 6 Inch, a track on which she slurs and snarls about how rich, hard-working and desirable she is over ominous electronics, before her voice appears to crack as sings “come back, come back, come back”. Daddy Lessons’ curious blend of New Orleans jazz and country sounds uncomfortably like pastiche, while there’s something of a lull at the centre of the album, ironically the moment where the mood changes from bitterness and fury to something more forgiving and redemptive. The piano ballad Sandcastles isn’t a bad song as such, and it boasts a startlingly raw vocal that occasionally threatens to turn into a distraught howl, but it sounds a bit commonplace compared to what’s going on around it, not least the flatly astonishing Freedom, a dense swirl of sound containing everything from old Alan Lomax field recordings to 60s psychedelia from Mexico.

On Freedom, and indeed for much of Lemonade, Beyonce sounds genuinely imperious. She’s obviously not the only major pop star willing to experiment and push at the boundaries of her sound: that’s clearly what Rihanna and Kanye West were attempting to do on Anti and The Life of Pablo respectively. The difference is that those albums were at best a bold and intriguing mess: the sense that the artists behind them were having trouble marshalling their ideas was hard to escape. Lemonade, however, feels like a success, made by someone very much in control. “This is your final warning,” she scowls on Don’t Hurt Yourself, “if you try this shit again, you lose your wife.” You rather get the feeling Jay Z should heed those words: on Lemonade, Beyonce sounds very much like a woman not to be messed with.

THE GUARDIAN