Inside Out with Poet Anne Sexton

This note is long overdue. In fact, I find it embarrassing to admit just how many years have passed since I first intended to write about this. I began an essay a decade ago due to my love of the song in question, but it petered out without achieving much traction. I find that curious since the song that inspired me to write about this is well positioned within my top five most meaningful songs and is a clear example of why words hold such a power over me. But before wading into the heart of my purpose here, a quick digression is in order to describe a curious experience I had earlier this morning that provided the spark this note needed.

One its surface, I believe most people would consider it nothing more than an interesting curiosity, a synchronicity of two lines of thought, but little more than that. Yet in this particular case, the real curiosity wasn’t necessarily the symmetry of the two ideas, which I’ll explain in a minute, but the obsession it unleashed. In fact, when I step back and view my journal as a whole, which is approaching half a million words now, I see it as the byproduct of these obsessions, the insatiable need to satisfy my curiosities, and perhaps arrive at some understanding of the thing in question. In other words, I have an inexhaustible desire to “know thyself”, which for me requires writing. It is the desire to find the right words to capture the tumult of ideas when my mind catches fire. I spend the bulk of my free time, in fact, attempting to give voice to these obsessions. I don’t intend that to imply that as a conceit or to sound artificially deep in any way, but simply to explain why 500,000 words exist at all. Why would half a million words have spilled out of me otherwise?  

What I’m leading to occurred while having my morning coffee when I was attempting to post an entry on Instagram of a new painting I had just finished. Keep in mind that an Instagram post is not meant to be a Shakespearean display of candor and wit, yet the desire to find the right words is still a primary concern; it is going out to the public after all. But there was a problem. Just crafting a simple sentence was alluding me. I just couldn’t get my mind to orient. I would begin a thought, only to change my mind and delete it. Over and over, it went. I was simply wanting to describe the painting and what I’m up to, artistically, in two or three brief sentences and be done. But that simple premise was suddenly a real struggle. I eventually finished the post, but one sentence stood out that I want to make note of here. I wrote:

“The goal is always expression, of course, to take what I carry inside and find a way to make it outside”.

It’s this idea, that of taking “what is inside and making it outside’ that I want to flag, for it links up beautifully with my intent here, so stay with me.

After posting the message and sipping on my second cup of coffee, I decided to go through my backlog of journal notes in order to weed out a few redundant entries and false starts. But while rummaging through dozens of unfinished entries spread across a decade or more, a few stood out that I felt really needed to be completed. I even opened a few up with that intent, only to change my mind and close them again. Apparently, they weren’t THE note that fate had in store for me this morning because I soon came across an entry about Peter Gabriel’s “Mercy Street”, a note that that I had begun many years ago but never completed, and it immediately felt like a bullseye had been struck. But once I began reading it to get my bearings, I soon realized that the entire note had neglected the poem, and indeed the poet that inspired Gabriel in the first place.

Which brings me to Anne Sexton and the beginning of an obsession.

The path I traveled to discover her is likely the same well-worn path many other people of my generation took, which was through Gabriel’s “Mercy Street”, a stunning piece of lyrical songwriting in its own right. In fact, I consider it one of the most evocative tunes that my ears have ever experienced…but only if you know the back story.

Curiously, even with my admiration of Gabriel and this wonderful song, for many years I didn’t even know what it was about. Keep in mind that it was the mid 80’s so there were no computers, no internet, and therefore no Google search engine to satisfy my every curiosity. If an artist didn’t include their lyrics within the album art, you were left to decipher the words “in song”, which of course can lead to a multitude of dialectic sins, as happened with “Mercy Street”. In fact, I could have easily remained blissfully ignorant had it not been for a single misunderstood line that continually nagged at my sensibilities. In one of its verses, I thought Gabriel had sang:

Hey Mr. Botha

Wait until darkness comes

It was an easy mistake to make since Gabriel was an outspoken critic of the Apartheid government of South Africa at the time, so I assumed it was simply meant as an ominous reference to their racist President, P.W. Botha. But something continually nagged at me over the years. Within the context to the other lyrics that I could decipher, it just didn’t ring true. Gabriel’s poetry was far too moving in scope and sung with an empathy that made little sense if the song was an expression of political angst.

So, fast forward twenty-five years or more and finding myself in front of my computer and suddenly all the information that I could ever dream of just a click away, so I circled back to this song and that single misunderstood lyric and quickly discovered the reason for my confusion; the song was not at all about South African, nor P.W. Botha. Gabriel had actually written:

Let’s take the boat out

Wait until darkness comes

That revelation still didn’t clarify the song’s meaning, so I kept digging, and shortly discovered the song was Gabriel’s heart felt homage to Ann Sexton. Well, I had never heard of her so I continued to dig and finally came across an article that made me all too aware of her life…..and death.

She suffered from a severe case of Bi-Polar disorder for all of her adult life and was susceptible to acute mood swings and depression, even attempted suicide four times before succeeding on her fifth. During one of her early hospital stays, a prophetic doctor encouraged her to write out her thoughts as a therapeutic exercise, and to the surprise of everyone, what poured out of her was piercingly poetic.

She began writing in the late 50’s, during President Eisenhower’s America, a supposed utopia for puritan ideals, but much of her writing, fueled by her illness, was anything but puritan. The unnerving honesty she unleashed in verse would not have been a welcome voice for mainstream America families, but for those with a keen eye for literary talent, she was seen as a poetic jewel, even winning a Pulitzer Prize.

The poem that originally inspired Gabriel was her poem, “45 Mercy Street”, which was inspired by a dream. In fact, the poem reads like a direct narration from inside that dream, and it’s in that narration that we can glimpse the crippling desperation she struggled with. Throughout the poem, she appears to be searching for a safe haven, or “a harbor in the tempest”, to quote Bono, and offers up a variety of charming, and some not so charming, memories from childhood, either real or imagined, such as:

“Where did you go?
45 Mercy Street,
with great-grandmother
kneeling in her whale-bone corset
and praying gently but fiercely”

and

“I know the cupboard of Spode
the boat of ice, solid silver,
where the butter sits in neat squares
like strange giant’s teeth
on the big mahogany table.
I know it well.
Not there.”

From beginning to end, the poem clearly expresses Sexton’s desperate and frustrated search for an emotional anchor, a grounding point of home and family, one that may have never existed for her. It exposes a frantic attempt to find a link back to a time when she felt whole, which she distills down to a street address, “45 Mercy Street”, but it’s “not there”, which becomes the thread that binds the poem like a repeating mantra. In other words, we have the awkward pleasure of peering inside her illness, for the poem works as a snapshot, an unintended selfie, if you will, of her struggle for sanity.

While reading the actual poem, perhaps an hour after my earlier Instagram post, I came across a phrase she used in the poem, “Inside out” and it pierced me. Within the poem, the phrase was a clear reference to her illness spilling out into the world with the line, “and a husband, who has wiped off his eyes in order not to see my inside out.” The phrase matches, at least in concept, my own use of it earlier while attempting to explain why I paint. Our meanings and contexts certainly don’t align, to be sure, but they do overlap. We were both speaking in the same artistic vocabulary.

I find it fairly astonishing to consider how the whole scenario played out this morning; from the struggle to craft a simple sentence on the Instagram post that eventually produced the phrase. Then being intuitively led through a maze of journal notes before finally locking onto a particular entry about Gabriel’s “Mercy Street”, which then led me to search the web for Ann Sexton, and then to her poem, which then led me to the phrase that matched my own. Following all the unlikely twists and turns converging into a single phrase that we both shared was enough to put a ‘knowing’ smile on my face.  

So, for your reading pleasure, here is Ann’s poem.

45 Mercy Street

In my dream,
drilling into the marrow
of my entire bone,
my real dream,
I’m walking up and down Beacon Hill
searching for a street sign –
namely MERCY STREET.
Not there.

I try the Back Bay.
Not there.
Not there.
And yet I know the number.
45 Mercy Street.
I know the stained-glass window
of the foyer,
the three flights of the house
with its parquet floors.
I know the furniture and
mother, grandmother, great-grandmother,
the servants.
I know the cupboard of Spode
the boat of ice, solid silver,
where the butter sits in neat squares
like strange giant’s teeth
on the big mahogany table.
I know it well.
Not there.

Where did you go?
45 Mercy Street,
with great-grandmother
kneeling in her whale-bone corset
and praying gently but fiercely
to the wash basin,
at five A.M.
at noon
dozing in her wiggy rocker,
grandfather taking a nap in the pantry,
grandmother pushing the bell for the downstairs maid,
and Nana rocking Mother with an oversized flower
on her forehead to cover the curl
of when she was good and when she was…
And where she was begat
and in a generation
the third she will beget, me,
with the stranger’s seed blooming
into the flower called Horrid.

I walk in a yellow dress
and a white pocketbook stuffed with cigarettes,
enough pills, my wallet, my keys,
and being twenty-eight, or is it forty-five?
I walk. I walk.
I hold matches at street signs
for it is dark,
as dark as the leathery dead
and I have lost my green Ford,
my house in the suburbs,
two little kids
sucked up like pollen by the bee in me
and a husband
who has wiped off his eyes
in order not to see my inside out
and I am walking and looking
and this is no dream
just my oily life
where the people are alibis
and the street is unfindable for an
entire lifetime.

Pull the shades down –
I don’t care!
Bolt the door, mercy,
erase the number,
rip down the street sign,
what can it matter,
what can it matter to this cheapskate
who wants to own the past
that went out on a dead ship
and left me only with paper?

Not there.

I open my pocketbook,
as women do,
and fish swim back and forth
between the dollars and the lipstick.
I pick them out,
one by one
and throw them at the street signs,
and shoot my pocketbook
into the Charles River.
Next I pull the dream off
and slam into the cement wall
of the clumsy calendar
I live in,
my life,
and its hauled up
notebooks.