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For many readers who have engaged Anne Sexton’s work, her play before the camera in photographs (both still and moving images) is inextricably linked to dynamics of woman’s looked-at-ness and to modes of confessional display. As Sexton’s fame has grown —in her era and in ours—her legacy in photographs has been treated a problem, an issue, an aspect of celebrity to be summarily dismissed (“exhibitionistic”) or selectively disavowed in the interest of a putatively more serious interest in a body of artistic work. This chapter presents an alternative, materially inspired reading of Sexton’s public authorial legend and the photographic references in her writing in which those two bodies—the lyric body and the photographed body—are less comfortably divisible.

“From the Podium to the Second Row” argues that Sexton’s readings deserve to be remembered as performance, at least in this more-than-theatrical sense, and (assured of this caveat) Sexton herself would have argued the point. Poetry readings, in turn, were “a reliving of the experience, that is, they are happening all over again” (No Evil Star 108). So, if what’s “happening” in performance is what’s “happening” in the poem—and if it’s hard to tell the difference between these and what’s happening in real life—well, this, for Sexton, was a mark of her performative success.

Anne Sexton continues to fascinate readers. Her career is in need of a reassessment that considers the wide range of materials in her archive, her influence on contemporary poetry, and directions for future scholarship. While there have been recent volumes analyzing the poetry of Sexton’s midcentury contemporaries, there have not been comparable considerations of Sexton’s poetry. Several collections of essays were published from the late seventies to the early nineties, but there has not been a book that fully engages the scope of Sexton’s creative and critical legacy. This introduction speaks to the ways that This Business of Words addresses these goals and draws new attention to the material dimensions of Sexton’s life and work.

“The Poet Has Collapsed” is a sober assessment of Sexton’s later work, specifically the poems written after those included in Transformations. It examines three areas of concern: first, the overuse of particular tropes in The Book of Folly, The Death Notebooks, The Awful Rowing Toward God, and 45 Mercy Street, second, the plethora of failed figurative language and images in those collections, and third, the performative aspect of Sexton’s reading style and public persona in the latter part of her life. It delves into Conway’s fascination with the recordings of Sexton reading her poems, as well as her larger-than-life persona. He explores his own mixed feelings for Sexton’s later work, describing what happens when profound admiration for the poet and the concept of “Bad Anne” collide.

Anne Sexton delivered her last public reading at Goucher College, Baltimore, MD, on October 1, 1974, three days before she took her own life. The high quality, eighty-minute long performance was recorded, but remained unknown until 2005. “Reading, Voice, and Performance” brings the last reading into conversation with some of the better known biographical aspects of Sexton’s last months and days—already familiar to readers of her obituaries and Diane Wood Middlebrook’s biography—as well as with other recordings (Caedmon (1974); Voice of the Poet (2000), etc.) and the work of scholars Derek Furr, Jo Gill, Christopher Grobe and J. D. McClatchy who have written on the nature of Sexton’s self-presentation and public persona(e).

‘“Two Sweet Ladies”: Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath’s Friendship and Mutual Influence’ explores the friendship between Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and their mutual influence on each other’s work. Poems, letters, and journal entries will be used to trace Sexton and Plath’s meeting in Robert Lowell’s poetry workshop at Boston University in 1959, Sexton’s influence on Plath’s Ariel poems, and conversely, Plath’s influence on Sexton’s poetry after her suicide.

Today, we may know confessional poetry as a set of texts that are printed in books, but in its time it was also a performance genre. This chapter demonstrates how the performance of poems—in the privacy of the poet’s study, at public poetry readings, and in the studios of recorded literature companies—shaped this genre, determined its tactics, and influenced its style. An extended comparison of Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg shows that breath was a key medium for confessional poets, and a study of Anne Sexton’s career—both on the page and at the podium—shows how she “breathed back” dead poems in live performance. Throughout, this chapter focuses on the feelings of embarrassment confessional poetry raised, and the uses to which poets could put such feelings. It also highlights contemporary trends in “performance” and their impact on confessional poets—e.g., Anne Sexton’s debt to the acting theories of Konstantin Stanislavsky and to Method acting as theorized by American director Lee Strasberg.

“Anne Sexton’s Institutional Voice” offers a critique and revisionary account of the breakthrough narrative, with Anne Sexton serving as its central example. If a crucial aspect of the breakthrough narrative is that the poet makes a radical turn away from “objective” content and towards autobiography, then Charles Altieri suggests a way in which we can both acknowledge the poet’s renewed interest in his own life and at the same time preserve the possibility that certain legacies of modernist and New Critical poetics might still condition his deployment of autobiography. Put another way, my contention here is that poets like Plath, Lowell, and Sexton continue, rather than reject, key aspects of the institutional forms of modernism that they inherit, but that they do so, often, by writing poems in which they are themselves both the subjects and the objects of institutional scrutiny.

Transformations brings together several currents of Anne Sexton’s themes and methods and can be read as both a masked autobiography and transitional or gateway work from her mid to late poetry. This chapter analyzes the voice and tone she conjures to create the persona of witch/crone/teller and closely looks at the kinds of metaphors and images she employs to create her distinctive dramas. It compares her retellings to the original Grimm texts and also looks at some of her earlier poems as precursors while considering how, in her hands, the tales turn into both theatrical performances and case studies.

With a mixture of talent, naiveté, and marketing smarts, Anne Sexton created lasting images of glamour, genius, insouciance, and self-destruction that defined the late-twentieth century woman, poet, and woman-poet. These images contributed to her success, but also made it difficult to assess her poetry, as shown by contemporary reviews of her work. “Are We Fake? Images of Anne Sexton, Twentieth-Century Woman/Poet” looks at how the images evolved and what pleasure and enlightenment we can gain from them now.

Anne Sexton’s book of poetry Live or Die would win her the Pulitzer Prize. It was a work in the confessional mode, dwelling on issues of madness, depression, and suicide—all exhibiting, however, poetic restraint, a modeling of material through artistic practice. Her life mingles in this chapter with her poetry, with both fitting the context of the madness and violence in American culture at this moment (as in the murder of nurses in Chicago by Richard Speck and the shooting in Austin by Charles Whitman) and the rise of a feminist consciousness, as indicated by Sexton’s appreciation for Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. For all of the sadness written into nearly every line of Sexton’s poetry, there is a hint of hope, especially in the poem “Live,” where the birth of Dalmatian puppies becomes a metaphor for keeping on with life, despite its vicissitudes.

“Anne Sexton and The Wild Animal” discusses the bestiary poems from Anne Sexton’s 45 Mercy Street in the context of the book as a whole. It also investigates the idea of a feral, metaphysical “I” in other American poets, including Sylvia Plath.

‘“The house/ of herself”: Reading Place and Space in the Poetry of Anne Sexton’ offers a reading of Anne Sexton’s poetry and prose (including short stories, unpublished lecture notes and correspondence) in light of its engagement with history and, more importantly, with historiography. The orthodox assumption that confessional poetry in general, and Sexton’s poetry in particular, has little or nothing to say about contemporary historical circumstances has been confounded of late by the work of a number of critics. This essay takes these revisionist readings of Sexton’s historical and political commitment as the starting point for a nuanced and theoretically inflected reading of her engagement not with history per se, but with historiography – or the ways in which the past has been read, understood and communicated over time.

When second-wave feminism spread across America in the 1970s, it left some women with an acute identity crisis. How did their new, liberated self relate to the one they had left behind? Comparing two performances from 1974—a reading by Anne Sexton of her poem “Self in 1958” and a performance art piece by Eleanor Antin called Eleanor of 1954—this essay shows how two women struggled to span the distance between their pre- and post-feminist selves. These performances (and many like them) questioned the promise of transformation held out by feminist consciousness raising. In consciousness-raising groups, women would confess the truth of their lives and, so they hoped, purge themselves of old pre-feminist identities. Artists like Sexton and Antin instead used art to fathom the gap (and the ongoing connection) between past and present, oppression and liberation.

Confessional performers may seem on intimate terms with their audience, but this relationship can often, in fact, be complicated or thorny. In part, this is because true intimacy is impossible under the circumstances. After all, for whatever reason, confessional performers have consistently relied on touring as a business model—each night, a new audience; each week, a new town. Exploring Sexton’s ambivalent relationship to her fans and Spalding Gray’s interactive theater piece Interviewing the Audience, this essay asks how confessional performers have constructed a public from the various audiences they encounter on their travels. This public, when it’s conjured, is defined by an ambivalent affect, which this essay names “broadcast intimacy.”