Anne Sexton on Letting Out 'Some Extraordinary Animals'

Patricia Marx asks Anne Sexton what she means when she says, "The form is always important."

PM: Do you mean by form just the physical look of the poem?

Anne Sexton: Yes, sometimes, but also the sound. But I think of it as something you can hold. I think of it with my hands to begin with. I don’t know what the poem will be and I start out writing and it looks wrong. I start a long line and that looks wrong, and a short line, and I play around with rhyme, and then I sometimes make a kind of impossible syllabic count, and if I can get the first verse and it’s right, then I might keep on with that for four more verses, and then I might change it because I felt that it needed a new rhythm. It has as much to do with speech as it does with the way it will look on the page, because it will change speech—it’s a kind of compression. I used to describe it this way; that if you used form it was like letting a lot of wild animals out in the arena, but enclosing them in a cage, and you could let some extraordinary animals out if you had the right cage, and that cage would be form.

from “Interview with Anne Sexton” (1965)by Patricia Marx in Anne Sexton: The Artist and Her Critics edited by J.D. McClatchy (1978)

Anne Sexton seems to be saying that by using formal structure in poetry, the poet is liberated in terms of content. Sexton, at least, found form to be freeing instead of limiting. One way this might be characterized is that the form occupied the logical part of the brain, allowing the creative side to sneak out and go wild. --Keith Badowski

Friday Spontaneous Poem

From: Emery Campbell

Hike Eith,

Interesting. I once entered a similar sort of challenge contest in which one was to write a poem incorporating the following words:

exaggerate, wind, dirt, raisin, game, chicken, garlic, cream, chimney, and soda.

It could be any form but it had to make sense.

If you show me yours I'll show you mine (nudge, nudge, wink, wink...)

ELC

OK. Here it goes, Emery:

The Greatest Form of Flattery

Chimpanzees under attack exaggerate
their screams and the more cinematic ones wind
up channeling Tarzan. These exacerbate
quandaries of the immaterial mind.

‘Who’s imitating whom?’ stirs us to dig dirt
to crush clods in search of the golden raisin.
‘Well enough’ is never left alone. It hurts
to pray when answers are trapped inside resin.

A chimp would never booby trap the chimney,
bait Santa Claus with cookies and spiked soda.
Our vocal cords and thumbs have made us cagey,
plotting murders while prone in a pagoda.

The chimps have moved on to a banana game—
they wring the peels as if choking a chicken.
When bananas go extinct who will they blame?
Moot point when the baby chimps cry and sicken

while onlookers lunch on stir-fry with garlic
sauce and one of us humans orders up cream.
A sip of tea to go with man’s oft cyclic
icing up of ‘nice’ into a cube of ‘mean.’

Ever Heard of Tanka?

Nope, it's not a decaffeinated coffee!

Even if you have heard of “tanka,” you might not know that they are five line poems that are similar to haiku in that they conjure succinct moments with a bare minimum of words.

Those who are fond of rules might ask about the syllable count for such poems. In answer, I must first caution you that tanka is a Japanese form; so we’re talking quite a big language difference here between English and Japanese. For hardcore rule followers, let’s say 31 syllables per tanka with the lines divided into five syllabic units: 5-7-5-7-7. However, in English many writers of tanka use fewer than 31 syllables and don’t rigidly follow the line length pattern. In other words, don’t have a nervous breakdown if the syllable count doesn’t match the pattern described above. Simply put: chill out!

Recently I’ve been in love with a small anthology of tanka, entitled The Tanka Anthology edited by Michael McClintock, Pamela Miller Ness & Jim Kacain. The book is published by Red Moon Press.

As the introduction states, “In these poems, we may learn to pay attention in a different way, and receive our news of the world with unexpected delight.” For those who wish to delve deeper into the structure and craft of making tanka poems, the introduction offers a decent amount of detail. For me, the proof is in the poetry.

Here are few samples of some of my favorites:


my friends tell me
that they are breaking up
I stand at the sink
--rinse the cloudy rice over
and over again.

--Margaret Chula

this morning
the cold of your absence
a presence now
shall I dress it like scarecrows
standing in an empty field

--Marjorie Buettner

On the night train
through that foreign land
I waver once
glimpsing
a lit farm kitchen

--Marianne Bluger


Lit every night
the screened porch
remains unoccupied.
A stage prepared for actors.
The script in development.

--Keith Badowski

P.S. I’m not really included in the anthology, but I thought I’d slip in a tanka of my own just for the heck of it.