The poems in The Awful Rowing Toward God were written during a crisis time in Anne Sexton’s life, a period of great personal anguish and at the same time of intense, even manic creativity. There is no psychic distance between the poet and the poem; on the contrary, the poem is an almost tangible physical extension of the psyche, a kind of third hand or eye. Robert Motherwell said, in an essay on art, “there is a certain point on the curve of anguish where one encounters the comic.” So it is in these poems. They are all signed with her vivid imagery. Again and again we are tossed on the curve, saved, refreshed, by the satire, the self-mock, the comic inner lining of the macabre. Reticence forms no part of Sexton’s style, nor economy, nor brusque reason. The poem is a defense against isolation, against memories so terrible that they erode the senses to the edge of hallucination.
We were for eighteen years warm personal friends. During the late winter of 1973, while these poems were being constructed out of blood and sorrow and fury, I was living in Kentucky as writer-in-residence at Centre College. We had agreed before I left Boston to divide the long-distance telephone bill; further, we had agreed to talk on the reduced-rate side of the ledger, after five P.M. or before eight A.M. My rooms in Danville abutted a Baptist church with a dependable clock that pinged on the quarters and tolled the hours. And every afternoon at five, a concert of Baptist hymns. But just as the carillons embarked on their opening measure, the ringing of my phone would float up through those other bells, and we would talk across the early dark of a Boston winter into the twilight of a bluegrass one. For the most part, we dispensed with amenities of time and place quickly and got down to the professional business of the poems-mostly hers, for she was writing with the urgency of a fugitive one length ahead of the posse. As indeed she was.
One other fact. As is evident from her poetry, Anne Sexton was strongly attracted to, indeed sought vigorously a kind of absolutism in religion that was missing from the Protestantism of her inheritance. She wanted God as a sure thing, an Old Testament avenger admonishing his Chosen People, an authoritarian yet forgiving God decked out in sacrament and ceremony. Judaism and Catholicism each exerted a strong gravitational pull. Divine election, confession and absolution, the last rites, these were her longings. And then an elderly, sympathetic priest, one of many priests she encountered-accosted might be a better word-along the way, said a saving thing to her, said the magic and simple fact that kept her alive at least a year beyond her time, and made the awful rowing a possibility. “God is in your typewriter,” he told her. Thus she went to her typewriter and thus, according to your lights, she found, or invented Him.
First appeared in the American Poetry Review 4, no. 3 (May- June, 1975). Reprinted in To Make a Prairie, Essays on Poets, Poetry, and Country Living, The University of Michigan Press, 1979
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