Celebrating the Uterus with Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton [Pinterest]
Picking up Anne Sexton’s collection of poems at the Tropismes in Brussels, completely by chance, it took only a quick glance over to know that I’ve found my new narrator.
The poems were impossibly sharp, infused with a bold, almost naturalistic honesty. They may have been written in mid-century suburban America but if someone had told me they were written today, in my local context, I’d believe them.
Although she rejected the term “confessional poet”, Anne invited the reader into her home, her mind, her body. Having been hospitalised with mental health disorders from a young age, she has been documenting her mercurial states, fears and thought patterns, often hiding behind the guise of poetic fiction. A large part of what we know about her is through years of recorded therapy sessions (made available posthumously by her daughter for biographical use). It’s the therapist who encouraged her to pick up the pen and share her struggles with mental illness, in order to help others.
And share she did. The material was shocking for many audiences of the time - unused to hearing such descriptive accounts of the mind and female sexuality, especially from a middle-class suburban housewife. She pondered her mental health, sex, attraction, drug use, abortion and, extensively, her troubled relationship to motherhood. Gender and age have played a big role, most notably in the Pulitzer Prize-winning poem Menstruating at 40 (Live or Die, 1966) - which would’ve been incredibly apt to include in this series.
However, it’s In Celebration of My Uterus from Love Poems (1969) that I’d like to share here. It’s an uncharacteristically hopeful ode to the female organ, written after refusing to undergo a hysterectomy. Sexton speaks movingly to the universally shared experience of womanhood and its many embodiments, thus reflecting back to the Self. The poem seems like a moment of lightness and clarity in an otherwise deeply troubled life.
Here it is, for your reading pleasure.
In Celebration of My Uterus
(from Love Poems [1969])
Everyone in me is a bird.
I am beating all my wings.
They wanted to cut you out
but they will not.
They said you are immeasurably empty
but you are not.
They said you were sick unto dying
but they were wrong.
You are singing like a school girl.
You are not torn.
Sweet weight,
in celebration of the woman I am
and of the soul of the woman I am
and of the central creature and its delight
I sing for you. I dare to live.
Hello spirit. Hello, cup.
Fasten, cover. Cover that does contain.
Hello to the soil of the fields.
Welcome, roots.
Each cell has a life.
There is enough here to please a nation.
It is enough that the populace owns these goods.
Any person, any commonwealth would say of it,
"It is good this year that we may plant again
and think forward to the harvest.
A blight had been forecast and has been cast out."
Many women are singing together of this:
one is in a shoe factory cursing the machine,
one is at the aquarium tending a seal,
one is dull at the wheel of her Ford,
one is at the toll gate collecting,
one is tying the cord of a calf in Arizona,
one is straddling a cello in Russia,
one is shifting pots on a stove in Egypt,
one is painting her bedroom walls moon color,
one is dying but remembering a breakfast,
one is stretching on her mat in Thailand,
one is wiping the ass of her child,
one is staring out the window of a train
in the middle of Wyoming and one is
anywhere and some are everywhere and all
seem to be singing, although some can not
sing a note.
Sweet weight,
in celebration of the woman I am
let me carry a ten-foot scarf,
let me drum for the nineteen-year-olds,
let me carry bowls for the offering
(if that is my part).
Let me study the cardiovascular tissue,
let me examine the angular distance of meteors,
let me suck on the stems of flowers
(if that is my part).
Let me make certain tribal figures
(if that is my part).
For this thing the body needs
let me sing
for the supper,
for the kissing,
for the correct
yes.
