Live Or Die: Anne Sexton 一位不幸的詩人

Live Or Die: Anne Sexton 一位不幸的詩人

 

這個周末出遠門，閑來無事，喜歡去附近的舊書店走走。看到在放詩集的櫃子上的Anne Sexton的“Live Or Die”，薄薄的一本。隨手翻到Three Greenwindows:

Half awake in my Sunday nap

I see three green windows

in three different lights —

one west, one south, one east.

I have forgotten that old friends are dying.

I have forgotten that I grow middle aged.

At each window such rustling!

……

心裏突然感覺得到一樣小小的pain，一點點的悵然，一些些的Sadness。現在想起來一個準確一點的詞去描述就是一篇負能量的詩。

再翻到後麵的Man and Wife 更是覺得負能量滿滿的：

MAN AND WIFE

To speke of wo

      that is in mariage …

We are not lovers.

We do not even know each other.

We look alike

but we have nothing to say.

We are like pigeons …

that pair who came to the suburbs

by mistake,

forsaking Boston where they bumped

their small heads against a blind wall,

having worn out the fruit stalls in the North End,

the amethyst windows of Louisburg Square,

the seats on the Common

And the traffic that kept stamping

and stamping.

……

結尾處注意到寫作的時間是5/1963。

翻到最末的同詩集名的Live：

Live

Live or die, but don’t poison everything…

Well, death’s been here for a long time—

it has a hell of a lot

to do with hell

and suspicion of the eye

and the religious objects

and how I mourned them

when they were made obscene

by my dwarf-heart’s doodle.

The chief ingredient

is mutilation.

And mud, day after day,

mud like a ritual,

and the baby on the platter,

cooked but still human,

cooked also with little maggots,

sewn onto it maybe by somebody’s mother,

the damn bitch!

Even so,

I kept right on going on,

a sort of human statement,

lugging myself as if

I were a sawed-off body in the trunk, the steamer trunk..

……

WXC應該很多網友都知道Anne Saxton，但我對那個時間段的作家特別的不了解，回到旅館，上網查了一下：

Anne Sexton was born in Newton, Massachusetts and raised in Weston. The daughter of a successful businessman, Sexton’s childhood was materially comfortable but not happy. Her relationships with her parents were difficult, perhaps even abusive. Sexton’s closest confidante was her maiden great-aunt. She attended boarding school and after graduation enrolled in Garland Junior College for one year. Sexton later described Garland as a “finishing” school. At age 19, she married Alfred “Kayo” Sexton II. While Kayo was serving in Korea, Anne became a fashion model. In 1953, she gave birth to her first child and in 1955, her second. Sexton suffered from post-partum depression, and after the birth of her first daughter she suffered her first breakdown and was admitted to a neuropsychiatric hospital. Other institutionalizations followed. Sexton struggled with depression for the remainder of her life. She committed suicide at age 46.（https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/anne-sexton）

下麵是一段YouTube上她的訪問錄影：