The New Yorker and Deborah Landau Revisit Anne Sexton

At the New Yorker, listen to the latest installment of the magazine's poetry podcast, hosted by poetry editor Kevin Young, featuring Deborah Landau, who reads poetry by Anne Sexton in addition to a few of her own verses. The transcript's introduction begins: "Deborah Landau joins Kevin Young to read and discuss Anne Sexton’s poem 'Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman' and her own poem 'Solitaire.'" Picking up from there: 

Kevin Young: [00:00:04] Hello. You’re listening to the New Yorker poetry podcast. I’m Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorkermagazine. On this program, we invite poets to select a poem from the New Yorker archive to read and discuss, along with a poem of their own that’s been published in the magazine. My guest today is Deborah Landau, author of “The Uses of the Body” and “The Last Usable Hour,” both Lannan Literary Selections. She’s received a Guggenheim Fellowship and Robert Dana and Anhinga Prize for Poetry, and she directs the creative-writing program at New York University. Welcome, Deborah.

Deborah Landau: [00:00:38] Thanks so much.

Kevin Young: [00:00:39] Thanks for joining us today. So the poem you've chosen from the archive is "Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman," by Anne Sexton. Can you tell us why this particular poem stood out to you.

Deborah Landau: [00:00:50] Well for several reasons but I'll start by saying that it would have been Sexton's ninetieth birthday this month and I thought it would be nice to read this in her honor.

Kevin Young: [00:01:01] Let's hear it and we can talk after.

Deborah Landau: [00:01:05] ["Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman," by Anne Sexton.].

Kevin Young: [00:04:49] That was "Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman," by Anne Sexton which appeared in the August 7th 1965 issue of the magazine. It was great to hear that aloud and read it so well.

Deborah Landau: [00:05:02] Thank you.

Kevin Young: [00:05:02] I Wonder what strikes you about it. hearing It again.

[00:05:04] Well there are a couple of reasons why I chose this poem and why I've been thinking about it so much. First of all Sexton was super important to me growing up my mother gave me a book of her love poems at age 13 and it was a heady book for a 13 year old and I couldn't believe that you could do these things in poems. And I started reading and writing sort of passionately after that. And then when I looked back to the archive of which poems The New Yorker had published I love this poem because, well for several reasons but especially because Sexton read it as her anti-war poem it was her version of a of an anti-war home she'd read it at the Vietnam protest rallies while other poets were reading these poems about napalm babies or whatever you know. Her idea was the celebratory love poem to her daughter and I loved the idea of love as a form of resistance or joy as a form of resistance as Toi Dericotte has said.

Listen to their complete conversation at the New Yorker.