Anne Sexton Poems Unearthed

This just in! Several previously uncollected Anne Sexton poems are now available to read thanks to University of Idaho journal, Fugue. Houston Chronicle's Allyn West writes: "In 1956, as she struggled with the depression that would shadow her life, Anne Sexton's psychiatrist, Dr. Martin T. Orne, encouraged her to write poetry. Sexton, married and the mother of two young daughters, hadn't written in years." From there: 

But Dr. Orne thought it might help.

One year later, Sexton was composing vigorously. She had shown Dr. Orne as many as 60 poems and enrolled in a workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education. Two years later, some of her first poems were published. In 1960, her first book, "To Bedlam and Part Way Back," would be nominated for a National Book Award.

Nine more books would come, including "Live or Die," which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967, before her death in 1974. "The Complete Poems" would be published in 1981.

Today, Sexton is essential reading, part of the canon of American literature, admired as one of the best of the "confessional" poets, along with Robert Lowell, John Berryman and Sylvia Plath. "Of all the confessional poets," writes Maxine Kumin, who met Sexton in that workshop in Boston, none has "displayed her brilliance, her verve, her headlong metaphoric leaps." Sally Connolly, who teaches at the University of Houston, says, "She is the first voice of the second wave of confessionalism. Nobody picked it up and ran with it as unabashedly as Sexton."

But Sexton is not studied as widely or as obsessively as some of her contemporaries — especially Plath, to whom she is most often, if not always fairly, compared. In 2016, Zachary Turpin, then a graduate student in the English department at UH, was looking at a bibliography about Plath. The writer of "Ariel" and "The Bell Jar" has been examined at the "molecular level," Turpin says — there's even a biopic about her, portrayed by Gwyneth Paltrow — but he wondered about Sexton.

He logged into a digital archive and started searching. "You become accustomed to failure," he says. "I didn't expect there to be anything to find."

Playing with keywords, bylines, search terms and a range of dates, Turpin stumbled on four poems and a short essay that had been published in the Christian Science Monitor in 1958 and 1959. Interesting, he thought. He wasn't a Sexton scholar, so he showed them to a colleague and friend, Erin Singer, a graduate student in poetry at UH.

Read on at Houston Chronicle.