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Today is Music Friday! That means continuing this quirky project of mine where I set canonical poetry to music. As mentioned previously, I use AI-generated voices and make the music myself in GarageBand.
Anne Sexton, in my view, has always been a bit overlooked as a poet, and I admire her work quite a bit. Maybe it’s her historical proximity to Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell that drowns out her volume a bit, but she truly does have her own frequency that stands as unique and is worth tuning in.
Here’s my favorite Anne Sexton poem, “Her Kind,” set to the the “witchiest” music I could find.
I hope you have a great weekend!
Because I came of age during the ascendency of Confessional Poetry, of course, I had to reject those whiney-display-all-your-wounds (real and imagined) head-cases and their sloppy free-verse baloney. You know, it was the agonistic thing to do: youth is required to reject their elders (Down with all Fathers and Mothers! Don't trust anyone older than you are!). And yet, as this poem demonstrates, the Confessional Poets weren't completely free-verse anti-formalists, so my antipathy was a little, perhaps . . . misplaced. Thanks for this: a marvelous poem, for sure. I just love the stanza she's created (or so I presume, as I don't recall seeing this form anywhere else).