I’ve never read any Anne Sexton; all I know is that she’s the über-Confessional poet and that she killed herself. Someone once said I look like her; I wouldn’t know.

I should say, rather, that I had never read Anne Sexton — now, I suppose, I have. Somehow I came across her poem “Sylvia’s Death” online the other day. (And, by the way, irritatingly, there are several versions online that print “rasing potatoes” when “raising potatoes” is surely correct: the version in Chadwyck-Healey’s database Twentieth-Century American Poetry has “raising,” and it takes its text from the 1981 Houghton-Mifflin edition of Sexton’s Complete Poems, so I’m going with the sane spelling.) Basically, of “Sylvia’s Death,” I thought, “Lame.” What annoyed me was that all the poem seems to do is give prosaic details in a tone that reminds me of the mockeries of evangelists that all the comedians seem to do. I did like the last three ecphonetic lines:

O tiny mother,
you too!
O funny duchess!
O blonde thing!

That got me to thinking about Auden’s famous elegy for Yeats, which is the opposite of lame. Fleet. It’s fleet. And especially the line that I misremembered as “The instruments we have agree / The day of his death was a dark, cold day.” Turns out it’s “What instruments we have agree / The day of his death was a dark cold day.” Okay, how much totally better is that “What” than the “the”? All kinds of avoirdupois of much totally better, that’s how much totally better. And ballsy, that omission of the comma between “dark” and “cold.” I never do that.

Auden, faced with the task of writing an elegy for Yeats, knows he’s up against a mammoth task, an impossible task. A really bad poet would just go ahead and commit the seductive pathetic fallacy without being aware that that’s what he was doing; a good poet would know to avoid or temper it; Auden comes out swinging with a pathetic certainty, a whole set of pathetic data:

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

That “what” does such an economical job of suggesting that the instruments we have are maybe not the best instruments, the most expensive, bleeding-edge, accurate to a millisecond instruments. We’ve lost the best one, maybe. Maybe our best instrument just died. Yeats, Auden suggests submergedly, was our best instrument. He would have known better than to commit the freshman solecism of starting a horror story with “It was a dark and stormy night” or of being so narcissistic on behalf of the human race as to think that the death of a great man matters to the weather or vice versa. This start to the poem is lovely because it’s funny. Auden pays homage to the poet Yeats by ever-so-subtly mocking the poet Auden. Like any poor miserable bastard, Auden’s going to start grumbling at the lateness of the newspaper and the crappiness of the weather and the rudeness of the clerk and the unfairness of the death of Yeats and the inability of the city to get the streets properly plowed. They always push the snow up in huge banks on the side of the road so that everyone has to dig their car out from eight times as much snow as actually fell. It all feels like a plot, a conspiracy to outrage, some days. It’s all connected, feels the irrational man. (And isn’t “irrational man” a tautology?)

Not coincidentally, this is also the poem with the famous lines

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper,….

I usually see that sentence “poetry makes nothing happen” debated a little defensively in articles and books, as though it’s an insult. Plenty of people want to assert that poetry does TOO make things happen. But you know what? A place where executives would never want to tamper is a place I am just dying to be. And if a poet is like a thermometer, well, thermometers make nothing happen either. They just tell you what is happening, is all.

My dissertation is a history of the villanelle, the 19-line alternating-refrain two-rhyme poetic form best known as the form of Dylan Thomas’s 1951 “Do not go gentle into that good night” and Elizabeth Bishop’s 1976 “One Art.” I’m not sure I ever say this explicitly in the dissertation, but I think that one reason contemporary poets have started writing in tight fixed forms like the villanelle is that these forms are a metaphor for life in the modern age. Ensconced as I am in higher education with its proliferating policies and politics, and with anyone’s ordinary experience of things like Comcast customer service agreements and bank loan application procedures and state emissions inspection sticker requirements, I feel rule-bound pretty much all the time. The main skill an adult needs in contemporary America seems to be an ability to pick one’s way through all these separate stern commandments and their accompanying paperwork and due dates. Writing something “strict” and “complicated” like a villanelle feels very natural — feels to me just like trying to exist in the strict and complicated world. The elusive trick is to say something human and graceful and crucial and true anyway.

Poets who hate strict forms like the villanelle also hate the complicated strictures of modernity, so, in their poetry, they just opt to be free of such things. And why not? It’s certainly true that when I write a villanelle, I choose to constrain myself. Why should I choose to, if what I really want to do is be human and free and so on, without stricture? Well, the fact is, I chose to sign up for Comcast internet; I applied for that bank loan; I bought a car. It’s not as though those constraints weren’t also chosen.

Anyway, those are relatively old thoughts. I thought them when I was writing poetry and when I was writing my dissertation: to choose and stick to the form A’bA” abA’ abA” abA’ abA” abA’A” is a lot like choosing and sticking to the requirements of my PhD program, for instance, in which I needed to take four courses in my chosen literary period and two courses each in contiguous periods, plus certain specified courses, plus pass a foreign-language exam, plus write a dissertation, which had to be printed double-spaced on 8.5″ by 11″ acid-free watermarked paper with citations in MLA style.

What occurred to me the other day is that right now I need to lean more on the modern life part of the equation than the villanelle part: the villanelle is like modern life, sure, and with work and attention I know how to write a good one. But at the moment I’m so hemmed in by what seem to me to be horribly excessive requirements, requirements hooked onto something that I absolutely chose, opted in to, made happen through my own will — which of COURSE makes it worse, not better — that what I really need to do is bring some of those villanelle-writing skills to bear on my life as it is right now. Accept the chosen constraints (for now) and make what I can of them, despite them or even from them.