Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New Sensibility by Cotkin George;

Author:Cotkin, George; [Cotkin, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780190218478
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2015-10-19T00:00:00+00:00

The answer to the contested question of whose “need is more desperate” was won by Sexton. Her excesses, her need for love and tenderness exhausted most around her. She and Kayo divorced in 1973, and her daughters struggled for many years to understand and to avoid replicating the tortured life of their mother.

In September 1974 Sexton had reflected in a letter about her poetic style and legacy. She accepted the appellation “confessional” poet. She admitted, “I do not know how I feel about such an old poem as ‘Live.’ ” Such “poems stand for the moment they were written and make no promises to the future events and consciousness.”52 “So I say Live, Live because of the sun, the dream, the excitable gift.”53

Certainly, the upbeat tone that she had achieved in “Live” had vanished from her own consciousness by Friday, October 4. On that day she achieved her dream, with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of efficiency. She showed no especial warnings of suicidal depression, having lunched with her pal Kumin earlier in the day and spending time going over the galley sheets for a new poetry collection, The Awful Rowing Toward God. That evening, she went into her garage and settled into the bucket seat of her red Ford Mustang. She sipped from a vodka martini, turned on the ignition, and listened to music. Then, as the exhaust fumes engulfed her, one hopes, she finally found the peace she had long desired.54

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