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    Transformations: Poems
    Transformations: Poems
    Transformations: Poems
    Ebook131 pages1 hour

    Transformations: Poems

    By Anne Sexton, Kurt Vonnegut and Barbara Swan

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    Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Anne Sexton morphs classic fairy tales into dark critiques of the cultural myths underpinning modern society

    Anne Sexton breathes new life into sixteen age-old Brothers Grimm fairy tales, reimagining them as poems infused with contemporary references, feminist ideals, and morbid humor. Grounded by nods to the ordinary—a witch’s blood “began to boil up/like Coca-Cola” and Snow White’s bodice is “as tight as an Ace bandage”—Sexton brings the stories out of the realm of the fantastical and into the everyday world. Stripping away their magical sheen, she exposes the flawed notions of family, gender, and morality within the stories that continue to pervade our collective psyche.
     
    Sexton is especially critical of what follows these tales’ happily-ever-after endings, noting that Cinderella never has to face the mundane struggles of marriage and growing old, such as “diapers and dust,” “telling the same story twice,” or “getting a middle-aged spread,” and that after being awakened Sleeping Beauty would likely be plagued by insomnia, taking “knock-out drops” behind the prince’s back. Deconstructed into vivid, visceral, and often highly amusing poems, these fairy tales reflect themes that have long fascinated Sexton—the claustrophobic anxiety of domestic life, the limited role of women in society, and a psychological strife more dangerous than any wicked witch or poisoned apple.
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateApr 5, 2016
    ISBN9781504034357
    Transformations: Poems
    Author

    Anne Sexton

    Anne Sexton (1928–1974) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning American poet born in Newton, Massachusetts. She attended Garland Junior College for one year and briefly worked as a model. She married Alfred Muller Sexton II at age nineteen, and in 1953 gave birth to a daughter. Shortly after, she was diagnosed with postpartum depression. When Sexton attempted suicide after the birth of her second daughter, her doctor encouraged her to pursue her interest in writing poetry, and in the fall of 1957, she enrolled in a poetry workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education.   Like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, W. D. Snodgrass (who exerted a great influence on her work), and other Confessional poets, Sexton offers the reader an intimate view of the emotional anguish that characterized her life. The experience of being a woman was a central issue in her poetry, and though she endured criticism for bringing subjects such as menstruation, abortion, and drug addiction into her work, her skill as a poet transcended the controversy over her subject matter. Sexton’s poetry collections include To Bedlam and Part Way Back, All My Pretty Ones, Transformations, and Live or Die, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967. In 1974 at the age of forty-six, Sexton lost her battle with mental illness and committed suicide.

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    Reviews for Transformations

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    • 4/5
      poems: The Gold Key / Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs / The White Snake / Rumpelstiltskin / The Little Peasant / Godfather Death / Rapunzel / Iron Hans / Cinderella / One-Eye, Two-Eyes, Three-Eyes / The Wonderful Musician / Red Riding Hood / The Maiden Without Hands / The Twelve Dancing Princesses / The Frog Prince / Hansel and Gretel / Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)This collection contains Sexton's poetic reworkings of several unexpurgated Grimms' fairy tales. Allusions to 20th-Century life and culture, which might normally be jarring in the context of a fairy-tale retelling, actually work to show the timelessness of certain folkloric sensibilities. The poems tend toward the psychologically dark and sexual; Swan's illustrations, too, are very...vulviform. Before reading this book, my exposure to Sexton was pretty limited; I thought it made sense to start with subject matter that appeals to me (i.e., fairy tales).
    • 5/5
      For my taste this book of Sexton's is far and away her crowning achievent. Each poem retells a Grimm's fairy tale. They are tender, cruel, laugh-out-loud funny, political, feminist, and often so so clever.
    • 5/5
      Anne Sexton retells seventeen Grimm fair tales. Essentially, each story is the same, except they are not. Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger and wakes up 100 years later with a Prince's kiss. Red meets a wolf who cross dresses in her Grandmother's cloths and then gobbles her up, only to be released later by a passing hunter. And so on. What makes each retelling unique to Sexton are two things. First, each poem/tale is first introduced with a kind of preface, the author's poetic commentary that introduces the tale she's about to retell. Secondly, she uses modern flare to the metaphor used to describe and detail the tales. The thirteenth witch in "Birar Rose" (Sleeping Beauty) has "eyes burnt by cigarettes" and her "uterus is an empty tea cup". Snow White has "china-blue doll eyes" and Cinderella "walked around looking like Al Jolson."The lines are simple and clean, plain lines, like the original tales she's retelling, but reading them you find there's something more, as though you've just spotted something out of the corner of your eye while walking in the woods. It's wonderful, and I want to keep it always, so that I can come back to it again and again.
    • 5/5
      Brilliant, and, at times, erotic re-telling of standard fairy tales. You can't help but read them outloud. Sometimes funny or sad, often bawdy, very enjoyable and very highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      Haunting, funny, naughty, compassionate retelling of fairy tales...beautiful and deceptively simple.
    • 4/5
      I don't really know where to start with this collection of poetry by Anne Sexton. I liked it, but I'm not sure why or what to say about it. I'm a virtual poetry novice and don't really feel qualified to critique it. From the blurb on the back of the book, "The poems collected in this astonishing volume are reenactments, parodies, what Anne Sexton described as transformations, of seventeen Grimm fairy tales. . ." The first poem is The Gold Key. I've never heard of a fairy tale by this name, and I'm not sure if this is a retelling of a fairy tale or not. It almost seems to me as if this is an introductory poem by Sexton describing what she's going to do with the rest of the poems in the collection. See what you think.The Gold KeyThe speaker in this caseis a middle-aged witch, me --tangled on my two great arms,my face in a bookand my mouth wide,ready to tell you a story or two.I have come to remind you,all of you:Alice, Samuel, Kurt, Eleanor,Jane, Brian, Maryel,all of you draw near.Alice,at fifty-six do you remember?Do you remember when you were read to as a child?Samuel,at twenty-two have you forgotten?Forgotten the ten P.M. dreamswhere the wicked kingwent up in smoke?Are you comatose?Are you undersea?Attention, my dears,let me present to you this boy.He is sixteen and he wants some answers.He is each of us.I mean you.I mean me.It is not enough to read Hesseand drink clam chowderwe must know the answers.The boy has found a gold keyand he is looking for what it will open.This boy!Upon finding a nickelhe would look for a wallet.This boy!Upon finding a stringhe would look for a harp.Therefore he holds the key tightly.Its secrets whimperlike a dog in heat.He turns the key.Presto!It opens this book of odd taleswhich transform the Brothers Grimm.Transform?As if an enlarged paper clipcould be a piece of sculpture.(And it could.)I like the idea of the gold key as a metaphor, admitting the reader into new worlds through books and storytelling. Sexton transforms all of the most famous fairy tales, including Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel, and Little Red Riding Hood. She also includes some that are lesser known (at least to me), such as Iron Hans, The Maiden without Hands, The White Snake and others. For the most part, she begins each fairy tale with a poem about the fairy tale and then gives a version of the fairy tale. I apologize if that doesn't make much sense, but that's what she does. In many cases, these fairy tales are even darker than the original tales. Sexton also interjects much of her own feelings and life into the tales, as well. Sexton suffered from depression for most of her life and committed suicide in 1974 just seven years after winning the Pulitzer Prize. I read this book as part of The Year of Reading Dangerously, and I'm glad I did. Even though I haven't always been successful with my reading challenges, I'll keep joining them for this reason -- it forces me to read books that I would never have picked up otherwise. I really did enjoy this book of poetry even though I find it difficult to describe. However, after reading the foreword to this edition by Kurt Vonnegut I feel somewhat better about my lack of ability to describe these poems. He says, "How do I explain these poems? Not at all. I quit teaching in colleges because it seemed so criminal to explain works of art. The crisis in my teaching career came, in fact, when I faced an audience which expected me to explain Dubliners by James Joyce. I was game. I'd read the book. But when I opened my big mouth, no sounds came out." So, as you can see, I'm in good company.
    • 2/5
      I was expecting this collection of poetry inspired by fairy tales to be a little more abstract and to feature less direct retellings of the stories. It wasn't bad, but I didn't really love it either.
    • 5/5
      In this collection of poetry, Anne Sexton retells seventeen Grimm fairy tales.I adore fairy tale revisions. I gobble it up as fast as I can. I especially love revisions that are darker and more sensual than the original tales (although that’s hard to do; the original Grimm stories were pretty bleak stuff). Anne Sexton’s poems certainly fit that bill.She has a pattern. She usually starts each poem with a prologue about general life which then segues into the actual tale. Thus, in each poem, there are actually two stories: the frame and the tale-within-a-tale. It’s a clever use of meta narrative and works really well with the collection’s theme of fairy tales.Sexton’s language is tricky, sharp, and utterly memorable. She has such perfect metaphors that each one of them is a little masterpiece in and of itself. Her fairy tales are both a homage to the original Grimm versions but with a mixture of the modern and the personal. They bite, and that’s a good thing.Also worth mentioning is Kurt Vonnegut’s fantastic preface. He explains poetry better than I can.

    Book preview

    Transformations - Anne Sexton

    PUBLISHER’S NOTE

    Long before they were ever written down, poems were organized in lines. Since the invention of the printing press, readers have become increasingly conscious of looking at poems, rather than hearing them, but the function of the poetic line remains primarily sonic. Whether a poem is written in meter or in free verse, the lines introduce some kind of pattern into the ongoing syntax of the poem’s sentences; the lines make us experience those sentences differently. Reading a prose poem, we feel the strategic absence of line.

    But precisely because we’ve become so used to looking at poems, the function of line can be hard to describe. As James Longenbach writes in The Art of the Poetic Line, Line has no identity except in relation to other elements in the poem, especially the syntax of the poem’s sentences. It is not an abstract concept, and its qualities cannot be described generally or schematically. It cannot be associated reliably with the way we speak or breathe. Nor can its function be understood merely from its visual appearance on the page. Printed books altered our relationship to poetry by allowing us to see the lines more readily. What new challenges do electronic reading devices pose?

    In a printed book, the width of the page and the size of the type are fixed. Usually, because the page is wide enough and the type small enough, a line of poetry fits comfortably on the page: What you see is what you’re supposed to hear as a unit of sound. Sometimes, however, a long line may exceed the width of the page; the line continues, indented just below the beginning of the line. Readers of printed books have become accustomed to this convention, even if it may on some occasions seem ambiguous—particularly when some of the lines of a poem are already indented from the left-hand margin of the page.

    But unlike a printed book, which is stable, an ebook is a shape-shifter. Electronic type may be reflowed across a galaxy of applications and interfaces, across a variety of screens, from phone to tablet to computer. And because the reader of an ebook is empowered to change the size of the type, a poem’s original lineation may seem to be altered in many different ways. As the size of the type increases, the likelihood of any given line running over increases.

    Our typesetting standard for poetry is designed to register that when a line of poetry exceeds the width of the screen, the resulting run-over line should be indented, as it might be in a printed book. Take a look at John Ashbery’s Disclaimer as it appears in two different type sizes.

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    Each of these versions of the poem has the same number of lines: the number that Ashbery intended. But if you look at the second, third, and fifth lines of the second stanza in the right-hand version of Disclaimer, you’ll see the automatic indent; in the fifth line, for instance, the word ahead drops down and is indented. The automatic indent not only makes poems easier to read electronically; it also helps to retain the rhythmic shape of the line—the unit of sound—as the poet intended it. And to preserve the integrity of the line, words are never broken or hyphenated when the line must run over. Reading Disclaimer on the screen, you can be sure that the phrase you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn ahead is a complete line, while the phrase you pause before the little bridge, sight, and turn is not.

    Open Road has developed an electronic typesetting standard for poetry that ensures the clearest possible marking of both line breaks and stanza breaks, while at the same time handling the built-in function for resizing and reflowing text that all ereading devices possess. The first step is the appropriate semantic markup of the text, in which the formal elements distinguishing a poem, including lines, stanzas, and degrees of indentation, are tagged. Next, a style sheet that reads these tags must be designed, so that the formal elements of the poems are always displayed consistently. For instance, the style sheet reads the tags marking lines that the author himself has indented; should that indented line exceed the character capacity of a screen, the run-over part of the line will be indented further, and all such runovers will look the same. This combination of appropriate coding choices and style sheets makes it easy to display poems with complex indentations, no matter if the

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