A Willing Apprentice

How My Mother’s Pulitzer Prize Exploded Into Our Family’s Kitchen

Once again it’s April and National Poetry Month. The following quotation, written by Franz Kafka, describes with precision what over-the-top poetry can achieve: books should “affect us like a disaster, grieve us deeply like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. It should serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us.”

Being the daughter of a mother who committed suicide more than a half century ago, as well being as the mother of a son who committed suicide two and a half years back, makes this quotation particularly meaningful to me. It reflects what Kafka aimed for as he created similes that stimulated the emotions both poetry and fiction have brought home to us, those which captured precisely what he was aiming for: “an axe for the frozen sea within us.”

Established by The Academy of American Poets, the month which celebrates this absorbing genre is April and here we are now, nearly at the end and with spring coming on hard behind us. Naturally, to have had a mother who was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet makes me more than a little interested; here are thirty days which, to my surprise, have been omitted from our list of Federal holidays—any one of which could have been declared to be a little time off for many citizens to read, relax and revel in poetry.

After all, such a dedication would ensure that we have the opportunity to plunge ourselves—for both those of us who are poets ourselves, as well as those who are simply passionate admirers—into a few hours whiling away with a book or poetry journal. Many say that they find this genre difficult to understand, but once they grapple with its form, they are rewarded with an enlightenment that is rich.

National Poetry Month also returns me to the aura of my adolescence. I grew up in a home stacked with books on shelves in virtually every room. Many of them were filled with volumes of poetry, but also with a great deal of fiction, biography and philosophy. Taped on the bottom shelf above my mother’s desk were rectangular scraps of paper on which she had typed, or scrawled by hand, a small excerpt from a writer she admired—one who had moved her enough to single out his or her work in this way. I first encountered the Kafka excerpt above when she taped it up beside the ten or so others fluttering there. And when I loved it, she grew generous: once my imagination had been seized by The Metamorphosis, she lent me her copy of The Trial.

When I was young, my mother frequently read out loud to me. The first book I would remember well was a worn blue volume of Grimm’s fairy tales—full of its macabre horrors—with its spine nearly broken. As I reached the years wherein childhood bloomed into adolescence, she drove me to the public library, where I spent innumerable hours with novels and the biographies of famous women. I did not recognize how much of a famous woman my own mother was already becoming, or perhaps I did, on an unconscious level. On one jaunt to The Hathaway House Bookshop, the local bookstore in the neighboring suburb of Wellesley, Massachusetts, she told me magnanimously that there was always money for books—no matter how strapped we were—and bought me every one for which I asked.

In the early 1960’s—quite quickly—she was becoming well-known in the world of “confessional poetry.” As the early years of the decade passed, she was read more and more often by the many who identified with her candid poems about love and loss, sex, death, mental illness, suicide, and more. She was fulfilling the goals Kafka had set out for writers and readers when he proclaimed that “we ought to read only the kinds of books that wound or stab us.”

By the mid-sixties, I could see that my mother was revered in poetry circles; she was aiming for the sky and it looked as if she had taken off successfully—awards, travelling fellowships, a popular candidate for reading performances. Because I adored her, I adored her poetry as well, and from an early age. One of the best “vacations” I could imagine was fulfilled when she took me with her on one of her “reading tours,” even though I was only eleven. On a typical swing through the colleges of the South, she required that I assume a lot of responsibilities—from not losing the airline tickets to making sure she got to bed before she was too drunk. Despite these caretaking burdens, we had quite a time of it. How thrilling it was to be included in circles of adults who were talking poetry while drinking cocktails!

The explosion of my mother’s Pulitzer Prize into our lives did not occur until the spring of 1967, when I was only fourteen. Today, I am seventy-one, and I sit here writing this essay on April 26, 2025. I walk from my desk into the family room, to the wall on which I have hung the framed certificate which leads into the kitchen—where no one can fail to see it. On heavy cream-colored parchment, and in a delicate archival typeface, it broadcasts the news that Anne Sexton was awarded the Pulitzer Prize on May 1, 1967, by The Trustees of Columbia University.

The word had come to us via a phone conversation with the chairman of the panel that had selected Live or Die as the pick for the year 1966. How well I remember that afternoon, which must have occurred sometime mid or late April of the following year. After she spoke with the chairman, she danced around the kitchen, hooting on the top of her lungs, elated beyond measure. What a way that would have been to celebrate National Poetry Month!

However, National Poetry Month was not established until a decade later, on April 1, 1996. President Bill Clinton then issued a proclamation declaring that: “National Poetry Month offers us a welcome opportunity to celebrate not only the unsurpassed body of literature produced by our poets in the past, but also the vitality and diversity of voices reflected in the works of today's American poetry….Their creativity and wealth of language enrich our culture and inspire a new generation of Americans to learn the power of reading and writing at its best." Clinton also hosted a gala at the White House during National Poetry Month, featuring Poets Laureate Robert Pinsky, Robert Hass, and Rita Dove. In 2001, the Academy of American Poets, which initiated the celebration, invited the public to vote for poets they wished to see featured on a postage stamp. What a celebration!

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When I turned eleven, my mother invited me into her study. There, she asked me what I thought of various of her poems, respecting my opinion and, after a time, playfully dubbing me her “greatest critic.” In 1970, the two of us worked together on her book Transformations, which was published in 1971. I was the sidekick who got to choose most of the Grimm’s fairy tales on which she would base the poems, and then to help her revise them, along with her Poet Pal, Maxine Kumin.

However, the poetry in this book was different than her usual, and Houghton Mifflin considered it far afield from the treatment she usually employed, where highly personal experiences constituted most of her subjects. Despite that dubious reaction from her editor, she forged ahead and insisted that the company publish it. She was powerful enough by then to insist and win. In the end, taking the fairy tales of my youth and reinterpreting them in a deep but humorous manner was an enormous success—it became one of her most popular books. Houghton Mifflin had been wrong.

By then, I had been writing poetry and short stories for several years, on which she offered her honest opinions. I curled up on the worn green couch in her writing room, while she sat rocked back in her swivel chair, her feet propped up on the bookshelf. She listened to me with great seriousness as we talked about what revisions she might make, then tried them out and decided which were the winners. Sometimes she liked the line I had suggested better than her own and asked if she could “steal it.” Naturally, delighted, I always said “yes.” She did the same for me with the poems I had written a few nights previously, after my homework was finished. We were both gentle but hard critics. She had become my mentor and I had become her willing apprentice.

I grew accustomed to writing many, many drafts of my own work and then revising over and over, as she had done for many years—but I enjoyed this part of the process. I rewrite, to this day, in both my fiction and my memoir, as mercilessly as I can. It is the first draft that I find difficult, because she taught me that for the poem to “work,” you must tap down into the unconscious.

Initially, I found submerging myself that way to be difficult, though those depths have become a distinct aspect of both my fiction and my memoir. It is hard to be a writer, I discovered, and—though I never had one poem or short story published—I kept at it, determined to find my own voice. I could never have imagined then that my efforts to “plumb the depths” would eventually result in a four hundred page first novel which would receive good reviews.

When eventually I did find that voice, and when my own nine books were published over the years, I found one piece of her advice equally invaluable to me as I persevered through the publication process. She always told me, “Linda, tell it true. Tell the whole truth.”

As I went forward from fiction to tackle memoir, her words stood by me, inspiring me as I dealt in prose with topics she had confronted in her own poetry. I, too, wrote of family secrets, my own mental illness, and later the process of forgiving her for her eventual suicide. These were footprints I was unable to refrain from following.

Ultimately, I am extremely grateful to my mother for having given me my start as a novelist and memoirist. Still, she always told me, “Never be a writer, Linda, because I will follow you around like an old gray ghost.” Yet, she also said, “Live to the hilt! Be the woman you are!”

I listened nearly helplessly, without choice, to the latter. Despite continual problems with others who identify me solely as Anne Sexton’s daughter, regardless of my success, I have learned to make my own way toward peace and acceptance with the inevitable “gray ghost” she did indeed turn out to be.

So, National Poetry Month has become a special time for me. Even those who sometimes find reading poetry difficult at times are rewarded if they persevere to make it their own as they read. I don’t write poetry any longer, though I do editorial consulting for poetry; it still moves my soul and my imagination and brings me joy—especially when I am using those skills which my mother taught me some sixty years ago. Every time I tap the delete button on my computer, or type in a new line, I think of how essential are the possibilities that revision provides. For me, helping poets achieve their best does indeed make this month hum with celebration, and brings us all closer to the mysteries of literature.

Let me close with another quotation from Kafka, this time one I discovered on my own, and which I would tape on the bookshelf over my desk, if I didn’t have a window looking out onto the Rhode river that is in precisely the same spot: “Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsession mercilessly.”

I take Kafka’s words quite literally and use them to govern all I edit, or all I write. They are a blessing to everyone of us attempting to wrestle with the art of creation.