The Allure of Love and Madness

Amy Nostbakken in The Big Smoke.

Would you go and see a play performed entirely by a single unaccompanied singer that describes itself as a ‘poetic waltz’ about one woman’s descent into madness and suicide? Does it appeal as much as, say, a Sarah Kane play on a rainy Wednesday evening? For some people (and I count myself among them) it’s just the ticket. The Big Smoke, written and performed by Amy Nostbakken, cites as its influences the work of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, and its sultry trailer shows a woman in a 1950s prom dress singing out her pain amid plumes of cigarette smoke.

Sounds heavy-going, and let’s face it, it probably is, though my interest was piqued. I work for a publisher with indelible connections to those three writers, and one whose editorial staff consists entirely of women. Feminist agendas are on our books. Judging from the trailer, the play’s approach seemed too direct for Woolf, too showy for Plath, but I could distinctly detect the influence of my poetic heroine Anne Sexton in Nostbakken’s pose.

Unlike Plath and Woolf, Sexton has never been required reading in Britain. I first encountered her in the pages of a battered library edition of The Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry, and the directness of her verse and the boldness of their subject matter drew the teenaged-me like a lure. If ever there were a poet to lend despair a certain glamour, it was Sexton. She would turn up at her readings ten minutes late, mount the lectern, light a cigarette, kick off her heels and announce in a throaty voice: ‘I’m going to read a poem that tells you what kind If ever there were a poet to lend despair a certain glamour, it was Sexton.of a poet I am, what kind of woman I am, so if you don’t like it you can leave,’ and then go on to read compelling, incisive poems of abortion and adultery, love and madness, death and desolation. This rare clip of Sexton reveals her for everything she was: beautiful and alluring, yet savage and vaguely menacing, cutting right to the bone and straight to the heart.

Sexton killed herself in 1974, but the torchbearers of her confessional legacy include such poets at Clare Pollard, Helen Farish and Sharon Olds (who still hasn’t stopped writing about the time her parents tied her to a chair).

And yet this mode, largely speaking, is deeply unfashionable, with its connotations of rampant egotism, bad ethics and sloppy craftsmanship. Most critics and poets take T.S. Eliot’s high road (that poetry is not an expression of personality, but an escape from it) and look upon Confessional poetry as nothing but amateurish, introspective navel-gazing. How, they say, is a poem about menstruation at the age of forty necessary or relevant? Bring on the Aenead and Rilke.

And yet it is necessary and relevant. Intensely so. Poets like Sexton and Plath enabled a cultural expression of female discontent that anticipated the ideas of Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique and Second-wave feminism. We owe these combustible figures much, not only for breaking down the white picket fences of poetic form but, by speaking in their own voices, changing what women could talk about not only in poetry but outside of poetry too. I can’t imagine a publishing landscape with such memoirs as Prozac Nation or Your Voice in My Head ever existing without the trail blazed by the oracular truth-sayers that came before them.

For all the criticisms The Big Smoke or Anne Sexton might attract, they signify a bravery I still don’t detect in most contemporary art forms. A one-woman, sixty-five minute, A capella play about madness and suicide might be a little too much to bear for most people, but it wholeheartedly embodies Sexton’s conviction: ‘In celebration of the woman I am...I sing for you, I dare to live.’ And that can only be a good thing. ■

photo by Ryan Garside.

Also on The F Word Online:

'Suddenly', a short by Victoria Redel.

'But if you were born female, it was easy. You only had one decision to make: you were a good girl or you were a slut'. Leila Guerriero on growing up in Buenos Aires.