This Business of Words

For Anne Sexton, becoming a successful poet meant skillfully approaching various forms of media and developing strategies for teaching, critiquing poems, delivering poetry readings, and giving interviews. This Business of Words: Reassessing Anne Sexton examines her industry and her industriousness. The five critics and five poets in this collection return to the materials of Sexton’s oeuvre to consider the development of her aesthetic, her reception, and the continuing allure of her poetry in the twenty-first century. This Business of Words provides new approaches to Sexton’s poetry that take into account the range of contexts her work addresses. The literary critics, Jo Gill, Anita Helle, Chris Grobe, Victoria Van Hyning, and Kamran Javadizadeh, interpret Sexton’s work in relation to such topics as photography, performance, poetry readings, the role of institutions, and midcentury culture. The poets, David Trinidad, Kathleen Ossip, Jeffery Conway, Jeanne Marie Beaumont, and Dorothea Lasky, shed new light on Sexton’s legacy, her responses to her contemporaries, and her poetic subjects, from her well known fairy tales in Transformations to the wild spirit of her less frequently discussed series “Bestiary U.S.A.” The volume’s critical and creative perspectives often intersect, inspiring new questions about Sexton’s poems and our modes of interpreting them. As a whole, This Business of Words underscores Sexton’s vitality as she continues to inspire readers.