Judy Richardson lived on the Massachusetts seacoast with a marine biologist husband. She threw good parties, too, in an apartment swarming with displaced New York City tomcats. (Robert Lowell had once taught Plath and Sexton in the very classroom where we now met.) She had a brilliant critical mind. Still, my favorite poem of hers was an early one about a failed marriage, where the bride had her fingers crossed “for luck” behind her back.Ī thin and jittery New Yorker who adored Gertrude Stein, Pat Crain did not seem like the type who would be drawn to the cradle of Confessionalism. Kate was dealing with the archetypal language of the Deep Image movement: snow, rain, sleep, silence, hands, breath, fire. I would soon learn that it was not because she was rich, but because she had been working full time for a few years following graduation. What a change of atmosphere from the two reserved Southern gentlemen who had been my poetry teachers at Cornell! My classmates, too, were very different from the gentle blue-jeaned hippies in my undergraduate workshops.īlonde Kate Green from Minneapolis had a summer tan and fabulous outfits like a fringed suede skirt and matching vest. I’ve been in the back of too many of them myself.” “No, no, it’s not thrilling at all!” she protested. But when a classmate’s poem responded to an ambulance siren with the line “that little thrill when they enter your neighborhood,” Anne let out a shriek. I hadn’t brought any poems with me that day, so I recited one from memory, about the women in my family at an Irish wake. Then, with a husky voice and great cackly laugh, she asked us to go around the room introducing ourselves and reading one of our poems out loud. I was twenty-two at the time and considered my mother to be a senior citizen.Īfter collapsing into a chair, the first thing Anne did was to kick off her shoes. My God, I thought: she’s as old as my mother, but she’s still beautiful. She looked a little heavier around the waist than in her photos, but her cheekbones were still model-sharp, as if they had been struck from flint with a rock. Under fierce black eyebrows and a wedge of dark, wavy hair, her eyes were surprisingly blue. She was taller than I had expected, with broad shoulders poking out like wings from a sleeveless cotton dress. But then our teacher burst in, incandescent. There were eight of us, and most of us were smoking, so the classroom held a dreary air. Waiting for Anne to arrive on the first day of class, we perched on hard wooden chairs backed up against the walls to form a rough circle. That calendar date was not yet a bad omen, but it certainly seems like one, in retrospect. Our poetry workshop met on Wednesday afternoons beginning September eleventh. I WAS A STUDENTin Anne Sexton’s last class at Boston University in the fall of 1974.

The Purse by Julie A. Burns