–Anne Sexton, Poetry, August 1962
This Recording’s got an interview with Anne Sexton where she talks about her friend Eleanor Boylan:
But actually, the genesis of Mercy Street was not when you received the Ford Grant. The germ of the play had been with you years earlier.
Well, before that the Charles Playhouse had a writers’ workshop kind of thing and different writers and actors would go in, oh, maybe fifteen people, to a loft on Berkeley Street over the Hotel Diplomat. It was once a church. They gave readings of people’s scripts. At the end of the evening, they would pass the hat around and everyone would put some money in it. I went with a friend of mine who was writing a play.
Who was the friend?
Eleanor Boylan, who is director of the Young Newton Players and a puppeteer. I went with her, and was quite interested in what they were doing. And then I thought, “Gee, maybe I could write a play,” so I started a few scenes, and I brought them in and they read them, and I put my money in the hat.
Was this after you published To Bedlam and Part Way Back in All My Pretty Ones?
Yes, I was in the middle of Live or Die.
For which you got the Pulitzer Prize in 1967. Tell me, what was the central theme of that first play?
Christ and madness. A girl who has committed suicide finds herself in death as a character in a circus sideshow looking for Christ. She is hounded by morality figures with names like Backbiter, Barker, Flesh, and Charity and when she turns from religion to psychiatry, she finds no Christ in that realm either.
a woman naked to the waist,
moist with palm oil and sweat, a woman of some virtue
and wild breasts, her limbs excellent, unbruised and chaste.
–Poetry, October 1962
At Lambda Literary, Jameson Fitzpatrick talks about Anne Sexton, “a poet beautiful enough to be a model…the very model of a modern model-poet.”
ANNE SEXTON
“Thief!—
how did you crawl into,
crawl down alone
into the death I wanted so badly and for so long”
—Poetry, January 1964
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