Her Kind Rehearsal. Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin. Papers of Anne Sexton, https://library.harvard.edu/collections/anne-sexton-and-her-kind-sound-recordings-1968-1971
In the article “Anne Sexton, Singer: ‘Her Kind’ and the Musical Impetus in Lyric Confessional Verse,” Tyne Daile Sumner illuminates the unfolding landscape of the postwar American lyric in popular and counterculture, inviting us to consider reading lyric confessional verse by emphasizing the kinetic and sonic implications of the lyric poem often inferred in readers’ receptions. Sumner argues that analysis of the three year stint comprising Sexton’s musical act, Anne Sexton and Her Kind, serves “as a model for the wider musical impetus in lyric confessional verse” in so that Anne Sexton’s poetics employed “the inherent audibility of the lyric poem” and the ensemble Anne Sexton and Her Kind employed an “array of illusory tactics… to challenge the formalist approach” (92) and liven the performance of confessional poetry.
Sumner begins by widely introducing some scholarly frameworks for connecting sound and poetry, drawing on the work of Helen English to discuss sound in poetry as its musical language is the effect that gives rise to rememberings of sound. Sumner details Sexton’s early more ambivalent attitude towards musicality in one of the few mentions of the more typical or expected “confessional” tidbits relayed about Sexton’s biography. Sumner argues that a poem like “Ringing the Bells” mechanically staccato progressions can be seen as “parallels between music’s explicit organizing principles and the regimented daily obligations of an institutionalized patient,” (91) of which Sexton periodically was.
Sumner writes that Anne Sexton and Her Kind had their first performance under that name in 1968 in a respected arts venue (92) and charts the bands fairly swift critical success in Boston. Bringing in context critical to the cultural moment, Sumner explains that Her Kind’s local embrace by critics and the public was in part due to the climate of entertainment in the 60s where music acts with an international reach and iconic influence on popular culture such as The Beatles and Bob Dylan were already achieving success conducting “imaginative work with poetic language” (93). Sumner writes that Simon and Garfunkel were one of the acts that heavily influenced Her Kind’s guitarist, at one time a student of Sexton, Steve Rizzo.
Sumner loops in the relationship of Her Kind to the musical world as one with commitment issues: pitching that the act held a “strangely marginalized status” (93) as Sexton was first, or at least most recognizably, a poet. Competing labels of performance and philosophies of musical composition and arrangement cemented this status (94). Sumner acknowledges the nature of Sexton’s participation in the act as more related to being another marketing channel—albeit one heightened by artistic intention—to elevate and control the experience of her poetry’s reception, rather than reinvent the lyre so to speak.
Sumner bolsters her claim by returning to frame her analysis with more depth in the study of the lyric genre, exploring an expansion of lyric and confessional meanings of sincerity in the contemporary world. Sumner discuss lyric poetry’s elusive and transnational histories, chiefly competing definitions of the genre, however outlines four consistent tenets of lyric poetry: brevity, performativity, persona (usually first person), and personal emotion. Drawing on scholarship by Peter Middleton, Sumner writes on the uncertainties of the genre: lyric poetry is historically dynamic and a fruitful analysis of its poetics must wade through assumptions of genre, school, form, or biography and let go the “ill-advised and ultimately impossible” (97) approach of total objectivity to be productive when considering the oxymoronic performance of authenticity lyric verse which Sumner describes.
Again, Sumner emphasizes that the contemporary lyric, although deeply connected to music, and not music itself, is a recalling of sound, something overheard, quoting Susan Stewart and nineteenth-century philosopher John Stuart Mill. Sumner begins to develop a position where lyric functions often on the borders of public and private, that its “remnants of song, along with the form’s inclination towards performance…necessitate…an insistence on the presence of a listening, observing ‘other’” (99). Though “the lyric is always a written form, however, its fruition arrives only with its oral declaration” is something Sumner argues would have been a feature of Sexton’s motivation for her musical endeavors. Sumner moves to establish the sonics of lyric verse as liminal by expanding on the notion of readers’ inferences of sound in the reading experience of poetry. Sumner includes that Herbert Tucker argues “that the oral convention in poetry is so powerful that we infer a speaking voice even though we are consciously interpreting words on the page” (101).
In any case, an oral or musically accompanied performance of poetry “is an ephemeral event. It stands to reason, then, that when a poem exists as a heard performance, its meaning differs from that of the traditional printed form” (103). Summer argues that the experiment of the Anne Sexton and Her Kind project was a deliberate example of elevating the sonic inference in lyric confessional verse.
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