All My Pretty Ones by Anne Sexton

Backlisted

Backlisted Podcast

Hobbies, Leisure, Books, Arts

4.7 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 26 March 2024

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Award-winning poet Emily Berry joins us to consider the work and troubled life of Anne Sexton. We focus on her brilliant second collection All My Pretty Ones (1962). Sexton was a trailblazing American poet of the so-called 'confessional' school of the 1960s, one whose writing continues to provoke controversy and debate; her friends and contemporaries included Sylvia Plath and John Berryman. We hear from Sexton herself, in recordings of readings and interviews, and fronting own experimental jazz-rock ensemble, Anne Sexton and Her Kind, and also from her daughter Linda. Please note: Anne Sexton was an unflinching chronicler of her own struggle with mental illness, and this episode contains extensive discussion of suicide and sexual abuse. * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here which has book recommendations from our hosts and guests. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast which gives new life to old books.
0:17.0	Today you find us in Western, a small affluent town on the outskirts of Boston.
0:28.6	We're in the slightly cramped dining room of a two-story modern colonial house in about 1962. The space is dominated by a tall
0:38.0	slim woman with dark bobbed hair and piercing blue eyes. She is smoking languidly, pencil in hand, pouring over a huge
0:45.5	sheaf of papers what appears to be a card table. Around her books and papers are stacked
0:51.1	in unruly piles spilling out into the rest of the room. and I'm
0:55.0	John Mitchinson the publisher of Unbound where people crowd fund the books
0:58.0	they really want to read.
0:59.0	And I'm Andy Miller, the author of the Year of Reading Dangerously.
1:02.0	Our guest for this episode is Emily
1:04.3	This is her first time on the podcast. Welcome Emily. Hello. Hi Emily
1:09.2	Emily is a poet, writer and editor living in London. She is the author of three books of poems published by Faber and Faber.
1:17.1	Dear Boy, 2013. Stranger Baby, 2017.
1:21.6	An unexhausted time 2022 and a co-writer of the breakfast Bible a
1:27.2	compendium of breakfast's her lyric essay in the secret country of her mind on dreams, agrophobia and the imagination
1:37.0	appeared in the limited edition artist's book Many Nights by Jackie Kenny.
1:42.0	She is editor of Chief of the Bedtime Stories app,
1:45.6	Sleep Worlds. And I have yet to share this with Emily Berry because I've saved it
1:50.6	until this moment. I am a huge fan of Emily Berry's work and so I'm actually having a bit of a
1:57.3	fan moment being here on the internet talking to the poet Emily Berry.
2:03.4	So my question to you Emily is, why are you so good at poetry?
2:07.6	That's a difficult starting question.
	...

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