“Anne Sexton & Her Kind” … One More Time

Music. Music. Music. How my mother loved music of all sorts—even though she couldn’t carry a tune and never played an instrument. Can such a love run in families? Perhaps so, as I sang in three high school choirs and participated in “summer stock” musical comedies where singing was de rigueur. I began with the violin in third grade, then took vocal lessons for many years, but was not as successful with my attempts at the piano.

I was an opera buff from sophomore year onward, sometimes being lucky enough to go to performances in the city and listening for hours from my room to my recordings of Elizabeth Schwarzkopf and Luciano Pavarotti. Mom often stole my albums, taking them downstairs to the stereo in the living room, where she played them loudly enough to hear them from her study. Her favorite was “Duets of the Spanish Guitar,” with Laurindo Almedia on guitar and Salli Terri singing Villa Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5. She wrote her poetry to the magic of music.

In 1967, while she taught creative writing at a neighboring high school, she and a fellow teacher founded a rock group called “Anne Sexton & Her Kind,” named after one of her signature poems from her first book, To Bedlam and Partway Back. The band—consisting of a guitar, reeds and woodwinds, keyboards, double bass and horns, percussion, and kazoo—backed up my mother as she read the “lyrics” aloud, lyrics which were, in fact, readings of her poetry.

The band played everything from ballads, to jazz, to rock, to the blues. Many of the “songs” had a fine sense of humor about them. Additionally, there were love poems and sensual rock numbers, as well as those that delved into the dark world of depression and suicide. “Woman With Girdle” was sometimes set against the lovely “Eighteen Days Without You,” or the raucous “Protestant Easter.” She said to me, quite proudly, that it all made for better listening than Simon and Garfunkel.

Mom never sang a word—bless her heart—for she couldn’t hit a note or even tap her foot to the beat, but that didn’t stop the musicians from playing wonderful songs that were enthusiastically received by a wide variety of audiences while she created fresh experiences through the poems themselves. She was a dramatic performer who captured everyone with her persona.

My friends and I sat like birds on a telephone wire, nodding to the rhythm from our perch—the step down into the sunken living room. On Saturdays, the band practiced in our home and all my friends and I had terrific crushes on the handsome guitarist, in the way only adolescent girls can: fiercely and passionately. But most of all, we loved “Her Kind’s” lyrics and music, with its darkness and its light.

Last year, the Woodberry Poetry Room, part of one of Harvard’s libraries, acquired the digitized tapes of the group’s various performances. Though none of the musicians are available any longer to join us, on December 1st, (the Wednesday following this one), the library will celebrate its finale of 2021: an event wherein the band will play again via these recordings. Its former manager will discuss the history of the group and its musicians and as many funny stories as he can recall. I’ll recount our adolescent reactions and our love for every last beat. My enthusiasm for the band’s rollicking tunes continues to this day.

Please join us on December 1st, at 7:00 pm EST, to listen in and experience “Anne Sexton & Her Kind.” The link for required registration is right here, and you will receive a Zoom invitation in your inbox shortly after you sign up. I hope you’ll mark your calendars now.

Yours,