The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Five): Jonathan Riccio [by Angela Ball]

Anne Sexton’s Death, 45 Years Ago Today

I don’t smoke but would’ve at your behest.

Truth hasn’t the same domesticity mingling

a throat. I have a doll theory that explains

the orbiters to whom you were malleable:

James Wright, Azel Mack, Mary Gray.

What’s confession but pull-string?

Outlook has downturns in Mississippi,

my umbrella sun guard, halo Kelly green.

The photo of Kayo carving a pumpkin—

Middlebrook’s biography has you archived

from holiday to halogen—his handsome

the kind that scoops seeds. My last meal

wouldn’t be a downtown proofread. Glue

from your out-of-print books flakes my floor.

The ′74 jacket-shot, dress plural floral,

your drink on brick, collarbone a doorstop

of someone who treated suicide like saloon.

No one writes of your shoes on October 4th.

Was it farewell and barefoot?

The tulip of betterment means one day

my father broke down at the ironing board.

We hugged, bayonet to monsoon. My sickness,

his steam. Don’t know how to light a match,

am incapable of cigarette. I quit turpentining

myself into corners. Maybe there’s a suitor.

I’ve out-delta’d disorder. Still, the engine

took you from diamond to coal.

— 10/4/2019

Jon Riccio received his PhD at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers. He is the author of two chapbooks and a full-length collection, Agoreography (3: A Taos Press). He teaches literature and creative writing at Western Michigan University and the University of West Alabama.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Five): Jonathan Riccio

Jonathan Riccio’s “Anne Sexton’s Death, 45 Years Ago Today,” combines energy and tenderness in a form reminiscent of ultratalk (Mark Halliday’s term)—the rapid-fire multi-sequiter colloquialism of David Kirby, Denise Duhamel, the much-missed Dean Young, and other poets who have appeared in this column–and also of one-time pianist Frank O’Hara’s pleasure in feting Rachmaninoff on his birthday while entwining him in details of his (O’Hara’s) life. Here are some lines from his tribute of 1954:

. . . presence is

better than absence, if you love excess.

Oh now it is that all this music tumbles

round me which was once considered muddy

and today surrounds this ambiguity of

our tables and our typewriter paper, more

nostalgic than a disease . . . .

Riccio is also a musician, with an MA from Oberlin to show for it. He almost conducts the language—commands it, rather, rallying words into phrasing that is both dense and lilting: “I don’t smoke but would have at your behest. / Truth hasn’t the same domesticity mingling / a throat.”

What a funny and lovely confession—the poet’s willingness to adopt his idol’s habit. Perhaps true fandom consists of wanting your paragon to rub off on you, like a fan magazine’s ink on a teenager’s sleeping face.

Indeed, we’re told, Sexton was, in Auden’s memorable phrase, “silly like us”—susceptible to Wright, Mack, and Gray—“What’s confession but pull-string?” It would take paragraphs to unpack this dense statement, its palpable correctness.

We see the poet in a hot country–“my umbrella sunguard, halo kelly green”—this entwined with a photo from Diane Middlebrook’s biography of Sexton which depicts her young husband “carving a pumpkin”: “his handsome the kind that scoops seeds.” Here a subtle echo of Sexton’s powerful “Her Kind.” And this master precis of Middlebrook: “has you archived from holiday to halogen”—the halogen, presumably, of the coroner’s slab.

Where O’Hara’s tribute is directly addressed to us, his readers, Riccio’s is addressed to Sexton herself (and, of course, also to us, his hearers). What he confides is at first surprising—“Glue / from your out-of-print books flakes my floor”—then more predictably, her outfit “plural flora,” then surprising again—in fact, amazing: “collarbone a doorstop / of someone who treated suicide like saloon.” To pause and unpack this would take more paragraphs. Suddenly we move to Sexton’s shoes, undescribed in accounts of her death:

Was it farewell and barefoot?

The tulip of betterment means one day

my father broke down at the ironing board.

What is this “tulip of betterment”? It successfully eludes my understanding, but not my sense of rightness, a rightness that wraps Sexton’s death with the decline of the poet’s father. How heartbreaking, his breakdown before that flimsiest of furnishings!

The father in his gauntness becomes “bayonet”; his son, “monsoon”—could there be a more unlikely pairing? “My sickness, / his steam.” Once again, we hear of Sexton’s cigarettes and the the poet’s inability to adopt them; learn that his own sickness has to do with obsession, eloquently described as “turpentining / myself into corners.” It’s an obsession conquered: “I’ve out-deltaed disorder.” We find that the poet has turned the disease’s convergences to his own purposes.

Then, the gift of the poem’s final lines: “Still, the engine / took you from diamond to coal.”

Sexton is a poet interested in metamorphoses—those of fairy tales, in particular. Jonathan Riccio portrays the car—running in place and generating her suicide’s poison—as an agent of transformation. By hugging Sexton close to his own life, Riccio brings her close to us. Turning “from diamond to coal”—a different expression of the carbon atom—Sexton becomes the darkness she has written. Perhaps she can be glimpsed as the glow at the tip of someone’s cigarette, its halo a brief expression of breath.

-Angela Ball