Pole Stars and Horizons: On Anne Sexton and the Millay House Rockland Residency
Joanna Young
I don’t know when I first read Anne Sexton’s poetry. I know I circled both Sexton’s and Sylvia Plath’s work for many years. Each a unique pole star, each vivid, incandescent, brave. Also vulnerable and accusatory. Each in her own way documented a wild longing accompanied by profound ambivalence—anger, love, ambition, grief and yearning yoked together. Knotted. At the same time Plath and Sexton seemed unafraid. They marched toward the dark, frightening cellar door and blasted it open. Shot the locks off. A courage I also want to claim.
I likely read Plath first. I remember being given The Colossus and Other Poems as a gift. I think I was seventeen. In many ways my reading Plath and Sexton was like a miner being handed a lamp while being lowered in the cage. The writing both lamp and map.
Linda Gray Sexton’s Searching for Mercy Street—My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton was published by Little, Brown in 1994. I was deeply drawn to her memoir but also appalled. The terrible, ravenous complications and unmet needs of their mother-daughter relationship. Each scalded. Each the other’s precipice. Each also fiercely, adamantly a writer. Staking a claim. Just whose story is it? Who gets to own the narrative? And what in the end “belongs” to us? What do we have the “right” to reveal? To expose? The drunken father circling the girl in the childhood bedroom. The disassociated trance state of a mother masturbating in front of her shocked young daughter. The dangerous play acting. How do you reconcile this with the love? The tenderness? What is accusation? What is confession? What finally remains? Who authors the story?
In a poem based on a Cormac McCarthy novel called The Passenger I write about a brother and sister’s nearly incestuous relationship and name the shared anguish “their double helix of loss.” I hear this doubling, this looping, this erasure and loss in Sexton’s and Plath’s writing—a familial history dominating and enveloping the horizon like a wave seen in the distance. Nothing is simple. The distortions, the drowning. How can we surface, break free, and see ourselves and each other accurately? The terrible myth of family chained to the terrible myth of me.
About her time at Millay House Rockland, Joanna says,
My October residency at the Millay House Rockland was an unexpected gift—waking up in one reality suddenly transported magically to another. The first day I walked through the space, touching the walls, standing in the middle of the living room, admiring the sweet space sheltering me. The long windows. High ceilings. The feeling of freedom. And then I stood for a few minutes before each photo of Vincent. Spoke to her. Admired the delicate cameo of her beauty, noting the defiant gaze. Almost steely. The rebel tilt of her head. I drew her portrait more than once.
The month included a new freedom plus a new sense of belonging. I entered another chamber, a larger space. It was both mine and also populated in a new way. There is someone new in the mix, more generous, more generative. A new belonging. This is where I am at this moment. The poetry continues. Writing the play. Feeling it branch different ways. Thank you for this time and space.
One day in mid-October, in the middle of her month-long residency, a friend of Joanna’s, Dana Wilde, emailed her a copy of a just-completed sonnet by poet and Zen abbot Richard Collins, author most recently of the collection Stone Nest, and a first-time reader of Millay.
Moved to share Collins’ poem, Joanna’s gesture gives us another instance of the ongoing conversation writers have between poems and people, and we find the words that permit us to hold the moment—our brief, timely residencies in the transience of things. Edna St. Vincent Millay died on October 19, 1950.
A Sonnet on the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of Her Death
I will control myself, or go inside.
I will not flaw perfection with my grief:
Handsome the day: no matter who has died.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay
From on high one fine mid-October day
Time shifts as leaves begin to drift away
And rare birds of savage beauty migrate
To find some more amenable climate.
Some find their way home without incident;
Others strike windows of the infinite,
Looking back on a life of lovely errors,
Looking back on a life of cruel mirrors.
They found what they called the girl poet’s head
On the last stair step seemingly at rest
On a notebook her tumbled autumn nest
Full of pale blue sonnets as yet unhatched;
Whose songs in her time were rated unmatched,
Whose death left nothing worth saying unsaid.
—Richard Collins
Joanna Young was the writer-in-residence at Millay House Rockland for the month of October 2025. Raised in Massachusetts, with generational roots in Vinalhaven, Maine, she now lives in Searsport. Walking on Moose Point nearly every day, she “feels initiated into a world of extraordinary beauty, mystery and healing. There is something about the horizon line that teaches me—creates a sense of reverence. In this space, this glimpsed infinity, I feel myself open and begin to find words."
