There’s always “starter houses”. Stamped out on grids and well-placed circles and cul de sacs, identical cookie cutter houses, two bedrooms, three—if one’s really small, designed for the newlyweds, people just starting their careers and their families in the long dead and buried absurd American dream. Real-estate to cut your teeth on.
1978 Barbie Dream Townhouse. I had the Sindy townhouse. I wasn’t even cool enough for the Barbie one at age six. It was actually nicer though.
When I was coming of age in the 1980s, my parents bought a “starter house” for the three of us, a tiny nuclear family in the slow end of The Cold War. We lived in it only two years. Her first, of several amputations, made it impossible for her to get into the dining room/eat-in kitchen. With that yellow wallpaper and geese decor, (what was she thinking?) it was a terribly ugly room, but my mother had gutted the horrible 1952-built kitchen and there were no cabinets and she moved the sink in front of the back window so she could watch me play in the small backyard for the two wonderful years we lived in the starter house. It was the last house she ever owned.
A little slice of Stepford, anybody?
It was the only house I ever lived in, it was all apartments again and college dorms, until 2002 . For six years, I had a starter house of my own. 1550 ft.², a front and back yard, three bedrooms, two baths, and I had the American dream. I had a small child, a husband, two cars in the concrete driveway, and I was dying inside because it wasn’t meant for me. It fit me like a shoe that was too small and that husband (one of those men who propose in public under a white rose arbor at Biltmore to assure my compliance from day one, and then complains I do not clean the floorboards like his mother does) is a long-ago wasband now.
I wasn’t happy, but at least I was writing. I earned my first publication credits for White Wolf Gaming Studio while imprisoned in that nice, little, spacious navy-carpeted wall to wall, white walled interior, starter house. It was also where my life imploded, I was liberated by being discarded like a broken doll.
The starter house of my early adolescence was lovely to me, and I was writing poetry already in the 1980s in that starter house we sold when we moved to the suburbs and a “garden apartment”. It was there I discovered my starter poets.
Sylvia Plath was my perfect starter poet. I was depressed. I was self harming, and I spent 30 days in the January before my 14th birthday, in a locked adolescent psychiatric ward in a private psychiatric hospital. I was going to be a poet and probably a suicide. Sylvia Plath joked her fate would be “ elected most popular waitress at Howard Johnson’s”, I suppose Applebees, Olive Garden, Cheesecake Factory, or any big, family-friendly casual dining with a full bar chain restaurants is the modern equivalent, I was a server (“waitress”- I’ll use the word) periodically in my 20’s and would’ve certainly been voted “most popular waitress“ at The Blues Cafe Bar & Grill in Salisbury, North Carolina in Summer 1996.
I am 52 years old now. Poet is confirmed. Suicide, well, it hasn’t happened yet, and I don’t think it will ever happen. Although, I am not fully sure that Trump policies will not kill me, for myriad reasons. But 13-year-old me sat in the minimally furnished private hospital day room with grates over all the windows. Pure light off the freshly-fallen blizzard outside in January casting everything in the white bright sharp light as I read The Bell Jar for the first time ,and then I read the poetry, and I related to it. I wanted to grow up to be Sylvia Plath. I wanted to experience what Esther Greenwood experienced (without the crab salad ptomaine poisoning though). That was another time.
Sylvia Plath was a woman poet, beautiful, a woman who wrote, who was married to a handsome dark brooding brilliant male poet (who cheated and we all know the legend of how terrible Ted Hughes really was, the scandal- he killed two women and his child, with his wandering dick, allegedly.)
Really, Plath and Weevil were already broken and it was a fate that had very little to do with him. He couldn’t save them both. Ted Hughes had major character defects, as humans will, but broken women were his fatal attraction. I wanted to be a broken woman because that was where I thought the poetry came from. I was naïve. I was thirteen. I give myself a pass.
Frida Kahlo -The Broken Column
Oh how I once foolishly saw this poem as aspirational life goals!!!
My Mother - Freida Hughes
They are killing her again.
She said she did it
One year in every ten,
But they do it annually, or weekly,
Some even do it daily,
Carrying her death around in their heads
And practising it. She saves them
The trouble of their own;
They can die through her
Without ever making
The decision. My buried mother
Is up-dug for repeat performances.
Now they want to make a film
For anyone lacking the ability
To imagine the body, head in oven,
Orphaning children. Then
It can be rewound
So they can watch her die
Right from the beginning again.
The peanut eaters, entertained
At my mother’s death, will go home,
Each carrying their memory of her,
Lifeless – a souvenir.
Maybe they’ll buy the video.
Watching someone on TV
Means all they have to do
Is press ‘pause’
If they want to boil a kettle,
While my mother holds her breath on screen
To finish dying after tea.
The filmmakers have collected
The body parts,
They want me to see.
They require dressings to cover the joins
And disguise the prosthetics
In their remake of my mother.
They want to use her poetry
As stitching and sutures
To give it credibility.
They think I should love it –
Having her back again, they think
I should give them my mother’s words
To fill the mouth of their monster,
Their Sylvia Suicide Doll,
Who will walk and talk
And die at will,
And die, and die
And forever be dying.
Published in The Stonepicker and The Book of Mirrors
I carried my torch for Sylvia Plath into high school. I wore her “Colossus” and “Ariel” on my sleeve like a bouquet of tulips and my broken hearts. And then, I discovered Anne Sexton.
Oddly, Anne Sexton still speaks to me, is more relatable to me, she was definitely the more dangerous of the two, in my opinion, and a much stronger voice. Plath did not know what kind of woman she was, whereas Sexton was always aware, and equally or more broken, but was also simply “too much” for her self and her time. Sexton was my second starter poet and I have matured with her.
I think too many young women poets discover Plath when they need her and romanticize her suicide, her suffering- she’s everything we want to poet to be, glamorous, dramatic, educated, cultured, loved, suffered, and was successful. She wrote about the topic she truly did not know best- herself.
Confessional poetry is dirty. It is self-indulgent. It is exquisite. It is liberating. It is cathartic. You take all the poison from within, and let it drip, letter by letter, from a blinking cursor or the end of a pen, onto the paper. It can be so sharp, honest, brilliant, but it can also be self indulgent drivel, trite, and pop psychology security blanket generalizations. See Gabbie Hanna, Megan Fox (for fucks sake), Rupi Kaur, 90% of Instapoetry. Everything is about the “ME” and the boy(s) who broke you, and it comes with cute drawings on every single page!
Because, what is poetry, if it is not a sentence or able to be posted in it’s entirety on social media limited formats with an illustration? We must have picture books because the poets cannot and won’t paint with language any longer!! Sometimes the Freudian typo should be left. We are poets-we create, mold, and craft words -fear not a neologism —like the heavily loaded “slitettoes” I accidentally stabbed my poetry with.
Women’s poetry, in particular, as if poetry is always cleanly gendered or is a gendered thing, needs to be A.A.Milne with comfort, characters, and illustrations and it must be completely universal, because all of us are obviously having the exact same experiences as women, aren’t we?
No, we aren’t. I will never be Sylvia Plath. I will never be beautiful, tall, manic, and obsessive like her. I am also too old and too experienced to have to be told that “pretty boys are poison”, like Fox titled her collection. (Some are not poisonous, some grow up and become pretty men, who are not like the sadistic men in “Daddy” by Plath, some pretty person (not always a man) can and will truly love and respect us). I do not need plati-poems from DBT sessions telling me that I need to love myself, and sometimes, that means having to leave someone who doesn’t love me enough.
I have learned my worth over many years and a lot of hard work. Poetry doesn’t fill any holes inside me. I do not read it to fill holes and to impress others. I don’t write it to please and perform for other people. I don’t need your approval. I do it because I love language. I love communicating, and I like poets who sometimes write sincere, skillful, clever confessional poetry. I’m a secret introverted exhibitionist.
The Author on her 52nd Birthday/Book Release Day
This week I got the funniest rejection letter ever from a “prestigious” poetry review. I sent them a very personal confessional poem, but was applauded for my imagination! I laughed. But it was one of the few rejections at this point that actually stung a little, only due to the implications and assumptions the editor made about my life and me. I am apparently walking or running a road less traveled, if my daily life is that imaginative to this specific editor.
“Dear Pixie Bruner,
Thank you for your interest in ________ Poetry Review. We value your work and thank you for submitting to us. We're sorry to say, however, that we have decided not to publish this submission. We wish you success in finding another venue for your poem. (I applaud your imagination. Perhaps you're attempting too much in this poem. However, another editor may love it.)
Sincerely,
The Editors ________ Poetry Review “
It is just last year that I started building my own house. I have thrown myself into submission grinders and become mincemeat. I have also had published my first co-edited/curated anthology of poetry and prose with all proceeds going to The Nature Conservancy and most importantly to me as writer, an incredible book of poetry on Authortunities Press, ”The Body As Haunted”, which is one hell of a starter poetry home. I am already planning new projects and a new wing, as one doesn’t just quit after their debut collection of poetry
One year into my journey as a dedicated builder of a poetry and literary career, not just an editor/proofreader, I have two walls standing, and way two many windows. It’s a glass house, apparently. I’m on display. 30 poems sold or published. I do not know if the house will ever provide me shelter. I share a 600 square-foot apartment with my doppelgänger, who is also my fiancé. He’s very pretty and non-poisonous. My doppelgänger is a real person.
Doppelgänger writes as well!
I’ve met many of my literary neighbors and liked them. I’ve even invited them over for tea and biscuits. No one ends up in an oven or a cage to be eaten.
I have discovered so many new writers as I am embark on building the walls for my next incarnation to reside, a literary Home in which I curate and publish the poems, I want to create a wondrous place. it’s dark, labyrinthine, slightly claustrophobic, haunted, and also beautiful, but not built on the past poets or social media. I have largely outgrown my starter poets, although “The Complete Works of Anne Sexton” is under the tarp covering the built-in bookcase already.
Bestsellers (from The Body as Haunted)
Pixie Bruner
The top of the poetry charts is not my place.
I have too many words in dodgy stanzas.
I craft forms, images, occasionally rhythm
I use assonance and I aliterate, I symbolize.
too many words on the pages without illustrations.
There is a rhythm in mine.
My volumes are slim slitettos
Switchblades, overkill for avocado pitting.
Poison to the self-diagnosed gluten intolerant
who shun thinking over feeling.
Want poems that chew and spit, instead of savor and devour.
Mine can’t fit on social media inside a
perfect square of relatable trauma,
heartbreak, validation, and my own bad great decisions.
we have forgotten what poetry is-
Transformations, Tulips, Great blue herons,
confessions, speculation and magic
Songs and ashes floating away, ephemera—
gossamer things of dark beauty, laid bare,
Viscera, feathers, and bone visitations.