It has been a little more than five years since poet Rachel Wetzsteon committed suicide at the age of 42 following the end of a three-year romance.
At the time of her death Wetzsteon (pronounced “whetstone”) was the poetry editor of The New Republic and a faculty member at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey. She was the author of three volumes of poetry and a study of W.H. Auden, and her work had appeared in The New Yorker, among other publications. Beyond the small-pond world of poetry, however, her death went largely unnoticed, and her reputation beyond the world of the literary magazines A.J. Leibling derided as “the quarterlies” hasn’t grown much. A recent check of two bookstores and a network of public libraries revealed that none had any of her books on their shelves. The short entry about her in Wikipedia still begins by noting who her father was, as if that were the most important fact about her. By contrast, three years after Sylvia Plath’s suicide her own mother was already complaining “I am so sick of the ‘legend’, the ‘image.’”
Why the difference? It is impolitic to point out that Plath was pretty, while Wetzsteon was not. Anne Sexton, another suicide, had striking good looks and today has a higher reputation than Wetzsteon even though her poetry is, by just about any measure that counts, inferior. The world that makes female poets’ reputations, despite its pose as the enemy of all things patriarchal, appears to be judging its victims by the very standards it professes to reject.
The case can be made, however, that Wetzsteon’s work will, as William Faulkner might put it, not just endure but prevail over that of Plath and Sexton. Wetzsteon took as her models two unlikely sources; Philip Larkin and W.H. Auden, taking the road less traveled—if at all—by female poets of her time. Her poems tack away from the rocky shores of confessional poetry, the mode of expression that has become identified—to a fault—with just about all poetry written by women since Plath.
Where the confessional poets such as Plath and Sexton seemed to yearn for death as completion, Wetzsteon projected an urban toughness—she lived in New York City—that gave hope she would overcome the urge to kill herself, the occupational hazard of female poets, like falls from great heights by window-washers. Her poems promised something else as well: a way out of the dead-end that contemporary poetry sometimes stumbles into. One of her poems was published posthumously in Poetry—one of (if not the) leading forums for living poets. It appeared during a stretch in which the liveliest argument (Poetry contains more writing—or grousing—about poetry than actual poems) in the publication’s pages concerned a poet who has written that he hates his wife’s—well, it rhymes with “bunt.” Another poet, whose deathless verse includes the image of drinking diarrhea, responded that he’d be upset if readers weren’t offended by the image. Potty-mouth as poetry.
Wetzsteon didn’t confuse vulgarity with expressiveness, but she was an unflinching observor of the world and the self, and what little there is in the way of progress to be made in either sphere. These lines are from the title poem of her last collection, about a park in her Morningside Heights neighborhood:
The park admits the wind,
the petals lift and scatter
like versions of myself I was on the verge
of becoming; and ten years on
and ten blocks down I still can’t tell
whether this dispersal resembles
a fist unclenching or waving goodbye.
6 comments
Matt Paust says:
Jun 17, 2015
More! More! Love the cover on her book, too. But…damn. She isn’t pretty? I find her face rather sensual, but, then, I don’t know from poetry either. Good column.
paxton says:
Sep 14, 2016
Guys, it doesn’t matter what she looked like…just read the poems.
Herb Berman says:
May 11, 2017
Her poems are gorgeous, and that’s all that matters.
Julie says:
Jul 5, 2018
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I think she’s beautiful. Why don’t you not mention your subjective thought of her prettiness or lack of and also not presuppose her reasons for killing herself. It’s offensive.
Kate Cunningham says:
Jul 24, 2018
I was so jolted when I discovered she’d committed suicide. Her “Love and Work” expressed something never before read in a poem.
“Love and Work”
In an uncurtained room across the way
a woman in a tight dress paints her lips
a deeper red, and sizes up her hips
for signs of ounces gained since yesterday.
She has a thoughtful and clever face,
but she is also smart enough know
the truth; however large her brain may grow,
the lashes and earring must keep pace.
Although I’ve spread my books in front of me
with a majestic air of I’ll show her,
I’m much less confident than I’d prefer
and now I’ve started pacing nervously.
I’m poring over theorems, tomes and tracts.
I’m getting ready for a heavy date
by staying up ridiculously late.
But a small voice advises, Face the facts:
Go on this way and you’ll so come to harm.
The world’s most famous scholars wander down
the most appalling alleyways in town,
a blond and busty airhead on each arm.
There is an inner motor known as lust
that makes a man of learning walk a mile
to gratify his raging senses, while
the woman he can talk to gathers dust.
A chilling vision of the years ahead
invades my thoughts and widens like a stain:
a barren dance card and a teeming brain,
a crowded bookcase and an empty bed…
What if I compromised? I’d stay up late
to hone my elocutionary skills,
and at the crack of dawn I’d swallow pills
to calm my temper and control my weight,
but I just can’t. Romantics, so far gone
they think their lovers live for wisdom, woo
by growing wiser: when I think of you
I find the nearest lamp and turn it on.
Great gods of longing, watch me as I work,
and if I spout a martyr’s smarmy grin
please find some violent way to do me in;
I’m not burning all these candles to shirk
a night of passion, but to give that night
a richly textured backdrop when it comes.
The girl who gets up from her desk and dumbs
her discourse down has never seen the flight
of wide-eyed starlings from their shabby cage;
the fool whose love is truest is the one
who knows a lover’s work is never done.
I’ll call you when I’ve finished one more page.
— Rachel Wetzsteon
Bill Blackley says:
Jan 15, 2021
Thank you Kate Cunningham for powerful message. Best, Bill