It's Memorial Day in the US, and like any day focused on remembering the dead, it's a day that leads me back to this poem by Sexton. Elegies are poems honoring and memorializing the dead (Milton's "Lycidas" is one of the true greats), but Sexton fights against the very concept. The dead, she notes, are bored of the living and have no time for us.

Our family's had its share of mourning in recent years, and at a certain point, grief becomes like the tides, something you're always experiencing in small or larger bursts. There are times when it's comforting, but Sexton reminds us that grief and remembrance serve us, not the dead.

Sexton's often a harder poet to handle than her Confessional peers like Lowell and Plath, rarely smoothing her sharp edges even the little bit the others choose to, but I find her stuff worth seeking out, especially when feeling melancholy.

A Curse Against Elegies --Anne Sexton

Oh, love, why do we argue like this? I am tired of all your pious talk. Also, I am tired of all the dead. They refuse to listen, so leave them alone. Take your foot out of the graveyard, they are busy being dead.

Everyone was always to blame: the last empty fifth of booze, the rusty nails and chicken feathers that stuck in the mud on the back doorstep, the worms that lived under the cat's ear and the thin-lipped preacher who refused to call except once on a flea-ridden day when he came scuffing in through the yard looking for a scapegoat. I hid in the kitchen under the ragbag.

I refuse to remember the dead. And the dead are bored with the whole thing. But you — you go ahead, go on, go on back down into the graveyard, lie down where you think their faces are; talk back to your old bad dreams.