Megan Caldwell Chandler

This week I came across an Anne Sexton poem that I haven’t read in a long time.  “The Farmer’s Wife” is a poem from her 1960 collection To Bedlam and Part Way Back.  As it turns out, some of my work from earlier this summer seems to be heavily influenced by this poem.  It’s really strange how something I have forgotten stays with me subconsciously and shows up years later.  Does this happen to anyone else?  The even stranger part is that when I originally read her poems, I had almost no idea what she was talking about.  This past week as I read back through her poetry, I was amazed at how much more of an understanding I have of her writing.  I guess life experiences do count for something.  Here is Anne Sexton’s “The Farmer’s Wife”:

From the hodge porridge 
of their country lust, 
their local life in Illinois, 
where all their acres look 
like a sprouting broom factory, 
they name just ten years now 
that she has been his habit; 
as again tonight he'll say 
honey bunch let's go 
and she will not say how there 
must be more to living 
than this brief bright bridge 
of the raucous bed or even 
the slow braille touch of him 
like a heavy god grown light, 
that old pantomime of love 
that she wants although 
it leaves her still alone, 
built back again at last, 
mind's apart from him, living 
her own self in her own words 
and hating the sweat of the house 
they keep when they finally lie 
each in separate dreams 
and then how she watches him, 
still strong in the blowzy bag 
of his usual sleep while 
her young years bungle past 
their same marriage bed 
and she wishes him cripple, or poet, 
or even lonely, or sometimes, 
better, my lover, dead.

Soooo…pretty heavy stuff.  My drawings (paintings?) The Farmer and The Farmer’s Wife are also pretty heavy. 

I was inspired to create The Farmer after seeing a picture I took of my brother wearing a straw hat.  That’s not to say I find my brother to be a very stern and serious person.  He’s pretty much the exact opposite of the mood depicted in The Farmer.   After I imagined the farmer, I figured he needed a wife in a blue gingham dress (natch).  After I had both pieces finished I still felt like there was a third installment to be had.   As is often the case, I needed to do something that added a little humor into the whole thing. 

First Kiss was my answer to this need for humor, although, at first glance (or every glance?) it also appears to be quite serious.  I was inspired to create this piece after I had come across several references to engaged couples who chose to wait until their wedding day to have their first kiss.  Whenever I hear about this phenomenon, I simultaneously cringe and laugh.  I always get this mental image of a smoking hot blond bride and a groom who looks like Dwight Schrute, hence the bowl cut.  What can I say, I find it comical, and this work is my response.