Peter Paige reads "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph" by Anne Sexton

In celebration of National Poetry Month, every day we're posting a new poem from the spoken-word album Poetic License, a three-CD set that features one hundred performers of stage and screen reading one hundred poems selected by the actors themselves. From Shakespeare and Dickinson to Lucille Clifton and Allen Ginsberg, the lineup spans contemporary American poetry and classics of the Western canon.   

Anne Sexton (1928–1974), a contemporary of Maxine Kumin, Robert Lowell, and Sylvia Plath, turned to writing at the advice of her therapist as a means to manage mental illness. Her works include the poetry collections To Bedlam and Part Way Back (Houghton Mifflin, 1960), All My Pretty Ones (Houghton Mifflin, 1962), Transformations (Houghton Mifflin, 1971), The Awful Rowing Toward God (Houghton Mifflin, 1975), and 45 Mercy Street (Houghton Mifflin, 1976), edited by her daughter, Linda Gray Sexton, as well as the play Mercy Street, produced in 1969. Sexton took her own life in Boston in the fall of 1974.

Peter Paige, who wrote, directed, and starred in the 2005 indie film Say Uncle, has also played in the series Queer as Folk and had guest turns on television programs including Will and Grace and Grey's Anatomy. His stage credits include roles in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, and John Guare's Landscape of the Body.

"To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph" by Anne Sexton, from Poetic License produced by Glen Roven. Copyright © 2010 by GPR Records. Used with permission of GPR Records.