Anne Sexton

thumb|To love another is somethinglike prayer and it can't be planned, you just fallinto its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief. Anne Sexton (November 9, 1928 - October 4, 1974), born Anne Gray Harvey, was an American poet and writer. She won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1967 for Live or Die. Quotes thumb|We are all writing God's poem. We are all writing God's poem. As quoted by Erica Jong, in "Into the lion's den" in The Guardian (26 October 2000) To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) thumb|I imitatea memory of beliefthat I do not own. Even so, I must admire your skill.You are so gracefully insane. "Elegy in the Classroom" Referring to Robert Lowell Love your self's self where it lives.There is no special God to refer to; or if there is,why did I let you growin another place. You did not know my voicewhen I came back to call. All the superlativesof tomorrow's white tree and mistletoewill not help you know the holidays you had to miss. "The Double Image" I rot on the wall, my ownDorian Gray. "The Double Image" I imitatea memory of beliefthat I do not own. "The Division of Parts" I have ridden in your cart, driver,waved my nude arms at villages going by,learning the last bright routes, survivorwhere your flames still bite my thighand my ribs crack where your wheels wind.A woman like that is not ashamed to die.I have been her kind. "Her Kind" All My Pretty Ones (1962) All who love have lied. "The Operation" Fact: death too is in the egg. Fact: the body is dumb, the body is meat.And tomorrow the O.R. Only the summer was sweet. "The Operation" Need is not quite belief. "With Mercy for the Greedy" Dearest,although everything has happened,nothing has happened. "Letter Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound" A woman who writes feels too much,those trances and portents!As if cycles and children and islandsweren't enough; as if mourners and gossipsand vegetables were never enough.She thinks she can warm the stars.A writer is essentially a spy.Dear love, I am that girl. "The Black Art" It would be pleasant to be drunk:faithless to my tongue and hands,giving up the boundariesfor the heroic gin.Dead drunk is the term I think of,insensible,neither cool nor warm,without a head or foot.To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool.I will try it shortly. "Letter Written During a January Northeaster" And what of the dead? They lie without shoesin their stone boats. They are more like stonethan the sea would be if it stopped. They refuseto be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone. "The Truth the Dead Know" In a dream you are never eighty. "Old" Live or Die (1966) I was spread out dailyand examined for flaws. "Those Times..." I grow old on my bitterness. "Two Sons" Love! That red disease — "Menstruation at Forty" Why have your eyes gone into their own room? "Your Face on the Dog's Neck" But suicides have a special language.Like carpenters they want to know which tools.They never ask why build. "Wanting to Die" Love Poems (1969) thumb|You said the anger would come backjust as the love did. My mouth blooms like a cut.I've been wronged all year, tediousnights, nothing but rough elbows in themand delicate boxes of Kleenex calling crybabycrybaby, you fool! "The Kiss" I am alive when your fingers are. "The Breast" As for me, I am a watercolor.I wash off. "For My Lover, Returning to His Wife" You said the anger would come backjust as the love did. Again and Again and Again" He puts his bones back on,Turning the clock back an hour.She knows flesh, that skin balloon,the unbound limbs, the boards,the roof, the removable roof.She is his selection, part time.You know the story too! Look,when it is over he places her,like a phone, back on the hook. "You All Know the Story of the Other Woman" Catch me. I'm your disease. "Eighteen Days Without You": December 18th Transformations (1971) Beauty is a simple passion,but, oh my friends, in the endyou will dance the fire dance in iron shoes. "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" The Book of Folly (1972) With a tongue like a razor he will kissthe mother, the child,and we three will color the stars blackin memory of his motherwho kept him chained to the food treeor turned him on and off like a water faucetand made women through all these hazy yearsthe enemy with a heart of lies. "The Wifebeater" In my sights I carve himlike a sculptor. I mold outhis last look at everyone.I carry his eyes and hisbrain bone at every position.I know his male sex and I domarch over him with my index finger.His mouth and his anus are one.I am at the center of feeling. "The Assassin" My eyes, those sluts, those whores, would play no more. "Killing the Spring" A Small Journal (1974) ed. Howard Moss It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was. "The Poet's Story," January 1, 1972 entry The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975) The tongue, the Chinese say,is like a sharp knife:it killswithout drawing blood. "The Dead Heart" I am, each day,typing out the Godmy typewriter believes in.Very quick. Very intense,like a wolf at a live heart. "Frenzy" 45 Mercy Street (1976) What can I do with this memory?Shake the bones out of it?Defoliate the smile?Stub out the chin with cigarettes?Take the face of the man I loveand squeeze my foot into it,when all the while my heart is making a museum?I love you the way the oboe plays.I love you the way skinny dipping makes my body feel.I love you the way a ripe artichoke tastes.Yet I fear you,as one in the desert fears the sun. "Waking Alone" from The Divorce Papers I am murdering me, where I kneeled at your kiss.I am pushing knives through the handsthat created two into one.Our hands do not bleed at this, they lie still in their dishonor. "Killing the Love" from The Divorce Papers I am stuffing your mouth with yourpromises and watchingyou vomit them out upon my face. "Killing the Love" There is rust in my mouth,the stain of an old kiss. "The Lost Lie" from The Divorce Papers Words for Dr. Y (1978) Death,I need my little addiction to you.need that tiny voice who,even as I rise from the sea,all woman, all there,says kill me, kill me. "Letters to Dr. Y." I begin again, Dr.Y,this neverland journal,full of my own sense of filth.Why else keep a journal, if notto examine your own filth? "Letters to Dr. Y." God is only mocked by believers. "Letters to Dr. Y." Blue eyes wash off sometimes. "Letters to Dr. Y." Here in the hospital, I say,that is not my body, not my body.I am not here for the doctorsto read like a recipe. "August 17th" from Scorpio, Bad Spider, Die: The Horoscope Poems The Complete Poems (1981) We all walk softly away.We would stay and be the nurse butthere are too many of us and we are too worried to help.It is love that walks awayand yet we have terrible mouthsand soft milk hands.We worry with like.We walk away like love. "To Like, To Love" Earth, earthriding your merry-go-roundtoward extinction,right to the rootsthickening the oceans like gravy,festering in your caves,you are becoming a latrine. "As It Was Written" from Last Poems To love another is somethinglike prayer and it can't be planned, you just fallinto its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief. "Admonitions to a Special Person" (1974) from Last Poems 11px|frameless QOTD 2007·11·09 Sound file Quotes about I am deeply grateful to the women who really blazed the way-poets like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath and Maxine Kumin. 1992 interview included in Conversations with Rita Dove Edited by Earl G. Ingersoll (2003) External links Anne Sexton @ American Poems website Anne Sexton @ Modern American Poetry website Biography at FemBio – Notable Women International 1991 Don Swaim interview with Diane Wood Middlebrook, author of Anne Sexton (RealAudio) Category:1974 deaths Category:Poets from Boston