Quote

Every time I get happy the Nana-hex comes through. Birds turn into plumber's tools, a sonnet turns into a dirty joke, a wind turns into a tracheotomy, a boat turns into a corpse.

Anne Sexton

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Anne Sexton
Age: 45 †
Born: 1928
Born: November 9
Died: 1974
Died: October 4
Poet
Writer
Newton
Massachusetts
Anne Gray Harvey
Wind
Birds
Turn
Joke
Turns
Depression
Happiness
Boat
Nana
Happy
Dirty
Plumber
Comes
Jokes
Sonnet
Every
Tools
Corpse
Time
Bird
Corpses

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Images are probably the most important part of the poem. First of all you want to tell a story, but images are what are going to shore it up and get to the heart of the matter.
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God is only mocked by believers.
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Jewels! Today each twig is important, each ring, each infection, each form is all that the gods must have meant.
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But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy, have taken on his craft, his magic.
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Poets are sitting in my kitchen. Why do these poets lie? Why do children get children and Did you hear what it said?
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Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It’s as though I could fly.
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Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
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As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love.
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I raise my pelvis to God so that it may know the truth of how flowers smash through the long winter.
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With this pen I take in hand my selves and with these dead disciples I will grapple. Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.
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There is a good look that I wear like a blood clot. I have sewn it over my left breast. I have made a vocation of it.
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Writers are such phonies: they sometimes have wise insights but they don't live by them at all. That's what writers are like...you think they know something, but usually they are just messes.
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My sleeping pill is white. It is a splendid pearl it floats me out of myself, my stung skin as alien as a loose bolt of cloth.
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Come, my pretender, my fritter, my bubbler, my chicken biddy! Oh succulent one, it is but one turn in the road and I would be a cannibal!
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Suddenly I'm not half the girl I used to be. There's a shadow hanging over me . . . From me to you out of my electric devil.
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I am tearing the feathers out of the pillows, waiting, waiting for Daddy to come home and stuff me so full of our infected child that I turn invisible, but married, at last.
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What's the point of fighting the dollars when all you need is a warm bed? When the dog barks you let him in. All we need is someone to let us in. And one other thing: to consider the lilies in the field.
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When I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do.
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O yellow eye, let me be sick with your heat, let me be feverish and frowning.
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All day I've built a lifetime and now the sun sinks to undo it.
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