The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.
Interpretation
This quote expresses the profound joy and fulfillment that comes from creative expression through poetry, even surpassing physical intimacy.
Anne Sexton suggests that the emotional and artistic satisfaction derived from writing poetry can be more intense and gratifying than the pleasures of sexual experiences. This highlights the deep connection between creativity and personal fulfillment, illustrating how artistic creation can evoke feelings of beauty and joy that resonate deeply within us.
In practice
During a poetry reading, one might use this quote to illustrate the deep emotions involved in creating art.
The Witch's Life" When I was a child there was an old woman in our neighborhood whom we called The Witch. All day she peered from her second story window from behind the wrinkled curtains and sometimes she would open the window and yell: Get out of my life! She had hair like kelp and a voice like a boulder. I think of her sometimes now and wonder if I am becoming her.
Do you like me?” No answer. Silence bounced, fell off his tongue and sat between us and clogged my throat. It slaughtered my trust. It tore cigarettes out of my mouth. We exchanged blind words, and I did not cry, I did not beg, but blackness filled my ears, blackness lunged in my heart, and something that had been good, a sort of kindly oxygen, turned into a gas oven.
Don't bite till you know if it's bread or stone.
Abundance is scooped from abundance yet abundance remains.
I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.
I am your dwarf. I am the enemy within. I am the boss of your dreams. See. Your hand shakes. It is not palsy or booze. It is your Doppelganger trying to get out. Beware...Beware...
The writing process for a short story feels more like field geology, where you keep turning the thing over and over, noting its qualities in detail, hammering at it, putting it near flame, pouring different acids on it, and then finally you figure out what it is, or you just give up and mount it on a ring and have an awkward chunky piece of jewelry that seems weirdly dominating but that you for some reason like. I could be wrong about field geology here.
I write as if I were drunk. It is a process of intuition rather than placing myself above my story like a puppeteer pulling strings. For me, it's a scary, chaotic process over which I have little control. Words demand other words, characters resist me.
I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could.
Au revoir, jewelled alligators and white hotels, hallucinatory forests, farewell.
I believe that the reason why I love painting so much is that it forces one to be objective. There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality.
My boobs are fake, my hair's fake but what is real is my voice and my heart.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.