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...
My art flatters nobody by imitation; it courts nobody by smoothness, tickles nobody by petiteness... there is no finish in nature.
But music seems to me to be the most closely identified with my soul. I mean, I feel that it’s the best for me. It just gets into the bloodstream so quickly, for no reason at all. You can close your heart, and you can sleep even with your eyes closed, but you can never close your ears.
I played with an idea, and grew willful; tossed it into the air; transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox.
To be honest, when I was writing these stories a million years ago, I never thought about movies at all one way or another. It would have seemed almost miraculous for these things to be movies someday. To me, they were just comic books that I hoped would sell so I could keep my job.
People love fashion exhibits because they can fantasize. They can respond to a dress even if they can never wear a dress like that.
You know, I became a director out of necessity. I was writing comedies, and I couldn't find anybody to deliver it correctly.
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