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.
Interpretation
The quote describes the exhilarating moment of inspiration that precedes writing a poem.
Anne Sexton's quote captures the ecstatic feeling of anticipation that comes just before creativity strikes—an intense awareness and joy that something profound is about to be expressed. This delightful sense of elation is likened to the freedom of flying, illustrating the deep connection between the artist and their craft during bursts of inspiration.
In practice
During a poetry reading, one might use this quote to express the joyful experience of finding inspiration.
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 film project has been “twenty years of constipation,” and he likens the Hollywood process to “trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it.”
I try with my pictures to raise a question, to provoke a debate, so that we can discuss problems together and come up with solutions.
I am a professional sportswriter, among other things, and I take the games seriously. It is only one of my many powerful addictions, and I don't mind admitting any of them.
With stammering lips and insufficient sound I strive and struggle to deliver right the music of my nature.
I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any of my own people who would look where I bid them. I have therefore written down accurately and candidly much that I have heard and seen, and, except by way of commentary, nothing that I have merely imagined.
Because each photograph is only a fragment, its moral and emotional weight depends on where it is inserted. A photograph changes according to the context in which it is seen: thus Smith's Minamata photographs will seem different on a contact sheet, in a gallery, in a political demonstration, in a police file, in a photographic magazine, in a book, on a living-room wall. Each o these situations suggest a different use for the photographs but none can secure their meaning.
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