#anne sexton
Anne Sexton, Transformations; from‘Rapunzel’
Anne Sexton, Transformations; from ‘One-Eye, Two-Eyes, Three-Eyes’
Anne Sexton, Live or Die; from ‘Live’
HAPPY 92nd BIRTHDAY Anne Sexton! RIP!
(9 November 1928 – 4 October 1974)
***
COURAGE
It is in the small things we see it.
The child’s first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.
Later,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
comver your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.
Later,
if you have endured a great despair,
then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off your heart,
then wringing it out like a sock.
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
you gave it a back rub
and then you covered it with a blanket
and after it had slept a while
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.
Later,
when you face old age and its natural conclusion
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
each spring will be a sword you’ll sharpen,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
and you’ll bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you’ll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out.
–Anne Sexton, “Courage” in The Awful Rowing Toward God, 1975
***
viaSierra Watts at https://www.tattoodo.com/
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Alisha W.’s tattoo via Facebook (Anne Sexton & Sylvia Plath Poetry Enthusiasts)
***
Today marks the 46th anniversary of Anne Sexton’s suicide! RIP!
(9 November 1928 – 4 October 1974)
Anne Sexton photographed by Gwendolyn Stewart, 1973
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HAPPY 91st BIRTHDAY Anne Sexton! RIP!
(9 November 1928 – 4 October 1974)
***
“Clifford, Vincent, Friedrich,
my scooter boys,
deep in books,
long before you were mad.
Zelda, Hannah, Renée.
Moon girls,
where did you go?”
–Anne Sexton, from “Iron Hans”, Transformations, 1971
***
Tattoo via instagram @ramblingandreading
***
(Please don’t forget to also like the picture there)
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Submitted by https://11041714011.tumblr.com/
I could admit
that I am only a coward
crying me me me
and not mention the little gnats, the moths,
forced by circumstance
to suck on the electric bulb.
But surely you know that everyone has a death,
his own death,
waiting for him.
So I will go now
without old age or disease,
wildly but accurately,
knowing my best route,
carried by that toy donkey I rode all these years,
never asking, “Where are we going?”
We were riding (if I’d only known)
to this.
–Anne Sexton, from “Suicide Note“ written, June 1965, Live or Die, 1966
***
Today marks the 45th anniversary of Anne Sexton’s suicide! RIP!
(9 November 1928 – 4 October 1974)
And if the memory of these days is all I ever have, it will be worth it.
Anne Sexton said, “As for me, I am watercolor. I wash off.” and Emily Dickinson said, “I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.” and Chuck Palahniuk said, “If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character… Would you slow down? Or speed up?” and Vita Sackville-West said, “Homesick we are, and always, for another And different world.” and Clarice Lispector said, “For one has the right to shout. So, I am shouting.” and Chelsea Hodson said, “I might be better as an idea, you said, and it was hard not to agree- everyone is better as a theory.” and Charles Bukowski said, “We have come so far and gone nowhere. We have lived so long and hardly at all.” and Jose Saramago said, “And here I am, trapped between today and the future and with no hope in either of them.” and Virginia Woolf said, “Do you still believe in life by the way?” and I am thinking about how badly I want to feel like I take up space.
I have been thinking about when Charles Bukowski said, “Find what you love and let it kill you.” and when R.Y.S. Perez said, “People should love in the same way that they should write; insistently, fervently, forever.” and when they said, “I will show you all the ways in which you are easy to love.” and when Yves Olade said, “I wanted to talk about love. You wanted to become it.” and when Pablo Neruda said, “I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.” and when Clive Barker said, “Wherever I go, I will speak of you with love.” and when Anne Sexton said, “I don’t care, I love you anyhow. It is too late to turn you out of my heart. Part of you lives here.” and when Christopher Citro said, “I love you. I want us both to eat well.”
Ashe Vernon said, “You are a language I am no longer fluent in but still remember how to read.” and Anne Sexton said, “I like you; your eyes are full of language.” and Salma Deera said, “My love translated sounds like a dead language.” and Czesław Miłosz said, “Language is the only homeland.” and Alice Notely said, “I can’t translate myself into language anymore.” and Hishaam Siddiqi said “One day I woke up and we no longer spoke the same language. I haven’t heard from you since.” and Jane Austen said, “and sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in.” and Henry James said, “She is written in a foreign tongue.” and I am in awe of language.
Anne Sexton Photographed by Arthur Furst (Summer 1974) featured in The Last Summer
HAPPY 93rd BIRTHDAY Anne Sexton! RIP!
(9 November 1928, Newton, MA – 4 October 1974, Weston, MA)
“Depression is boring, I think,
and I would do better to make
some soup and light up the cave.”–-Anne Sexton, from “ The Fury Of Rain Storms”, “The Death Notebooks”,The Furies, 1974
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Moodboard: A Cancer Winter Book List.
- Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin.
- Transformations by Anne Sexton.
- The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab.
- The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey.
- The Luminaries by Eleanore Catton.
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