anne sexton, from the last summer
I give you the images I know.
Lie still with me and watch.
--Anne Sexton, The Fortress
"Where others saw roses," her nieces write, "Anne saw clots of blood."
Poetry is my love, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.
I was often told that my poetry was too personal, too private. But the art, though it be suicide or murder, choses you. I let it do this and then I let it contiue its path, deeper and deeper. One night call that style. I think of it as a no-other-choice-project. I can't give my poems someone's face-lifting-job. Further, I won't. I've even stopped trying. The critics be damned. I just let the poems alone. No. Not that I don't rework. Some poems take years and hundereds of rewrites before they have their own sound, own face. I remember the long days, years of learning to write and that the thing I had to fight most for was this certain style. For praise or damnation, the poem must be itself. At best, one hopes to make something new, a kind of original product. Otherwise, why bother to hope, to make? And my newest poems are even more personal. They usually come from a part of me that I don't know, haven't met and won't understand for a couple of years. They know things I don't know myself.
I have found this somewhat unusual among writers in general. Fairy tales we all have in common-- but one marriage, seldom.
I am something of a tin can-- being opened up all the time.
--A
Lie still with me and watch.
--Anne Sexton, The Fortress
"Where others saw roses," her nieces write, "Anne saw clots of blood."
Poetry is my love, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.
I was often told that my poetry was too personal, too private. But the art, though it be suicide or murder, choses you. I let it do this and then I let it contiue its path, deeper and deeper. One night call that style. I think of it as a no-other-choice-project. I can't give my poems someone's face-lifting-job. Further, I won't. I've even stopped trying. The critics be damned. I just let the poems alone. No. Not that I don't rework. Some poems take years and hundereds of rewrites before they have their own sound, own face. I remember the long days, years of learning to write and that the thing I had to fight most for was this certain style. For praise or damnation, the poem must be itself. At best, one hopes to make something new, a kind of original product. Otherwise, why bother to hope, to make? And my newest poems are even more personal. They usually come from a part of me that I don't know, haven't met and won't understand for a couple of years. They know things I don't know myself.
I have found this somewhat unusual among writers in general. Fairy tales we all have in common-- but one marriage, seldom.
I am something of a tin can-- being opened up all the time.
--A