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Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning American poet born in Newton, Massachusetts. She attended Garland Junior College for one year and briefly worked as a model. She married Alfred Muller Sexton II at age nineteen, and in 1953 gave birth to a daughter. Shortly after, she was diagnosed with postpartum depression. When Sexton attempted suicide after the birth of her second daughter, her doctor encouraged her to pursue her interest in writing poetry, and in the fall of 1957, she enrolled in a poetry workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education.   Like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, W. D. Snodgrass (who exerted a great influence on her work), and other Confessional poets, Sexton offers the reader an intimate view of the emotional anguish that characterized her life. The experience of being a woman was a central issue in her poetry, and though she endured criticism for bringing subjects such as menstruation, abortion, and drug addiction into her work, her skill as a poet transcended the controversy over her subject matter. Sexton’s poetry collections include To Bedlam and Part Way Back, All My Pretty Ones, Transformations, and Live or Die, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967. In 1974 at the age of forty-six, Sexton lost her battle with mental illness and committed suicide.

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Evelina Todorovaцитуєторік
CONSORTING WITH ANGELS

I was tired of being a woman,

tired of the spoons and the pots,

tired of my mouth and my breasts,

tired of the cosmetics and the silks.

There were still men who sat at my table,

circled around the bowl I offered up.

The bowl was filled with purple grapes

and the flies hovered in for the scent

and even my father came with his white bone.

But I was tired of the gender of things.

Last night I had a dream

and I said to it …

“You are the answer.

You will outlive my husband and my father.”

In that dream there was a city made of chains

where Joan was put to death in man’s clothes

and the nature of the angels went unexplained,

no two made in the same species,

one with a nose, one with an ear in its hand,

one chewing a star and recording its orbit,

each one like a poem obeying itself,

performing God’s functions,

a people apart.

“You are the answer,”

I said, and entered,

lying down on the gates of the city.

Then the chains were fastened around me

and I lost my common gender and my final aspect.

Adam was on the left of me

and Eve was on the right of me,

both thoroughly inconsistent with the world of reason.

We wove our arms together

and rode under the sun.

I was not a woman anymore,

not one thing or the other.

O daughters of Jerusalem,

the king has brought me into his chamber.

I am black and I am beautiful.

I’ve been opened and undressed.

I have no arms or legs.

I’m all one skin like a fish.

I’m no more a woman

than Christ was a man.

February 1963
Evelina Todorovaцитуєторік
LOVE SONG

I was

the girl of the chain letter,

the girl full of talk of coffins and keyholes,

the one of the telephone bills,

the wrinkled photo and the lost connections,

the one who kept saying—

Listen! Listen!

We must never! We must never!

and all those things …

the one

with her eyes half under her coat,

with her large gun-metal blue eyes,

with the thin vein at the bend of her neck

that hummed like a tuning fork,

with her shoulders as bare as a building,

with her thin foot and her thin toes,

with an old red hook in her mouth,

the mouth that kept bleeding

into the terrible fields of her soul …

the one

who kept dropping off to sleep,

as old as a stone she was,

each hand like a piece of cement,

for hours and hours

and then she’d wake,

after the small death,

and then she’d be as soft as,

as delicate as …

as soft and delicate as

an excess of light,

with nothing dangerous at all,

like a beggar who eats

or a mouse on a rooftop

with no trap doors,

with nothing more honest

than your hand in her hand—

with nobody, nobody but you!

and all those things.

nobody, nobody but you!

Oh! There is no translating

that ocean,

that music,

that theater,

that field of ponies.

April 19, 1963
Evelina Todorovaцитуєторік
SYLVIA’S DEATH

for Sylvia Plath

O Sylvia, Sylvia,

with a dead box of stones and spoons,

with two children, two meteors

wandering loose in the tiny playroom,

with your mouth into the sheet,

into the roofbeam, into the dumb prayer,

(Sylvia, Sylvia,

where did you go

after you wrote me

from Devonshire

about raising potatoes

and keeping bees?)

what did you stand by,

just how did you lie down into?

Thief!—

how did you crawl into,

crawl down alone

into the death I wanted so badly and for so long,

the death we said we both outgrew,

the one we wore on our skinny breasts,

the one we talked of so often each time

we downed three extra dry martinis in Boston,

the death that talked of analysts and cures,

the death that talked like brides with plots,

the death we drank to,

the motives and then the quiet deed?

(In Boston

the dying

ride in cabs,

yes death again,

that ride home

with our boy.)

O Sylvia, I remember the sleepy drummer

who beat on our eyes with an old story,

how we wanted to let him come

like a sadist or a New York fairy

to do his job,

a necessity, a window in a wall or a crib,

and since that time he waited

under our heart, our cupboard,

and I see now that we store him up

year after year, old suicides

and I know at the news of your death,

a terrible taste for it, like salt.

(And me,

me too.

And now, Sylvia,

you again

with death again,

that ride home

with our boy.)

And I say only

with my arms stretched out into that stone place,

what is your death

but an old belonging,

a mole that fell out

of one of your poems?

(O friend,

while the moon’s bad,

and the king’s gone,

and the queen’s at her wit’s end

the bar fly ought to sing!)

O tiny mother,

you too!

O funny duchess!

O blonde thing!

February 17, 1963
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