A Quote by Anne Sexton
The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.
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When I'm constructing a poem, I'm trying to write one good line after another. One solid line after another. You know a lot of the lines - some hold up better as lines than others. But I'm not thinking of just writing a paragraph and then chopping it up.
After sex, after coffee, after everything there is to be said --
The hovering and beautiful alphabet as we form our first words after making love.
And somehow I'm still alive.
I just wonder what has been the effect on the human soul of nearly a century in which we have regarded sex on screen as generally better than the sex we actually have, the sex which is, in fact, much better than anything we have seen in the movies, becuase it's sex, after all, and in the movies, it isn't.
When you are writing a spoken word poem, the tools you're working with are your voice, your body, how it's going to sound to someone when you're saying it out loud. Which is different from when you're writing it on the page. That toolbox becomes how does this look visually on the page, how does this read among pages, how is this in relation to poems that are before it or after it. I don't think one is better or more successful than the other. You've just gotta think about "what are the tools I'm using, and how are they most effective in this form?"
I keep feeling that there isn't one poem being written by any one of us - or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem - a community effort if you will. It's all the same poem. It doesn't belong to any one writer - it's God's poem perhaps. Or God's people's poem.
Sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you're limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter of an inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.
You must believe: a poem is a holy thing - a good poem, that is. The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle; unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods.
A very poor kid came up to me after a talk and said 'I want to go blow up a factory.' I asked how old he was and he said 17. I said 'have you ever had sex?' He said 'no.' I said 'just remember if you get caught you aren't going to have sex for twenty years at least.' That's not saying that one person having sex is worth the salmon. I'm not saying it's a reason not to act, I'm saying don't be stupid.
You never feel better than when you start feeling good after you've been feeling bad.
Years ago I was on television having a discussion with Billy Graham about atheism. He was saying, even if you're right and I'm wrong, and there's nothing after, I will have had a better life than you, because I do believe there was something. And I couldn't argue with that, even though I wanted to.
The "truth" is the poem itself. Just because someone writes a poem about a feeling she has does not mean that the feeling will stay forever. The truth of the emotion of the poem remains, even if the particular truth of the poet changes.
I did a film recently in the Republic of Georgia [upcoming 'Halo of Stars'] which was based on a long poem written by the director. We found that all these words were beautiful as a poem, but for humans it was more about the emotion or a look than just saying what was there.
After a break-up people always claim that things will get better, and in fact they do. ( but not because we in fact ARE better but that the pain, has beaten every last ounce of feeling from us. after we are wasted away, because food and drink seems to be like sand being choked down, and sleep is no comfort because you know you'll dream of them, and have to wake with knowing they'll not be there. after all this is accepted, we are what people claim is 'better'.
It's better for the whole world to know you, even as a sex star, than never to be known at all.
I once was asked to contribute to a mushroom poem anthology. I didn't have anything, and so instead ended up writing the introduction. I think that request made me more alert to mushrooms, and now they've cropped up in my work, the way mushrooms themselves do after rain, quite a lot. But I've only just now taken up mushroom hunting, after going to a class offered at my local library.
Sex can be fun after eighty, after ninety, and after lunch!
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