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Anne’s poetry is devastatingly poignant, as is her reading of it, but the background piano that was added is awful, trite, unnecessary, and distracting - and I’m a professional pianist.

She sounds buzzed

1:02. Ode to Billie Joe reference?

I wonder if she was wearing a Girdle while singing this

i am watching this at 4 am

Would ya look at that expression on her face, talk about a Mona Lisa smile. She had Sexy Resting Bitch Face.

"He wants to take leave among strangers passing out bits of his heart like hors d'oeuvres." Damn! I felt that!

Well done. Inner chaos does wonders for a poet, but it's a hard road.

Anne reciting her genious from the depths of her lungs, Sylvia speaking hers in tongues. I wish they've found a common sanctuary. I love them both in different ways.

Is this an Anne Sexton poem? I read it on the 1987 SAT in Indiana, and have never found it anywhere since. I cannot remember all the middle, and can't find it anywhere. I don't remember when I fell asleep, half up the stair or dropped from a summer hill or yawning into bedtime, for the dream so counterfeited me I could not tell I was asleep.... and the days were full... and my diary would show many deeds accomplished... but it was not true. I find the book dusty, unwritten in. Was it a kiss? I awoke and I was old.

Sheer genius X 🙂

Father, this year’s jinx rides us apart where you followed our mother to her cold slumber; a second shock boiling its stone to your heart, leaving me here to shuffle and disencumber you from the residence you could not afford: a gold key, your half of a woolen mill, twenty suits from Dunne’s, an English Ford, the love and legal verbiage of another will, boxes of pictures of people I do not know. I touch their cardboard faces. They must go. But the eyes, as thick as wood in this album, hold me. I stop here, where a small boy waits in a ruffled dress for someone to come ... for this soldier who holds his bugle like a toy or for this velvet lady who cannot smile. Is this your father’s father, this commodore in a mailman suit? My father, time meanwhile has made it unimportant who you are looking for. I’ll never know what these faces are all about. I lock them into their book and throw them out. This is the yellow scrapbook that you began the year I was born; as crackling now and wrinkly as tobacco leaves: clippings where Hoover outran the Democrats, wiggling his dry finger at me and Prohibition; news where the Hindenburg went down and recent years where you went flush on war. This year, solvent but sick, you meant to marry that pretty widow in a one-month rush. But before you had that second chance, I cried on your fat shoulder. Three days later you died. These are the snapshots of marriage, stopped in places. Side by side at the rail toward Nassau now; here, with the winner’s cup at the speedboat races, here, in tails at the Cotillion, you take a bow, here, by our kennel of dogs with their pink eyes, running like show-bred pigs in their chain-link pen; here, at the horseshow where my sister wins a prize; and here, standing like a duke among groups of men. Now I fold you down, my drunkard, my navigator, my first lost keeper, to love or look at later. I hold a five-year diary that my mother kept for three years, telling all she does not say of your alcoholic tendency. You overslept, she writes. My God, father, each Christmas Day with your blood, will I drink down your glass of wine? The diary of your hurly-burly years goes to my shelf to wait for my age to pass. Only in this hoarded span will love persevere. Whether you are pretty or not, I outlive you, bend down my strange face to yours and forgive you.

Bravo!

Dianne Middlebrook seems to really dislike Anne Sexton and takes every opportunity to belittle her in a passive aggressive manor

When I was studying at BU English Lit around 1970 we had seminars and were sometimes invited to the professorial homestead. One was memorable. A water bed in the middle of the floor and shelves of books on every wall surrounding it except the one window with a wonderful view of downtown Boston. The female students seemed quite impressed. Your description of the aura around this elite group so true.

🖤🌹🖤🇦🇺

Damn, she was beautiful, drunk and crazy. RIP.

Gosh there is such power in the words alone, it's hard for me to accept the band. With only a few exceptions I'm just not much of a fan of "poetry set to music"... I know, I know... Maybe I just need more time with it and allll the things you could say about it, but poetry alone has its own power that I feel is lost with music .. I know . What am I even saying ? But.. that is just my feeling, with all due respect to the project and the band.

The privilege of madness-a poem to Anne Sexton and when i fell in love with her poems in prison. I...I....I.... Always about me. Mine mine mine. For as far as the eye can see we bleed A labyrinth of destruction Like absent-minded religion And the sheepish tyrants Banging at the door, for silence Chewing down violence Until choking we riot and rott We wanted revenge i tell you It spilled out onto the floor Men like children Poking each other with sticks Crying for war Suckling from the tit Making prisons out of Profits and love Never enough Longing Ignored. I. Fell out the very walls holding me back And i scurried along the empty streets Searching for reason through this madness I found nothing but Broken pieces of people Strewn into masterpieces of Delusional hypocrisy Standards below unlivable Divisible By only faith and misery The truth of Thought, winging itself flight Into the ashes of mankind My words never seemed so brittle As i began to tremble Years of abusing myself with pleasure Until the child in me died Wilted like Saturday night Festive yet calling 911 Help Me! No one answers. In silence I linger a while In my own filth Divulging my indiscretions To the few who would listen, None truly grasping the depth And despair in my journey And i think to myself Why. Am i so selfish? To want misery over the perception vast and insolent To taste divinity inside and Retribution without Sacrament. I....i....i.... Drink my own sadness And rise up for the day, Another one And another Until i dimly Fade.

A TV ad for Hershey's cocoa: Still photo of Anne Sexton with mug. Her lips move like in those creepy youtube animations of dead poets reciting their work. As Sexton's lips move on her otherwise motionless face we hear: "Dear God, wouldn’t it be good enough just to drink cocoa?"

Fascinating..thank you

Exhilarating Anne Sexton was. Each word perfectly executed and an arrow thrust in meaning.

So beautifully disturbed and raw.

So it has come to this...

RIP Anne, you Poor Torture Soul*******

4:08 the 'alcoholic' pouring forth. Thats the berryman trap. thats what I call it.

What d'you think Simon Cowell would make of his doggerel?

This aged well!

Her voice is mesmerizing, I love her. 🖤🖤🖤

Rumi's reflection

Concerning your letter in which you ask me to call a priest and in which you ask me to wear The Cross that you enclose; your own cross, your dog-bitten cross, no larger than a thumb, small and wooden, no thorns, this rose- I pray to its shadow, that gray place where it lies on your letter ... deep, deep. I detest my sins and I try to believe in The Cross. I touch its tender hips, its dark jawed face, its solid neck, its brown sleep. True. There is a beautiful Jesus. He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef. How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in! How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes! But I can’t. Need is not quite belief. All morning long I have worn your cross, hung with package string around my throat. It tapped me lightly as a child’s heart might, tapping secondhand, softly waiting to be born. Ruth, I cherish the letter you wrote. My friend, my friend, I was born doing reference work in sin, and born confessing it. Thats is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy, they are the tongue’s wrangle, the world's pottage, the rat's star.

Gone, I say and walk from church, refusing the stiff procession to the grave, letting the dead ride alone in the hearse. It is June. I am tired of being brave. We drive to the Cape. I cultivate myself where the sun gutters from the sky, where the sea swings in like an iron gate and we touch. In another country people die. My darling, the wind falls in like stones from the whitehearted water and when we touch we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone. Men kill for this, or for as much. And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in their stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

Ms. Sexton went out looking for the gods. She began looking in the sky -expecting a large white angel with a blue crotch. No one. She looked next in all the learned books and the print spat back at her. No one She made a pilgrimage to the great poet and he belched in her face. No one. She prayed in all the churches of the world and learned a great deal about culture. No one. She went to the Atlantic, the Pacific, for surely God… No one. She went to the Buddha, the Brahma, the Pyramids and found immense postcards. No one. Then she journeyed back to her own house and the gods of the world were shut in the lavatory. At last! she cried out, and locked the door.

So it has come to this - insomnia at 3:15 A.M., the clock tolling its engine like a frog following a sundial yet having an electric seizure at the quarter hour. The business of words keeps me awake. I am drinking cocoa, the warm brown mama. I would like a simple life yet all night I am laying poems away in a long box. It is my immortality box, my lay-away plan, my coffin. All night dark wings flopping in my heart. Each an ambition bird. The bird wants to be dropped from a high place like Tallahatchie Bridge. He wants to light a kitchen match and immolate himself. He wants to fly into the hand of Michelangelo and come out painted on a ceiling. He wants to pierce the hornet’s nest and come out with a long godhead. He wants to take bread and wine and bring forth a man happily floating in the Caribbean. He wants to be pressed out like a key so he can unlock the Magi. He wants to take leave among strangers passing out bits of his heart like hors d’oeuvres. He wants to die changing his clothes and bolt for the sun like a diamond. He wants, I want. Dear God, wouldn’t it be good enough just to drink cocoa? I must get a new bird and a new immortality box. There is folly enough inside this one.

I am surprised to see that the ocean is still going on. Now I am going back and I have ripped my hand from your hand as I said I would and I have made it this far as I said I would and I am on the top deck now holding my wallet, my cigarettes and my car keys at 2 o’clock on a Tuesday in August of 1960. Dearest, although everything has happened, nothing has happened. The sea is very old. The sea is the face of Mary, without miracles or rage or unusual hope, grown rough and wrinkled with incurable age. Still, I have eyes. These are my eyes: the orange letters that spell ORIENT on the life preserver that hangs by my knees; the cement lifeboat that wears its dirty canvas coat; the faded sign that sits on its shelf saying KEEP OFF. Oh, all right, I say, I’ll save myself. Over my right shoulder I see four nuns who sit like a bridge club, their faces poked out from under their habits, as good as good babies who have sunk into their carriages. Without discrimination the wind pulls the skirts of their arms. Almost undressed, I see what remains: that holy wrist, that ankle, that chain. Oh God, although I am very sad, could you please let these four nuns loosen from their leather boots and their wooden chairs to rise out over this greasy deck, out over this iron rail, nodding their pink heads to one side, flying four abreast in the old-fashioned side stroke; each mouth open and round, breathing together as fish do, singing without sound. Dearest, see how my dark girls sally forth, over the passing lighthouse of Plum Gut, its shell as rusty as a camp dish, as fragile as a pagoda on a stone; out over the little lighthouse that warns me of drowning winds that rub over its blind bottom and its blue cover; winds that will take the toes and the ears of the rider or the lover. There go my dark girls, their dresses puff in the leeward air. Oh, they are lighter than flying dogs or the breath of dolphins; each mouth opens gratefully, wider than a milk cup. My dark girls sing for this. They are going up. See them rise on black wings, drinking the sky, without smiles or hands or shoes. They call back to us from the gauzy edge of paradise, good news, good news.

😭😭😭😢

The town does not exist except where one black-haired tree slips up like a drowned woman into the hot sky. The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars. Oh starry starry night! This is how I want to die. It moves. They are all alive. Even the moon bulges in its orange irons to push children, like a god, from its eye. The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars. Oh starry starry night! This is how I want to die: into that rushing beast of the night, sucked up by that great dragon, to split from my life with no flag, no belly, no cry.

I love her. Truly. But bish was crazy af. <3 Still, my favorite poet. The way she works with words.

I love her.........

2:26 I love u anne, Id call u annie to make u infantile like that happy child.

I DRINK HER BOOK AND GET LOST IN HER SADNESS. WHAT WAS WHAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN , MY HART SKIPS A BEAT TO HER GREATNESS.

what year was this interview conducted?

Too bad there are no professional recordings or better yet video.

substitute 'cheap red wine' for 'cocoa' and you'd think it was a bukowski poem

I am drawn to her poetry. Love this reading.

A second shock boiling it's stone to your heart? Any idea what this reference is?

Diane Middlebook should be ashamed of herself, as should Sexton's psychiatrist. Speaking of ghouls....

All poetry is confessional, whether we intend it or not

Anne Sexton's psychiatrist should be ashamed of himself. Granted, he followed the letter of the law and dotted his i's and crosed his t's but it seems to me he couldn't wait to spread the tawdry news. What a creep.

I find Middlebrook's entire project appalling, equivalent to robbing a grave.