10 More Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by Anne Sexton

~ Paul Szlosek

“Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.”

“I am not a prophet but I think you will make it if you learn to revise, if you take your time, if you work your guts out on one poem for four months instead of just letting the miracle (as you must feel it) flow from the pen and then just leave it with the excuse that you are undisciplined.”

“Poetry, after all, milks the unconscious.”

“Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It’s as though I could fly.”

“Everyone in the world seems to be writing poems … but only a few climb into the sky.”

“My poems only come when I have almost lost the ability to utter a word. To speak, in a way, of the unspeakable.”

“You must be a poet, a lady of evil luck desiring to be what you are not, longing to be what you can only visit.”

“Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.”

“Writers are such phonies: they sometimes have wise insights but they don’t live by them at all. That’s what writers are like…you think they know something, but usually they are just messes.”

“I was born doing reference work in sin, and born confessing it. This is what poems are.”

—Anne Sexton

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Published by Paul Szlosek

Paul Szlosek was born in Southbridge, Massachusetts, but currently resides in the nearby metropolis of Worcester. He was co-founder and host of the long-running Poet’s Parlor poetry reading in Southbridge and Sturbridge, as well as a past recipient of the Jacob Knight Award for Poetry. His poems have appeared in various local publications including the Worcester Review, Worcester Magazine, Sahara, Concrete Wolf, and Diner. He’s probably best known in the Worcester poetry community for his fanatical obsession with obscure poetry forms, and has invented his own including the ziggurat, the streetbeatina, and (most recently) the hodgenelle.

14 thoughts on “10 More Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by Anne Sexton”

  7. I love these quotes.
    “My poems only come when I have almost lost the ability to utter a word. To speak, in a way, of the unspeakable.”
    Poetry is speaking in tongues, and everyone hears it in their own language! :>)

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