The Room of My Life

Here,

in the room of my life

the objects keep changing.

Ashtrays to cry into,

the suffering brother of the wood walls,

the forty-eight keys of the typewriter

each an eyeball that is never shut,

the books, each a contestant in a beauty contest,

the black chair, a dog coffin made of Naugahyde,

the sockets on the wall

waiting like a cave of bees,

the gold rug

a conversation of heels and toes,

the fireplace

a knife waiting for someone to pick it up,

the sofa, exhausted with the exertion of a whore,

the phone

two flowers taking root in its crotch,

the doors

opening and closing like sea clams,

the lights

poking at me,

lighting up both the soil and the laugh.

The windows,

the starving windows

that drive the trees like nails into my heart.

Each day I feed the world out there

although birds explode

right and left.

I feed the world in here too,

offering the desk puppy biscuits.

However, nothing is just what it seems to be.

My objects dream and wear new costumes,

compelled to, it seems, by all the words in my hands

and the sea that bangs in my throat.

 

Poulin, A., and Michael Waters. Contemporary American Poetry. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Print.

Anne Sexton Timeline

Poetry and Prose (collections and novels)

• Uncompleted Novel-started in the 1960s
• To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960)
• The Starry Night (1961)
• All My Pretty Ones (1962)
• Live or Die (1966) – Winner of the Pulitzer prize in 1967
• Love Poems (1969)
• Mercy Street, a 2-act play performed at the American Place Theatre (1969)
• Transformations (1971)
• The Book of Folly (1972)
• The Death Notebooks (1974)
• The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975; posthumous)
• 45 Mercy Street (1976; posthumous)
• Anne Sexton: A Self Portrait in Letters, edited by Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames (1977; posthumous)
• Words for Dr. Y. (1978)
• No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews and Prose, edited by Steven E. Colburn (1985)

From the New York Times

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/anne_sexton/index.html

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/14

In Celebration of My Uterus

Everyone in me is a bird.

I am beating all my wings.

They wanted to cut you out

but they will not.

They said you were immeasurably empty

but you are not.

They said you were sick unto dying

but they were wrong.

You are singing like a school girl.

You are not torn.

 

Sweet weight,

in celebration of the woman I am

and of the soul of the woman I am

and of the central creature and its delight

I sing for you. I dare to live.

Hello, spirit. Hello, cup.

Fasten, cover. Cover that does contain.

Hello to the soil of the fields.

Welcome, roots.

 

Each cell has a life.

There is enough here to please a nation.

It is enough that the populace own these goods.

Any person, any commonwealth would say of it,

“It is good this year that we may plant again

and think forward to a harvest.

A blight had been forecast and has been cast out.”

Many women are singing together of this:

one is in a shoe factory cursing the machine,

one is at the aquarium tending a seal,

one is dull at the wheel of her Ford,

one is at the toll gate collecting,

one is tying the cord of a calf in Arizona,

one is straddling a cello in Russia,

one is shifting pots on the stove in Egypt,

one is painting her bedroom walls moon color,

one is dying but remembering a breakfast,

one is stretching on her mat in Thailand,

one is wiping the ass of her child,

one is staring out the window of a train

in the middle of Wyoming and one is

anywhere and some are everywhere and all

seem to be singing, although some can not

sing a note.

 

Sweet weight,

in celebration of the woman I am

let me carry a ten-foot scarf,

let me drum for the nineteen-year-olds,

let me carry bowls for the offering

(if that is my part).

Let me study the cardiovascular tissue,

let me examine the angular distance of meteors,

let me suck on the stems of flowers

(if that is my part).

Let me make certain tribal figures

(if that is my part).

For this thing the body needs

let me sing

for the supper,

for the kissing,

for the correct

yes.

Poulin, A., and Michael Waters. Contemporary American Poetry. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Print.

History

Anne Sexton

1928-1974

Anne Sexton was born on November 9, 1928, in Newton, Massachusetts. Suffering from depression, she published her first book of poetry, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, in 1960. In 1967, she won the Pulitzer Prize and the Shelley Memorial Prize for her poetry collection Live or Die. She also published the book Transformations in 1971. Sexton committed suicide on October 4, 1974, in Weston, Massachusetts.

Anne Sexton put strong emotion and personal feelings behind her writings.  Her poems were used as a direct therapy for her mental illness.  She battled with severe mental illness much of her life and while in mental hospitals she spent time writing her poems.  Her poetry was a way to easily express her feelings and what she was thinking.  A doctor in her hospital was very impressed by her work and told her to keep writing as long as it continued to be therapeutic.  This kind of poetry, which unveils the poet's innermost feelings, is usually termed confessional poetry, and it is the subject of much critical controversy.  One of her strongest influences was Robert Lowell, who was a founder of the confessional movement. 

"Anne Sexton." The Poetry Foundation. N.p., n.d. Web. 03 May 2013.

"Miss Sexton is an interior voyager," –Joel O. Conarroe

"Anne Sexton." The Poetry Foundation. N.p., n.d. Web. 03 May 2013.

"Miss Sexton's work seems to me very little more than a kind of terribly serious and determinedly outspoken soap-opera." -Dickey

"Anne Sexton." The Poetry Foundation. N.p., n.d. Web. 03 May 2013

Analysis of In Celebration of My Uterus

In Sexton's poem, In Celebration of My Uterus she applies her wit and humor. She is taking a very uplifting approach to a very serious topic of her struggles of being a woman. The idea of a woman's sexual orientation makes most people raise their eyebrows and cringe, but the way she approaches this poem makes you feel a bit more comfortable.  She also makes it clear to the audience that as a woman she wants to be more than just a symbol and necessity for men.  In the second stanza she is referencing the life a woman can create inside of her and how delightful that is.