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Cigarettes And Whiskey And Wild, Wild Women.

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Words

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When a man enters a woman

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Laura Duran
Carla Cassú

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ANNE SEXTON

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Poetry, Prose, Letters and Theater:

To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960)

The Starry Night (1961)

All My Pretty Ones (1962)

Live or Die (1966) - Pulitzer Prize in 1967

Love Poems (1969)

Mercy Street (1969) (Theater)

Transformations (1971)

The Book of Folly (1972)

The Death Notebooks (1974)

The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975 posthumou)

45 Mercy Street (1976 posthumou)

Anne Sexton: A Self Portrait in Letters, edited by Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames (1977 posthumou)

The Complete Poems, (1981 posthumou)

Books for kids:

Joey and the Birthday Present  (1974)

The Wizard's Tears (1978 posthumou)

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Anne Gray Harvey, known as Anne Sexton, was born on the 9th of November, 1928, in Norton, Massachusetts. Sexton belonged to a rich family, in which she was the youngest of three sisters. Although she studied in the Rogers Hall School, soon she left the school in order to marry Alfred Muller Sexton, known as Kayo. They had two daughters: Linda Gray Sexton (1953) and Joyce Sexton (1955). In 1954, Sexton was diagnosed her first postpartum depression, she suffered a nervous breakdown. Consequently she was admitted in the Westwood Lodge Hospital. A year later, after Joyce’s birth, she suffered and other crisis and was hospitalized. Her daughters were sent to their grandparents’ house. That year, on her birthday, Anne Sexton tried to commit suicide.

Her doctor, Martin Orne, advised her and recommended to enter a poesy club in 1957. Later, her poems achieved kind of recognition, especially with her publications in important magazines: New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, etc. Thanks to the poesy, Anne Sexton reached an emotional stable moment. However, in 1974, she committed suicide while she inhaled a poisonous gas, which caused her death.

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CIGARETTES AND WHISKEY AND WILD, WILD WOMEN

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CIGARETTES AND WHISKEY AND WILD, WILD WOMEN

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Perhaps I was born kneeling,
born coughing on the long winter,
born expecting the kiss of mercy,
born with a passion for quickness
and yet, as things progressed,
I learned early about the stockade
or taken out, the fume of the enema.
By two or three I learned not to kneel,
not to expect, to plant my fires underground
where none but the dolls, perfect and awful,
could be whispered to or laid down to die.

Now that I have written many words,
and let out so many loves, for so many,
and been altogether what I always was
a woman of excess, of zeal and greed,
I find the effort useless.
Do I not look in the mirror,
these days,
and see a drunken rat avert her eyes?
Do I not feel the hunger so acutely
that I would rather die than look
into its face?
I kneel once more,
in case mercy should come
in the nick of time.

VOCABULARY

Kneel - Agenollar-se

Stockade - Limitacions

Enema - Instrument médic

None - Res

Laid down - Anar a dormir

Zeal - Gelosa

Greed - Codiciosa

Mercy - Pietat

In the nick of time - Tiemps just

TOPIC AND INTENTION

This feminist poem uses words to make the poem more intense and aggressive.

In this poem, Sexton plays with the behaviour limits of the society. The writer transmits us that we must be happier and free as much as we can. She says that things are progressing and humans progressed too.

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When man
enters woman,
like the surf biting the shore,
again and again,
and the woman opens her mouth in pleasure
and her teeth gleam
like the alphabet,
Logos appears milking a star,
and the man
inside of woman
ties a knot
so that they will
never again be separate
and the woman
climbs into a flower
and swallows its stem
and Logos appears
and unleashed their rivers.

This man,
this woman
with their double hunger,
have tried to reach through
the curtain of God
and briefly they have,
though God
in His perversity
unties the knot.

VOCABULARY:

Shore - Costa

Gleam - Brillant

Milking - "Ordeñando"

Knot - Nus

Unleashed - Desfer

TOPIC AND INTENTION

Sexton presents a close view about an action, which wasn't normalized during those days.
She describes in detail the act of making love. The poet is using many metaphors to create an elegant poem.
Although she is trying to explain a pleasant moment in our lives, Sexton finishes the poem with a melancholy moment. This unhappy end is what characterise Sexton's poetry.
When you are reading the poem, many feelings came to your mind: From pleasure to sadness, passing through happiness.
Pleasure and happiness are the ones the poem transmits naturally. But, if you read it carefully, you will see how things in our lives start and end in the same way.

"ties a knot
unties the knot."

Vocaroo link: http://vocaroo.com/i/s1dJcm2ideZr

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Be careful of words,
even the miraculous ones.
For the miraculous we do our best,
sometimes they swarm like insects
and leave not a sting but a kiss.
They can be as good as fingers.
They can be as trusty as the rock
you stick your bottom on.
But they can be both daisies and bruises.

Yet I am in love with words.
They are doves falling out of the ceiling.
They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap.
They are the trees, the legs of summer,
and the sun, its passionate face.

Yet often they fail me.
I have so much I want to say,
so many stories, images, proverbs, etc.
But the words aren’t good enough,
the wrong ones kiss me.
Sometimes I fly like an eagle
but with the wings of a wren.

But I try to take care
and be gentle to them.
Words and eggs must be handled with care.
Once broken they are impossible
things to repair.

VOCABULARY:

Swarm - Zumbar

Sting - Picada

Trusty -Integres

Daisies - Margarides

Bruises - Morat

Doves - Colom

Ceiling - Caient

Holy - Sagrada

Wren - Reietó (ocell petit)

TOPIC AND INTENTION

Sexton advises us to be careful of what we say, because once we speak, the words we said, we can never go back and correct them.

She uses parallelisms between words and nature, we are encouraged to think about the innate essence of language and our amazing ability to learn.

At the end of the poem the poet tries to remind the reader to use words with care with these phrase:

‘Words and eggs must be handled with care.

Once broken they are impossible

things to repair.’