Tag: anne sexton

Jenny Holzer, Truisms (Marquees), 1993, installation, NYC

Muriel Zeller, “Self, Time and External Circumstances”

Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Mother”

Mona Hatoum, Marrow , 1996, rubber, 128.3 x 58.4 x 50.8 cm. (50.5 x 23 x 20 in

Doris Salcedo, Untitled, 1987, Steel cot, steel shelving, rubber, 10 plastic dolls and pig intestine, 1870 x 2410 x 460 mm, 65, Tate

Tracey Emin, Terribly Wrong 1997, monoprint on paper, 58.2 x 81.1. Tate

Frida Kahlo, My Birth, Mi Nacimiento, 1932

Anne Sexton, “The Abortion”

Sylvia Plath, April 18th 

Tracey Emin, Feeling Pregnant (in 6 parts) , 2000, clothes, wood and text

THE BELLS

Today the circus poster
is scabbing off the concrete wall
and the children have forgotten
if they knew at all.
Father, do you remember?
Only the sound remains,
the distant thump of the good elephants,
the voice of ancient lions
and how the bells
trembled for the flying man.
I, laughing,
lifted to your high shoulder
or small at the rough legs of strangers,
was not afraid.
You held my hand
and were instant to explain
the three rings of danger.
Oh see the naughty clown
and the wild parade
while love love
love grew rings around me.
This was the sound where it began;
our breath pounding up to see
the flying man breast out
across the boarded sky
and climb the air.
I remember the color of music
and how forever
all the trembling bells of you
were mine.

– Anne Sexton

Rebecca Horn, El Rio de la Luna 

“On the southwest side of Capri
we found a little unknown grotto
where no people were and we
entered it completely
and let our bodies lose all
their loneliness….
Water so clear you could
read a book through it.
Water so buoyant you could
float on your elbow.”

—A. Sexton

Writers need to be damned hard to kill. So do women, of course. I have never believed in suicide, the female poet’s alternative to standing her ground and facing down the power of men. I don’t like it that Plath and Sexton wrote strong and beautiful poems capturing the horror and meanness of male dominance but would not risk losing socially conventional femininity by sticking around to fight it out in the realm of politics, including the politics of culture. I always wanted to live. I fought hard to live. This means I did something new. I have been bearing the unbearable, and facing men down, for a long time now.

—-andrea dworkin, life and death