Wd Snodgrass Quotes

I have not learned how often I Can win, can love, but choose to die.

I am younger each year at the first snow. When I see it, suddenly, in the air, all little and white and moving; then I am in love again and very young and I believe everything.” Anne Sexton, in a letter to W.D. Snodgrass (November 28, 1958)

Song" Observe the cautious toadstools still on the lawn today though they grow over-evening; sun shrinks them away. Pale and proper and rootless, they righteously extort their living from the living. I have been their sort. See by our blocked foundation the cold, archaic clay, stiff and clinging and sterile as children mold at play or as the Lord God fashioned before He breathed it breath. The earth we dig and carry for flowers, is strong in death. Woman, we are the rich soil, friable and humble, where all our murders rot, where our old deaths crumble and fortify my reach far from you, wide and free, though I have set my root in you and am your tree.

The Poet Ridiculed by Hysterical Academics" Is it, then, your opinion Women are putty in your hands? Is this the face to launch upon A thousand one night stands? First, please, would you be so kind As to define your contribution To modern verse, the Western mind And human institutions? Where, where is the long, flowing hair, The velvet suit, the broad bow tie; Where is the other-worldly air, Where the abstracted eye? Describe the influence on your verse Of Oscar Mudwarp’s mighty line, The theories of Susan Schmersch Or the spondee’s decline. You’ve labored to present us with This mouse-sized volume; shall this equal The epic glories of Joe Smith? He’s just brought out a sequel. Where are the beard, the bongo drums, Tattered T-shirt and grubby sandals, As who, released from Iowa, comes To tell of wondrous scandals? Have you subversive, out of date, Or controversial ideas? And can you really pull your weight Among such minds as these? Ah, what avails the tenure race, Ah, what the Ph.D., When all departments have a place For nincompoops like thee?

Into flowers, into women, I have awakened. Too weak to think of strength, I have thought all day, Or dozed among standing friends. I lie in night, now, A small mound under linen like the drifted snow. from “The Operation

I sometimes think since I’ve retired, sitting in the shade here and feeling the winds shift, I must have been filled with a child dread you could catch somebody’s dying if you got too close. And you can’t be too sure.