In continuation of my post above...

Anne Sexton was My Ninth Grade English Teacher

Anne Sexton was my ninth grade English teacher.
Or maybe it was eleventh grade.
I'm not really sure.
I know it wasn't tenth grade or twelfth grade.
It doesn't matter.
Ninth grade, fourteen years old,
Eleventh grade, sixteen years old,
A bag of raging hormones either way, huh?
Let's call it ninth grade for the sake of argument.

I guess I did that on purpose, didn't I?
Saying "Anne Sexton was my ninth grade English teacher,"
Instead of "My ninth grade English teacher was named Anne Sexton?"
They say the same thing,
But they don't mean the same thing, do they?

As you've probably deduced, the Anne sexton who was my ninth grade English teacher
Was not the famous Anne Sexton,
Not the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Anne Sexton,
Not the multiple-volumes-of-verse-publishing Anne Sexton,
Not the pill-popping, booze-swilling Anne Sexton,
Not the manic-depressive Anne Sexton,
Not the suicide-committing Anne Sexton,
But another Anne Sexton.

That's not to say with 100% certainty that the Anne Sexton who was my English teacher
Wasn't pill-popping, booze-swilling, manic-depressive, or suicide-committing,
Only that, if she was, she wasn't famously so.
Her pill-popping, booze-swilling, or suicide-committing didn't make the papers.

Poet Anne Sexton was from Massachusetts.
Teacher Anne Sexton was from somewhere in the Deep South,
Though she tried her best to hide the fact by adopting a soft-spoken, finishing school voice.
But every now and then some kid would get her goat and she'd drop the genteel affectation
And lay into him with the vocal equivalent of a double-barreled twelve-gauge shotgun,
Both barrels fully loaded with red-dirt hill-country drawl.

Poet Anne Sexton was born in 1928.
I don't know with certainty when teacher Anne Sexton was born,
But I'm sure it was long after 1928.
She was a hottie.
Poet Anne Sexton would have been almost forty when I was in high school.
Teacher Anne Sexton was only in her twenties,
Young enough to inflame the gonads of male students.

Poet Anne Sexton worked as a model in her younger days.
Teacher Anne Sexton worked as a model, as well,
Mainly on weekends, when she wasn't teaching us how to diagram sentences.
As already stated, she was a hottie.
In fact, while the photographs I've seen of the younger Poet Anne Sexton
Don't much resemble what I remember of Teacher Anne Sexton,
Photos of the older Poet Anne Sexton look remarkably like
What I imagine Teacher Anne Sexton would have looked like
At the same age.