defend the indefensible: sylvia plath

godmother of bloggers everywhere and one of the most hideously bloated egos to ever exist. hi, honey, no one cares!

You're using that oven the wrong way, love.

I just bought and read "Ariel" last year and thought it was great.

I've always loved "Cut":

What a thrill ----
My thumb instead of an onion.
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of hinge

Of skin,
A flap like a hat,
Dead white.
Then that red plush.

Little pilgrim,
The Indian's axed your scalp.
Your turkey wattle
Carpet rolls

Straight from the heart.
I step on it,
Clutching my bottle
Of pink fizz. A celebration, this is.
Out of a gap
A million soldiers run,
Redcoats, every one.

Whose side are they one?
O my
Homunculus, I am ill.
I have taken a pill to kill

The thin
Papery feeling.
Saboteur,
Kamikaze man ----

The stain on your
Gauze Ku Klux Klan
Babushka
Darkens and tarnishes and when
The balled
Pulp of your heart
Confronts its small
Mill of silence

How you jump ----
Trepanned veteran,
Dirty girl,
Thumb stump.

not indefensible at all

The horizons ring me like faggots,
Tilted and disparate, and always unstable.
Touched by a match, they might warm me,
And their fine lines singe
The air to orange
Before the distances they pin evaporate,
Weighting the pale sky with a soldier color.
But they only dissolve and dissolve
Like a series of promises, as I step forward.

There is no life higher than the grasstops
Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind
Pours by like destiny, bending
Everything in one direction.
I can feel it trying
To funnel my heat away.
If I pay the roots of the heather
Too close attention, they will invite me
To whiten my bones among them.

The sheep know where they are,
Browsing in their dirty wool-clouds,
Gray as the weather.
The black slots of their pupils take me in.
It is like being mailed into space,
A thin, silly message.
They stand about in grandmotherly disguise,
All wig curls and yellow teeth
And hard, marbly baas.

I come to wheel ruts, and water
Limpid as the solitudes
That flee through my fingers.
Hollow doorsteps go from grass to grass;
Lintel and sill have unhinged themselves.
Of people and the air only
Remembers a few odd syllables.
It rehearses them moaningly:
Black stone, black stone.

The sky leans on me, me, the one upright
Among all horizontals.
The grass is beating its head distractedly.
It is too delicate
For a life in such company;
Darkness terrifies it.
Now, in valleys narrow
And black as purses, the house lights
Gleam like small change.

What a thrill ----
My thumb instead of an onion.
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of hinge

Of skin,
A flap like a hat,
Dead white.
Then that red plush.

what, i'm supposed to be impressed? fuck her. if she were alive today she'd do vlogs about her panties.

In the hands of any lesser poet it would be truly indefensible but she pulls it off.

Can't stand "Daddy" though.

As far as arguing the point, I'm having that "why bother?" feeling right about . . . now.

Thread of challops.

Do you know, the first two lines of "Cut" might be the bit of poetry that repeats most often in my head.

As far as arguing the point, I'm having that "why bother?" feeling right about . . . now.
― Neotropical pygmy squirrel, Saturday, August 22, 2009 3:49 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

her poetry's enough argument itself tho, if u don't appreciate it whatevs

read "Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams" recently and was quite impressed. early stories were overwritten but the later ones were very good. wish she'd written more fiction.

wait, did you seriously just "suggest ban" me?

lol did he sb me too?

It was a sincere question. I've never SBed anyone and I guess I've just foolishly assumed that no one has ever SBed me. How do you find out what your score is, anyway?

I checked, no-one appears to have suggest banned anyone as a result of this thread. Well, not yet anyway.

Cheers.

Daddy is horrendous but she's pretty ok.

UH @ this thread

We read a really cool short story of hers about Batman or something in high school as well.

Her poetry's quite good (as far as I can tell, I don't really do poetry). The Bell Jar is dull dull dull.

sb'd u jim

can't hate her because of her followers or college freshman, her poetry, arial in particular, is utterly fantastic.

otm

i love her new website "goop"

plath wrath

I think if this was called "defend the indefensible: sylvia plath fans" I would get the bile/hatred/dismissive stuff- it just seems like if you don't believe that people are responsible for their fans then you can't get off the ground with hating Syliva Plath on that score. If the charge is "bad poetry" it seems like there are far worse poets. If the point is that Plath's final decision is part of her life and thus that she is "responsible for" all the outcomes that trail from that final decision including both the personal pain and damage done to her family and the corny goth/emo cult of her suicidal authenticity, then we're having a "Suicide is indefensible" conversation and not a "her poetry is bad" conversation.

I rise with my red hair
and I eat men like air

indisputably classic surely?

her poetry drips with ego and smug self-satisfaction. i read her work and think, no one cares about you or your family or your suicide fetishism. just shut up and fuck off.

Was she actually an American-desperate-to-British, or do I just think that because of Gwyneth Paltrow?

i mean, fuck: "If I pay the roots of the heather /Too close attention, they will invite me /To whiten my bones among them." she can't even write about landscape without it coming back to ME ME ME. get the fuck OVER yourself, lady.

her poetry drips with ego and smug self-satisfaction. i read her work and think, no one cares about you or your family or your suicide fetishism. just shut up and fuck off.

― Yeah, well, jazz isn't exactly in love with Johnny either. (bug), Saturday, August 22, 2009 2:58 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

with less force and personal investment, I must say your posts have the same effect on me.

maybe i should blog about it

bug, who are your favourite poets just out of interest

"If I pay the roots of the heather /Too close attention, they will invite me /To whiten my bones among them." she can't even write about landscape without it coming back to ME ME ME.

don't read this as being about her at all, much more about the lure.

i like george oppen, mark doty, russell edson, erin belieu, michael s harper, robert creeley, li-young lee... i'm more into fiction, though.

http://www.bugoutwf.com/images/truck-bug-out.jpg

<3 russell edson

her poetry drips with ego and smug self-satisfaction. i read her work and think, no one cares about you or your family or your suicide fetishism. just shut up and fuck off.

― Yeah, well, jazz isn't exactly in love with Johnny either. (bug), Saturday, August 22, 2009 2:58 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

why the fuck are u reading her poetry if u dont care abt her family bro

i mean, fuck: "If I pay the roots of the heather /Too close attention, they will invite me /To whiten my bones among them." she can't even write about landscape without it coming back to ME ME ME. get the fuck OVER yourself, lady.

― Yeah, well, jazz isn't exactly in love with Johnny either. (bug), Saturday, August 22, 2009 3:01 PM (58 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

my dude what is the second word in that quote--this isnt a set of lines about landscapes

lol @ me for taking this seriously tho

lol save-a-plaths

lol at expecting lyric poetry not to be about the speaker

get the fuck OVER yourself, lady.

Of course she's got an ego and was self-obsessed: she suffered from depression. Anyone suffering from a depression only thinks about him/herself. One could argue that if Bug hatehatehates Sylvia Plath's socalled bloated ego,Bug (he? she?) should just stop reading it. That's a fair point, but I still disagree. What you should do, Bug, is argue why we're silly for loving her egotistic writings. But in a more... coherent and intelligent way.

Anyway, I never read her poetry, but count TheBellJar as one of my favourite books. Mostly because I read it at the right (or probably wrong) moment: I was suffering from a depression. But then I lack the right words. She didn't. My best friend of course hated it because 1 it was written by a woman and 2 the woman was also depressed. I wanted to throw the same words at her: if you hate it, convince me why I should stop loving it. But as of now I have yet to stop liking her book.

She also had an ego because she knew very well that she had talent.

this thread makes me wonder what bug thinks of teenage/young adult goth girls ... sylvia plath is definitely part of the teenage goth girl canon.

i've read her stuff because i was an english major and have read my share of poetry anthologies and been subjected to recitations of "daddy" and "lady lazarus." it's one thing that she was an egotistical asshole, but it's another for other people to validate her egotism and say she was correct in thinking so highly of herself.

lol at expecting lyric poetry not to be about the speaker

― horseshoe, Saturday, August 22, 2009 3:29 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

plenty of poetry is about the person speaking/writing it, sure, but plath, to me, is about nothing but plath. it irritates me that i'm expected to care about this person.

i don't know, she says a lot of retarded things like "zoo of the new" and "flap like a hat" that bothers me

my dude what is the second word in that quote--this isnt a set of lines about landscapes
― fleetwood (max), Saturday, August 22, 2009 9:00 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

is about landscape tho

i like george oppen, mark doty, russell edson, erin belieu, michael s harper, robert creeley, li-young lee... i'm more into fiction, though.

6/7 of those writers have something in common.

a penis

6/7 of those writers have something in common.

― Melissa W, Saturday, August 22, 2009 8:07 PM

o no u got me

a penis

^not a duplicate message

sure, there are lots of self-absorbed male writers. take your pick from any of the beats, say. but no one takes those fuckers seriously anymore, do they?

pretty sure ginsberg is still taken srsly

show me a poet who is not self obsessed btw

The main figures and early writers of the Beats were Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Herbert Huncke, Peter Orlovsky, and John Clellon Holmes. Certain poets the core Beats encountered in San Francisco were associated with the San Francisco Renaissance such as Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Lew Welch, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Harold Norse, Kirby Doyle, Michael McClure. The poets associated with the Black Mountain College were also associated with the Beat Generation, such as Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan (though Duncan was one of the most vocal early critics of the "Beat Generation" label). As well, there were the New York School poets such as Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch; surrealist poets Philip Lamantia and Ted Joans; and, poets who are occasionally called the "second wave" of the Beat Generation such as LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Diane DiPrima, Anne Waldman.

still pretty big deals

anyway, plath's poetry is great peace out motherfuckers

xpost

i mean, fuck: "If I pay the roots of the heather /Too close attention, they will invite me /To whiten my bones among them." she can't even write about landscape without it coming back to ME ME ME. get the fuck OVER yourself, lady.

― Yeah, well, jazz isn't exactly in love with Johnny either. (bug), Saturday, August 22, 2009 3:01 PM (58 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

The thing you're complaining about here is straight down the line in not just English poetry but the Western tradition. To ask a rhetorical question, what do Virgil's Eclogues, the anonymous "O Western Wind", Sir Philip Sidney's "Ye Goat-Herd Gods", Spenser's "Prothalamion" and Wordsworth's "Prelude" have in common if not a recursive affective feedback loop between landscape and (often suffering) lyric self? Not all poetry that makes that move is good, and lots of good poetry doesn't make that move- but *disliking that move as such* seems like a very odd way to separate good poetry from bad. And, if I may, quite a *presentist* gesture. It seems like precisely the sort of move that contemporary MFA programs might encourage young writers to titter at, but perhaps the problem is that it's a demanding move if it's too escape the charge of solipsism.

to escape, obviously

<3 f o'h because he says awesome things like:

I spill your whiskey: you are
beautiful! When my back is

turned you still love me.
Mirrors go blind in our flame.

still pretty big deals

I feel like among poets only O'Hara and to a lesser extent Koch and maybe, maybe Ginsberg is anything like a "big deal."

The thing you're complaining about here is straight down the line in not just English poetry but the Western tradition. To ask a rhetorical question, what do Virgil's Eclogues, the anonymous "O Western Wind", Sir Philip Sidney's "Ye Goat-Herd Gods", Spenser's "Prothalamion" and Wordsworth's "Prelude" have in common if not a recursive affective feedback loop between landscape and (often suffering) lyric self? Not all poetry that makes that move is good, and lots of good poetry doesn't make that move- but *disliking that move as such* seems like a very odd way to separate good poetry from bad. And, if I may, quite a *presentist* gesture. It seems like precisely the sort of move that contemporary MFA programs might encourage young writers to titter at, but perhaps the problem is that it's a demanding move if it's too escape the charge of solipsism.

― Neotropical pygmy squirrel, Saturday, August 22, 2009 8:18 PM

well, sure, there's nothing wrong with the feedback loop of observer and landscape. it just annoys me that, yet again, we can't get away from this overbearing plath ego.

bug, what poets do you consider good?

oh wait you answered this, a lot of poets who aren't as good as sylvia plath was

srsly though dude if "ego" in poetry is your complaint, then you need to avoid poetry altogether

btw u all forgot that TED HUGHES KILLED SYLVIA (WITH HIS RAPIST'S PENIS)

oh wait you answered this, a lot of poets who aren't as good as sylvia plath was

― Man Is Nairf! (J0hn D.), Saturday, August 22, 2009 8:23 PM

O SNAPZ U GOT ME

ted hughes was at least free of the prison of lol ego

go write a shitty indie song about it

john d i said all this already

o snapz u got sylvia plath

On a side-track, Clellon Holmes' Go is a great book worthy of yr attention, as far as I can tell. He reminds me a lot of Nelson Algren's best stuff.

Most of Plath's writing is way too technically adept to get into arguments about her ego. You might as well say that all first person lyrics are bloggeresque - that's bollocks.

go write a shitty indie song about it

OH SNAPZ YOU GOT ME

got any more challops while you're here? we could make this "bug's thread of extremely challenging opinions"

we cd make it his defend the indefensible

fuck you people

pretty much how this is gonna break down: 1) people who know something about poetry think her craft is pretty f'in impressive 2) people who're trying to flex a very edgy pose think she SUCKS

She's totally self-obsessed...but it's the way she expresses herself that I love. She doesn't just tell you. She draws you a picture. I get that as a reader you're basically trapped in her head, seeing what she sees...but her use of language, symbolism, and the cadence of her poems...that's the appeal for me. I'm not in love with the fact that she was depressed.

and ego shmego. William Blake wrote his own bible. If poets just wanted to tell stories they'd write novels. There's almost an implicit 'me me' quality in writing poetry, because the form itself draws attention to the author as much to the subject matter.

I don't know what I'm trying to say. Carry on.

THE_BELL_JAR ok guys i'm going to stick my head in the oven and see why its not working 2 hours ago from web

THE_BELL_JAR @tedhughes i know u dont give a shit asshole but the oven isnt working anymore!! 2 hours ago from web

oh hai guys wanna know wat i think about sylvia plath btw?

go for it dude

nah fuck it

I think that might have been the funniest KBP post I've seen so far.

i've even reconsidered my dickens challops since yesterday, tbh

real life lol king boy pato

its really hard to know what the real challop is on a thread like this u no?

Hard Times is plenty fun darragh, I'm still a bit baffled at yr allergic reaction to it.

real life lol king boy pato
^middle line of my most recent KBP-related haiku btw

what are the first and third?

Thread has blown my mind.

we stealin this thread? my allergic reaction to hard times got me full marks in the leaving cert, cos i studied like gospel every challopy criticism of it. i guess that's what hating something with 'a passion' is.

plath twitter updates
real life lol king boy pato
challops remedy

xpost

Yeah, well what they want is: facts.

here comes big hoos
aka the steendriver
mind completely blown

rockin accidental freeform there

a challop is just an unpopular fact, sheeple

here comes big hoos

John bringing the Finnegans Wake quotes.

do sheeples challop thru the fields i wonders

a challop is just
an unpopular fact, sheeple
or so you say, dude

Sheeples may safely graze.

For a thread of defending some of you sure seem to not nderstand the meaning of the word.

I have never met a single "goth teenage plath fan" type. In fact no one I knew was much into poetry at all.

I appreciated the visceralness of her lster work, and I find intrigue in the raked-over coals of her life, I admit. I most certainly don't adhere to the "omg ted was a bastard" line - in fact I'm a little the other way, I think Plath would have been pretty unbearable to live with, as was her way with the problems she had.

In "Birthday Letters" Hughes writes a poem about her I rather like called "Fever", which has a section that turns her whole vigorous drama on its head:

As I paused
Between your mouthful, I stared at the readings
On your dials. Your cry jammed so hard
Over into the red of catastrophe
Left no space for worse. And I thought
How sick is she? Is she exaggerating?
And I recoiled, just a little,
Just for balance, just for symmetry,
Into skeptical patience, a little.

Sorry for my typos, this computer's screwy and keeps freezing.

"a challop is just an unpopular fact" is a challop

like pink sprouts of truth
through the brittle winter snow:
the challops in bloom

do challops dream of
electric sheeple in the
panty vlog fuck world

""a challop is just an unpopular fact" is a challop" is a challop

nah KBP that's an unpopular fact

I will say I prefer Ted's work to Sylvia's. I have no idea of the currency of that opinion.

^^ u have a penis

how's ur 800m time hoos

they call me usain

Hughes' body of work is about 20 times bigger than Sylv's so there is an unfair advantage there but yeah Hawk in the Rain to Wodwo is still better and I say that having plenty of love for SP.

usain, usain,
ur just insane,
in the membrane.

my favorite plath anyway has always been "morning song" - I think the big problem with plath is she's the only poet of the modern age whose bio intersects so aggressively with the poetry. it's true too of lowell, and berryman, and the other (lesser imo) confessionals, but plath is like wilde to both her supporters & detractors: separating the poetry from the person, the content from the story, is something she has made very difficult. maybe as part of her poetic project but if I were going to make a semester of it I would argue not: that her focus in on craft, that content is almost an afterthought for her BUT like any (egocentric, reflection-obsessed) poet she leans toward content that will impress others. and "this is what it feels like to crave death with your eyes open"/"this is how the world looks from down here in my own personal pit" is/was stuff that people found riveting, and in which see found inspiration. but it's all afterthought, that bit - it's about the actual writing that people went gaga. "And now you try/your handful of notes/the clear vowels rise like balloons"? Anyone who's spent a few minutes in the company of a babbling infant, much more an infant for whom one has some personal feeling, feels the heft of that, the beauty. That sort of poetry is why people love her writing: the ability to communicate something with such almost aggressive clarity. imo obv

I will say I prefer Ted's work to Sylvia's. I have no idea of the currency of that opinion.

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Saturday, August 22, 2009 9:47 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

oh, hoos

maybe I should just go write a shitty indie song about it tho

there was a young (wo)man name caster
who's genes made her (possibly) faster
at the end of the race
she had finished first place
and the other competitors hinted that (s)he had a cock

damn if people's are actually still using this thread i'm sorry, thought it had degenerated beyond use. where else can we party drunk tonite imo?

do challops dream of
electric sheeple in the
panty vlog fuck world

sadhu! sadhu!

I don't think she's the only one ... Anne Sexton is in the same camp, and to my knowledge are on the same level, reputation-wise.

AFAIK Sexton is way more firmly tied to the confessional thing by poetry critics than SP, and her rep is consequently a lot lower.

do people still dig sexton? last time my opinions on poetry had any currency she was in serious decline

oh, hoos

― horseshoe, Sunday, August 23, 2009 1:53 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

what i'm right here man

lol sorry! i think hughes is mediocre and plath is great, but i don't know how "current" that view is tbh.

i mean i've only read "selected" of either tbh so take my opinion as one will

more twitter plz

"And now you try/your handful of notes/the clear vowels rise like balloons"? Anyone who's spent a few minutes in the company of a babbling infant, much more an infant for whom one has some personal feeling, feels the heft of that, the beauty.

Yes this. "Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing/I want to fill it with color and ducks"... I'm not even a mother but she evokes that love of newness and awe of the child so beautifully. When she was still and comtemplative her poems were really very lovely.

the ability to communicate something with such almost aggressive clarity

yes, love this way of putting it

Apparently the suicide wasn't really meant to happen. I am not sure where I found the link to the article but it analysed the suicide was merely a cry for attention.

Wd have more chance of being heard crying for attention with yr head outside the oven imo

Roffle. Probably.

wtf @ please ban me (although that "go write a shitty indie song about it" did made me think bug was maybe fishing for a timeout)

wtf are you people doing talking about Plath? Go read Elizabeth Bishop.

I checked, no-one appears to have suggest banned anyone as a result of this thread. Well, not yet anyway.

prophetic

wtf are you people doing talking about Plath? Go read Elizabeth Bishop.

― post-contrarian meta-challop 2009 (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, August 23, 2009 10:03 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

post/screenname

<3 Bishop

When I was in secondary school I was obsessed with the few Plath poems that were in our English Reader, Mirror, Finisterre, The Arrival of the Bee Box, Elm, Pheasant and Poppies in July. They felt sharp and flinty and yowling with a goth-girl mania that made sense to me. In the middle of Patrick Kavanagh and Seamus Heaney, she felt a lot more relatable to angsty me, and the hard, right angled rhythms of her poems called out to me. You know that "I know the bottom." I don't pretend to be any particular poetry buff. I'm one of those ppl who wonders what it is they're supposed to be looking at wrt poetry most of the time. But a lot of her phrasing seems clumsy and grasping to me now. Maybe that's part of her appeal but "I want to fill it with ducks"? psshht. Still, fourteen year old me was definitely a prime example of the college girl mentality that misinterpreted her suicide as romantic, and I reread the brief bio over and over.

what the hell kind of goof gets butthurt and self-bans over a sylvia plath thread?

<3 bishop

defend the indefensible: ted hughes I really could have got w/ tho.

sorry for being a jerk, bug. rip

the kind of goof who thinks "ok shit just got so heated i called a dude out by his ACTUAL DAYJOB on a sylvia plath thread maybe i need an ilx time out"? idk that seems of... sensible.

xposts

this thread needs to be summarized in a series of photos

Anyway, Plath. Lady Lazarus is the poem I get stuck in my head most often - pretty much every time I pass a pair of public toilets in the right order, and my brain goes "gentlemen, ladies, // these are my hands / my knees. / i may be skin and bone / / nevertheless..." and so on. And so I give her respect for catchiness, for the strength of lines that I haven't forgotten the way I've forgotten so many other poems I studied in school and loved as I did so.

I like the confessional style, and I like hyperbolic poetry, but there's a grandeur to her phrases and a sort of-- muscularity? Perhaps it's even the same muscularity I don't like in e.g. Hughes' poetry, there's something trimmed-down, sinewy, definite. She knows the effect she's aiming for and she writes to that effect, no word is used except in its service. I read her poems and think: I have never felt anything as clearly as what this poem is feeling.

http://spicybrat.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/ladybug.jpg

http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGS/Shared/StaticFiles/animals/images/primary/mountain-goat.jpg

http://gizmodo.com/assets/resources/2008/02/dual-pizza-oven.jpg

I like Plath *and* Bishop. And Lowell, and O'Hara, and Roethke, and Berryman. Dunno why I'm particularly fond of at era of US poets but it stuck somehow - studying Lowell in high school might have started it I think (I read him well before Plath).

well done cool app

Sylvia reminds me of Roethke quite a bit.

turangalia otm though Roethke has that wanna-make-sure-you-know-about-the-physicality part that afflicted a lot of menfolk poets back then & may still whereas plath is willing to get fully spirit-breakin-free about it

Plath wrote many stunning lines, and her instinct for startling enjambments was a rare gift, but I can't reread her. I teach "Daddy" a lot in class, to fascinating responses. Most of my students recognize its power without being able to explain its source. I ask them whether the primal emotions it deals with require the adducing of Holocaust imagery for their force.

To me this is her only truly realized poem:

The woman is perfected.
Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity

Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare

Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.

Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little

Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded

Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden

Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.

The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.

She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.

" ' "a challop is just an unpopular fact" is a challop' is a challop" is a challop

Roetke is a much better poet in my opinion.

"I long for the imperishable quiet at the heart of form" is one of my favorite verses by anybody.

btw if you guys see a copy of that edition of Bishop-Lowell letters published last year, snap it up. That thing unearths pleasure after pleasure.

Roetke is a much better poet in my opinion.

oh man you're a bold man to make this claim. with plath you have a trajectory that ends in very early near-perfection. with Roethke you have a lot of crap, amongst which you find gems that Plath didn't live long enough to learn how to craft. can't go with you that far - bad roethke is way worse than immature plath imo

Oh, I agree - Plath's poetry is perfected in a way that makes Roethke look like an amateur; and he still makes me cringe. But if it's a simple taking-sides situation Roetke >>> Plath.

I mean, I'm more of a Snodgrass-Hecht-Merrill-Bishop guy anyway.

/polishes copy of lowell-bishop letters

TS: Ted Hughes vs. Courtney Love

Having just caught this thread, I would defend Plath on simple grounds: she gets read.

Not many poets of the past 50 years have made any dent on the consciousness of the public. She did. You try doing the same and see how far it gets you. Whether or not this poet or that one is "better" is debatable. Whether Plath gets read is not debatable.

Billy Collins is read too.

Do you teach him too, Alfred?

I could teach him to keep quiet.

I would say the same of Billy Collins, too. He may not be the best poet going, but he is hardly "indefensible"; he just connects with people at a level that doesn't require much stretching to reach.

why don't we turn this thread into something productive: what's a good Plath primer

if you only read one Plath poem in your life...

jesus christ yall

lol otm

what the hell kind of goof gets butthurt and self-bans over a sylvia plath thread?

― call all destroyer, Sunday, August 23, 2009 5:47 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

haha i think the answer to this is "a sylvia plath fan"

cept in this case it was a "sylvia plath hater!"

self-hating plath lover

I've never read sylvia plath

me fucking either!

She's really not that bad, you know.

oh i wouldn't think of her as bad, from what i know. in fact i'm quite curious.

If you can get a copy, get the whole collected poems. Her fiction is a bit meh, but some of the short stories in "johnny panic" are ok (the title story's pretty cool)

Bell Jar is so so.

i think the bell jar is pretty great

UH @ this thread

― horseshoe, Saturday, August 22, 2009 11:36 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark

Sunny: I liked it plenty when I first read it. Compared to her poetry though I find her fiction ... I dont know, lacking somehow. I do realise though that from her POV (at least from what her journals note) she always thought of poetry as "an evasion of the real job of writing" and wanted to be a novelist. Its a shame really, I'd love to have seen how a novel with the power of the Ariel poems might have come out.

UH @ this thread

― horseshoe, Saturday, August 22, 2009 11:36 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark

― \(^o\) (/o^)/ (ENBB), Tuesday, August 25, 2009 2:41 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

The collected poems really are great. I don't have an image of Plath the Superego going 'me! me! me!' like some are trying to say here, but if you do it will probably wear off soon when immersing in her poetry.

it only bugs people cause she was a rich pretty girl

who cares imo

Can fans at least see why someone might be turned off by the sentiment behind "Edge", beyond just wanting to strike a challopsy pose? (I don't have a strong opinion on Plath myself and am not especially knowledgeable about poetry.)

The woman is perfected.
Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity

Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare

Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.

Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little

Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded

Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden

Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.

The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.

She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.

for some reason i imagine mark e smith reciting this

^^^^YES

I can imagine mark e smith reading the instructions on the back of a package of crepe mix ...

true but there's something about the enjambements which is VERY MES

after the Blixa Bargeld hardware catalog video, I frequently imagine musicians with distinctive vocal styles reading other things.

Also, the starkly didactic imaging is extremely Smith-esque

how do you define didactic?

Each image doesn't leave any room for interpretation; it is a discrete but absolute item. Aspect and emotion are assigned by the poet. We are being told not just things but of things and how they are. Happenings are instructed.

hmm ... I always think of didactic as meaning - lecturing; presenting an arguable viewpoint or opinion in a stark manner, without much room to negotiate/read nuance ... like the thread title.

it only bugs people cause she was a rich pretty girl

yeah, i hate gwyneth paltrow

see!!

seen

Have never read Plath, but I thought her deal was that she validated depression among those who had no outward reason to be depressed, having had pretty much every other advantage? Thot she gave the rallying cry of a certain kind of female depression/searching-for-self of "nothing practical is wrong but no one understands me" which is either "UGH not again" or "my soul has found its harbor" depending on who you ask.

thing is, historically it seems like there are plenty of male poets and writers that did this well before her time.

But for women? My impression was that there was something specifically feminine about SP's writing, voice, message, whatever.

marketing

exactly - it's the combination of validating depression for the upper classes and her gender, and that she focused on it

irl, i don't think i know a single poet who enjoys thinking about or reading Sylvia Plath at this point in time. same with ginsberg.

i do admire her line, and her assonance is admirable, but the content of her poems bores the living hell out of me.

also, just a note to MR D4rnielle: You are so fucking wrong about Lowell and Berryman being lesser poets. So incredibly wrong, it almost hurts me inside that someone could be so wrong.

Bishop >> Merrill >>>>> Lowell > Berryman >> Plath

oh alfred I think we're in telepathic agreement there

def. agree that Lowell > Plath, but I do know poets who think about and read Plath, for what that is worth

If anything, the 'contemporary' culture of death-romanticization is so inextricably tied to her work, it can be ignored by anyone who finds such sentiments unappealing, if not downright irresponsible and selfish.

no frakn way, alfred.

Lowell>Berryman>Bishop>Merrill>Plath .

i mean, there are tons that beat all of these to a pulp, but i won't get into that here.

maybe if more poets read and thought about plath more people would read poetry!!!!

Have you watched Annie Hall, tabes?

I find Lowell mostly unreadable after 1968.

maybe if people would turn off their fucking televisions, they would read more. that ain't gonna fucking happen, so let us poets wallow in academia and free-lance criticism circles of masturbation plz thx.

i think internet is bigger barrier to reading of poetry than television tbh, although at least the one can be incorporated into the other

Sonnet: Typical Bishop, not a word wasted. She would often pin up poems in front of her desk, a line or so short of completion; some might stay there for ten years before there were finished. You'd think she could have just made it up...

<3 bishop

i have seen annie hall. many times.

Lowell's best poem is "New York 1962: Fragment." hands-down one of my favorite poems ever written.

what's weldon kees place in academia? forgotten?

LJ, do you have any idea how many internet-only poetry journals there are? or the number of blogs discussing contemporary poetry on the internet? not trying to be an asshole, but i don't think you do-- the internet is full of poetry. i would say that television has some poetry in it, but it also is a much more passive activity than spending time on the internet.

anyway.

Yeah I meant in my own case. I know there's poetry on the internet, hence the last clause of my post. If you could link some of the better blogs, that'd be nice.

"I got poetry in me."

http://www.popmatters.com/images/features_art/1/100-male-film-beatty.jpg

www.ohhla.com

man i am a total philistine when it comes to poetry. don't get it, don't read it, don't enjoy it, don't really care.

not that this is the right thread to air that out but w/e.

^^ TELEVISION-WATCHER

don't watch tv either!!

^^ INTERNET-USER

gotcha

bzang

LJ, look up Tarpaulin Sky and Jacket Magazine . these are two of the best.

grooviness

Best Internet-specific poetry I've seen (turn your sound on): http://www.yhchang.com/DAKOTA.html

do you like FENCE, table?

All sorts of conflicted about Plath. Loved her at 15, hated by 18, and on through my early 20s. Now I admire & sometimes really like stretches of her: the line is great, but I think she can pack in too much of that clickety click alliteration and pack-the-stresses long-vowel assonance - feels a bit of cheap way to get the suffocation effects, but it does often come off.

Maybe related: she seems to have big anxiety/ambition about being a serious poet - I feel like the poems are gritted-teeth working towards that, maybe too self-conscious about it. I mean it's a stupid criticism in a way - isn't that part of how a poet works towards a traditional sort of greatness? - but when it isn't coming together it looks a bit like a set of learned effects.

Great eye I think - arresting images. I especially like the Bee poems, a few others from before the Ariel extremities, that middle period of strong craft. She's quite an odd British/American hybrid.

I tried to re-read The Bell Jar recently, but didn't get that far. I was going back and forth between being impressed at her knack for intense & precise description/images and getting annoyed at what felt like attempts to impress by extended passages of this.

I've had a steadier enjoyment of Lowell and Berryman over the years, but I'd certainly take Plath at her best over the later Dream Songs or most of the Notebook/Dolphin poems. Bishop over any of them, though.

http://www.poemsthatgo.com/gallery/summer2000/redlily/eliet.html

cool site but long abandoned

FENCE is pretty good— I haven't seen an issue since the Spring of 08, but I remember an essay from an issue a year before that totally blew me away: Brad Cran's "Cinéma Vérité and the Collected Works of
Ronald Reagan: A History of Propaganda in Motion Pictures." totally excellent reading.

woofx3, some of the middle-late Dream Songs are among the best. like 191:

"The autumn breeze was light & bright. A small bird
flew in the back door and the beagle got it
(half-beagle) on the second try.
My wife kills fleas and feeds them to the dog,
five last night, plus one Rufus snapped herself.
This is a house of death

and one of Henry's oldest friends was killed,
It came on a friend's radio, this week,
whereat Henry wept.
All those deaths keep Henry pale & ill
and unable to sail through the autumn world & weak,
a disadvantage of surviving.

The leaves fall, lives fall, every little while
you can count with stirring love on a new loss
& an emptier place.
The style is black jade at all seasons, the style
is burning leaves and a shelving of moss
over each planted face."

if that last stanze doesn't leave you breathless, then...damn.

i mean, whenever i die, that is going on the funeral program. that last stanza. no question.

obviously, hope not to think about such things for a while, duh.

table, ty for reprinting that dreamsong, it isn't in my copy of berryman's SELECTED POEMS 1938-1968

my fave might be no 69, which begins

Love her he doesn't but the thought he puts
into that young woman
would launch a national prodcut
complete with TV spots & skywriting
outlets in Bonn & Tokyo
I mean it

product

i think ilx posts are some of the best poems ever written

i love that one, too!

Yes, thanks table, that was great. Will go back to those later Dream Songs - I tend remember them as falling off badly somewhere after 77, like the form's letting him be sloppy rather than giving him the freedom/structure balance that makes the best of them (and sequences of them) so supple and sharp; the Shakespearisms tended to grate on me after a while too, iirc. But think I might have been reading sloppily. That last stanza is fantastic.

(Man I had better think through some funeral poetry, just in case. Don't want to be leaving it up to random relatives, it will be that "I have only slipped away into the next room" shit.)

My favorite death poem: Wallace Stevens' "The Owl in the Sarcophagus."

I dreamt he drove me back to the asylum

I dreamt he drove me back to the asylum
Straight after lunch: we stood then at one end,
A sort of cafeteria behind, my friend
Behind me, nuts in groups about the room;
A dumbwaiter with five shelves was waiting (some-
thing's missing here) to take me up - I bend
And lift a quart of milk to hide and tend,
Take with me. Everybody is watching, dumb.

I try to put it first among some worm-
shot volumes of the N.E.D. I had
On the top shelf - then somewhere else... slowly
Lise comes up in a matron's uniform
And with a look (I saw once) infinitely sad
In her grey eyes takes it away from me.

The terrible pathos of this poem convinces you that this was a real dream, not Berryman making one up. An Italian sonnet, effortlessly accommodating a very conversational syntax.

29 for me

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry's ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody's missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.

All sorts of conflicted about Plath. Loved her at 15, hated by 18, and on through my early 20s.

Ha, I have the same pattern! Except if "on through early 20s" meaning liking again but with a different appreciation.

I forgot how much I loved poetry...I quit interfacing with it six/seven years ago. I'm coming back to it and it's like eating this wonderful meal your aunt used to serve, going back and visiting after years and getting all that force and pleasure back again.

"Interfacing"?

Sure?

thk abbott means reading

or engaging

interfacing's a word

reading/writing/engaging/thinking baout

Sorry.

I still think you are the bee's knees.

This thread turned into something good, with these Berryman poems.

A stray thought I had while reading it, though: in particular, w/r/t Plath vs Hughes. Why do we end up in these dichotomies so often? I mean, I'm not holding myself above anyone here -- I have no doubt I've fallen into the same trap, and often (*cough* ILM lists) -- but it seems really odd that we have to pit like against like so often. We can love both, right? My stray (or maybe strained would be a better word, lol) thought, actually, was that it reminded me of endless arguments (on ILM and IRL) between Joy Division and New Order, and how I've basically given up trying to compare them in terms of value. If Arial = Closer, then The Hawk in the Rain = Movement and (I don't know) Crow = Technique and it's all good (although Hughes, like NO, has a much larger catalogue, with more room for embarrassing missteps).

In shorter form, why can't we enjoy and engage with something on its own terms, and leave it at that?

Without Ted Hughes we would not have

http://www.mymovie-downloads.com/images/iron_giant.jpg

In shorter form, why can't we enjoy and engage with something on its own terms, and leave it at that?

― Lostandfound, Wednesday, August 26, 2009 2:54 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

There's a lot of snobbery toward the 'known' poets because people want to appear as if they are smarter/wiser/more well-read then the masses. In poetry's case it is especially destructive because readers are so few already.

Countless times I have been turned off by a poet at first read only to have them become a favorite later. Some of that is from poor teachers, mostly its from that ingrained eagerness to be a cynical dick.

Re: Iron Giant: I've never read the original Hughes story, although I love the movie. Was the film faithful or did it deviate a lot, other than obvious details (location, etc)?

xpost

Yeah, I like the "known" poets, but I also love to explore what others have dug up, on threads like these. I seem to remember discovering an ILX thread simply devoted to great poems and I was in an ecstasy of c&p for awhile! I don't know if I'm widely read, but I do know I'm not particularly deeply read if that makes sense.

Oh, I suppose I should say that I love a lot of Plath's work, mostly her poems but The Bell Jar has its moments, and I'm at a loss figuring our how she is "indefensible". Her legacy, maybe, but not her writing.

(Weird, I just used the phrase "I love" in all three of those last posts, must be in a good mood or something.)

There's a lot of snobbery toward the 'known' poets because people want to appear as if they are smarter/wiser/more well-read then the masses. In poetry's case it is especially destructive because readers are so few already.

And in most cases I'll applaud a best-selling poet. For about twenty years Robert Frost was probably the best we had (then again, I'm tainted because I've loved Frost since my mom got me a children's collection of Frost's verse at 12).

Re: Iron Giant: I've never read the original Hughes story, although I love the movie. Was the film faithful or did it deviate a lot, other than obvious details (location, etc)?

Movie was absolutely nothing like the book. Like, to the point where I don't even know why they bothered to credit the Hughes book as the source material. That 50s paranoia stuff was just all made up for the movie. In the book, a STAR SPIRIT lands on Australia and the Iron Man has to defeat it. That would have been a way cooler movie.

That would have been a way cooler movie.

challops. THE IRON GIANT could not be improved in any way.

Frost is one who definitely comes to mind. Too much emphasis on symbolism when its taught, and too quickly dismissed because of his name.

most of my problems with contemporary best-selling poets are that i find their work so facile, obvious, and sentimental that i can't help but consider them pulp/pap. i think that one must also take into consideration the fact that most poets who pooh-pooh their more popular/successful contemporaries are not simply jealous, but upset that the mass-market book industry (and tbh, if you're mark doty or billy collins, you're mass-market, sorry) completely passes over more original, interesting and innovative work for what will sell. it's an old problem in many creative fields, of course, but one that is made much more stark in these seemingly anti-poetry times.

the only mass-market poet worth anything nowadays, imho, is Jorie Graham.

barely related: after being denied his usual 3 stories before bedtime as a punishment, my 2 year old nephew asked "not even a poem?" <3 <3 <3

i mean, do you know who the best-selling poets of our times are? Mattie J Stepanek (that sickly child who writes poems about heaven), Billy Collins, and Mary Oliver. while a child can be forgiven for crimes against all that is good in poetry, the latter two are totally indefensible, imo.

(that is awesome, bnw)

Jorie Graham's verse consists _________ of _______ lots of -------- blanks.

I do own and enjoy The End of Beauty.

if you're one of those people who aren't into the play of white space on the page, alfred, i don't think we can be friends.

her book "Swarm" is my favorite, highly recommended to all.

those berryman poems are awesome--i've never looked at him

In shorter form, why can't we enjoy and engage with something on its own terms, and leave it at that?

― Lostandfound, Wednesday, August 26, 2009 2:54 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

ppl best understand things in their relations to other things; when the tyranny of coincidence has a wife w/a tragic story marry a feted poet, it's hard to resist engaging tht way but I get yr point

if you're one of those people who aren't into the play of white space on the page, alfred, i don't think we can be friends.

Well, you DO love Lowell. Sabers out.

how is matthea harvey regarded by you dudes?

who are your favourite modern poets, table is a table?

i mean, do you know who the best-selling poets of our times are?

Thing is, most people have no clue. Do we want to compare Billy Collins sales to Dan Brown?

Both Collins and Mary Oliver are easily defensible imo. I'd much rather have people reading them then not reading poetry at all. Hate the work, don't hate the sales. p.s. you forgot Jewel.

:)

Contemporary poets....

More lyric stuff: Kazim Ali, Martha Collins, Anne Carson.

More out-there stuff: Lisa Robertson, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Elizabeth Robinson, Laura Mullen, Eileen Myles, Kim Rosenfield, Jill Magi, Kevin Davies.

More conceptual stuff: Christian Bok, Kenny Goldsmith, Vanessa Place.

i could go on and on. i'm a bookworm.

pls do; are those all american?

lol britishes

some Canadians here and there...

now i'll just list:
Bruce Andrews, Kevin k*ll*an, Jessica Grim, Jena Osman, Kathleen Fraser, Nathaniel Mackey, Kamau Brathwaite, Jacques Roubaud, Lytton Smith, E. Tracey Grinnell, Stan Apps, Juliana Spahr, Jared Stanley, Peter Culley, Ben Lerner's first book, Mark Wunderlich's first book, Dennis Cooper's older stuff......

and of course, a lot of young poets who don't have much out yet except chapbooks.

don't give us it, bnw

thx, ttitt

the cool thing about poets is if you can google their email address (usually at a school) they'll respond 97.83% of the time.

some living American poets I like:

Rae Armantrout (probably my fave), Aaron Kunin, Claudia Rankine, Charles Simic, Ashbery (duh)

I am pals with, and hence biased about:

Mon1ca Youn, St3ve Burt, Mark Wunderl1ch

i love Rae's older stuff, and saw Aaron give a fucking amazing reading a couple weeks back....

ppl best understand things in their relations to other things; when the tyranny of coincidence has a wife w/a tragic story marry a feted poet, it's hard to resist engaging tht way but I get yr point

Yeah, I don't want to overstate that point, and I'm not uninterested in their unique backstory, it's just that (as with JD and NO) I've largely given up trying to decide which one is better.

thinking maybe a separate thread to post poems we like, talk baout poetry, stuff like that?

so this thread can go back to hatin' on/stanning for/zinging in the vicinity of plath?

maybe this one?

Poetry Corner

More lyric stuff: Kazim Ali, Martha Collins, Anne Carson.

I saw Kazim Ali read here and he has a marvelously kooky reading voice. Also I corrected the math in one of his poems.

I am pals with, and hence biased about:

Mon1ca Youn, St3ve Burt, Mark Wunderl1ch

Wait, all these people are my pals too and one was best man at my wedding. Who are you?

argh crap THIS ONE

Contemporary Poetry

Who are you?
― Guayaquil (eephus!), Wednesday, August 26, 2009 10:45 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

his name rhymes with "jew janiel"
― fleetwood (max), Wednesday, August 26, 2009 3:35 PM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

oh hey there true manuel
― Miss Fitzhenry (s1ocki), Wednesday, August 26, 2009 3:45 PM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

new spaniel
― cutty, Wednesday, August 26, 2009 3:50 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

blue granual, of popular beat combo thermos
― Roberto Spiralli, Wednesday, August 26, 2009 3:57 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ha ha, who knew. squirrel, i am Monica's math friend whose first name rhymes with "lizzie borden."

There are also:

The Poetry Thread
Poetry Thread, part two: A Game Of Chess

xpost to eephus

Hey there you- didn't we meet up quite randomly at the MSRI dedication thang?

indeed!

hi, honey, no one cares!

irl, i don't think i know a single poet who enjoys thinking about or reading Sylvia Plath at this point in time. same with ginsberg.

who gives a shit?

for the record there's a bad sentence above - I don't consider Plath greater than Berryman or Lowell, "other lesser confessionals" meant "confessionals you can name besides these ones" e.g. Sexton

Snodgrass quite underrated these days

Berryman (the only one of the aforementioned that I know well) is all-time for me. I had to stop reading Dream Songs last year cuz I was at a really bad place in my life and the darkness in them was starting to get suffocating... but I recently picked it up again and I'm glad I did

first dream song is still my fav & one of v.few poems burned into my memory probably forever; but #29 (posted upthread) is one of my favs too

I have this constitutional aversion to the confessional, even after giving Lowell a genuine try after that 2003 collected poems got published. I'd rather read Merrill, Bishop, O'Hara, and Ashbery.

eh, different strokes; I like most of the names you just mentioned but Berryman's style is so electrifying I don't even pay attention to what he's "confessing" half the time

wish I could say more on the actual topic of this thread but I haven't read Plath since I was assigned to do a project on her in high school. I don't recall enjoying it very much (though I suspect I was a pretty bad reader/she went over my head most of the time), and I always think I ought to give her another chance, but there's always something else I wanna buy instead... *shrug*

They've all written poems I love though. The concision of and enjambments in "Near the Ocean" are breathtaking, and Plath's highwire act of imperiousness and vulgarity is unequaled; her strangeness eludes much of her collegiate claque.

calling berryman confessional is selling him short

otoh the same is true of plath and probably also of everyone called 'confessional' ever

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/jun/05/sylvia-plath-rage-laughter/

I posted this on the LRB thread. It's compelling, but...

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n24/joanna-biggs/im-an-intelligence

re-reading Bell Jar and i think i will always stan for Plath

i dont know if i’ll articulate this the way i think of it but in her poetry and the bell jar there’s something i love about the way her direct, vivid-yet-blunt (& often grotesque) descriptions are presented so unapologetically in very refined, calm settings and she never belabors them or refers back to them, she just lets them, sit, & moves on


she’s not drawing attention to a “gloomy” mindset, or indicating it with any kind of moody gothy setup. like rooms and places and landscapes are always pleasant or inoffensive — she really captures the way weird or ugly thoughts and similes just land & fly away in one’s thoughts without necessarily being shown outwardly?

idk if that makes sense but anyway i love her

i recently read part of the recent Heather Clark “Red Comet” bio of plath and while i annoyingly didn’t get to finish before i had to return it, it is so impressively comprehensive and human and demythologizing, i am going to reborrow & finish it

i highly recommend

I read The Bell Jar in February 20121 and whooped at every other sentence -- a hilarious, scary novel.

I recommend the book published last year about Plath and Sexton meeting for martinis at the Ritz.

xp great post

also i never knew ~insulin~ shock therapy was a thing until rereading bell jar this time

horrifying https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_shock_therapy

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

omg at this thread's early exchanges

the bell jar is monumental, her poetry...i've not encountered anything that isn't great

the holocaust imagery in daddy and lady lazarus always offended me. today i realized that it is supposed to. she is reveling in her solipsism, the rawness of her experience, not framing it in a way that is easily consumed and digested by someone like me. at her best when she is transgressive, uninhibited, and uncomfortable.

i think ariel is my favorite.

White
Godiva, I unpeel—
Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.

the same rawness and uninhibited openness to changing experience that permits TBJ's terrifyingly seamless fall from hilarious social satire to the case against life under medical abuse :(

right. even in the social satire parts of the bell jar, she permits herself to be mean. she often laments the burden of living up to other people's expectations -- especially gendered ones -- but in her writing she doesn't seem to do that at all and this is her genius i think

i re-read Ariel again after Bell Jar - one of my new old favorites is ‘Letter in November’

the rat-rail pods of the laburnum
golden apples, red autumn, all the wintery colors in the mist

i enjoy her visuals a lot. and i love how her word choices uh “feel”? in yr mouth when you say them out loud

I read Elm just before I went to sleep last night. Sweet dreams.

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

I think about Tulips, often. I find Plath too raw sometimes. Maybe I mean too real. I think (late) Stevens aimed at the real in a similar fashion, but it never felt this flayed.

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free——
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

xp absolutely haunting poem. I think about it all the time.

and the final couplet:

The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.

Yikes at the early parts of this thread.

I finally read The Bell Jar. I enjoyed the shit out of it, reader! It's one of those books that, when you read it in public, you imagine people around you can see and hear the prose so loudly does it jump off the page: lines that wound, lines audacious and hilariously funny, lines that make you wince.

On that last point, it's kind of gauche or clumsy in places and I couldn't decide if this was a deliberate aspect of the narrative voice. She clings to similes too readily (on some pages there are five or more) and I found myself highlighting lines of excess, or where she personifies herself - things like 'I shivered' or 'my eyes sprang with tears'. It's something you pick up in a lot of student writing.

that tendency feels absolutely part of the excoriation. it's a celebration of and a final judgement upon her life and the forces that broke it. i'm p sensitive to overdoing similes and here it feels wry rather than gauche

that central chapter where it flips from being a humorous satire to sheer horror is still one of the most haunting chapters in literature imo, it's so sudden and brutal

Yeah, gauche is unkind. I think I'm so attuned to marking clunky student writing, seeing it in the wild like that is jarring and unsettling. Even the satire is brutal, though. Some of it made me think of Ballard - how dead-eyed everything is, how stark.

And yeah, passages like:

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.

Holy shit.

the most metal writing, gonna throw some horns 4 sylvia, reign in power

I can take or leave Bell Jar.

From a search it doesn't look like the letters to her mother have been mentioned. That's my favourite collection of her writing besides some of her poetry.

Imago otm.

Somebody (I think Camille Paglia?) Said of Emily Dickinson that she had a mean streak a mile wide.

Where I love Plath the most is when she just fucking lets loose. Rage, despair, hunger, madness. Bring it on

this piece (sub needed i think) is very funny on emily dickinson's mean streak: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n11/joanne-o-leary/bitchy-little-spinster

Thanks for that, mark s. Yeah ED was pretty layered, even sneaky, and that's part of the fun.

Read Janet Malcolm's longish NYer piece (or the shortish book) on Plath and you get the same sense.

I try to mainly focus on the work (as opposed to the soap opera aspects of their lives) but with some writers, it's hard to separate. Do NOT get me started on Woolf.

Yeah the Malcolm book is superb. I had never heard of it until I was telling xyzzzz__ about my English class’s absolute hatred of Ted Hughes, he was like, you need to read this book. We discussed it a bit here

Now the year is turning and the eeriness comes: what are you reading in autumn 2021?

I'm debating whether to re-read the Malcolm book post-Bell Jar. I think I will. Also want to read the Heather Clark biography.

That Malcolm book is an eye-opener.

But even those who admired Dickinson’s work have been put off by the demands she places on the reader. Denise Levertov found something chilling about her command on the page, an ugliness in her aristocratic self-assurance: ‘You know, actually those dashes bother me,’ she wrote to Robert Duncan in 1961. ‘There’s something cold and perversely smug about E.D. that has always rebuffed my feeling for individual poems ... She wrote some great things – saw strangely – makes one shudder with new truths – but ever and again one feels (or I do) – “Jesus, what a bitchy little spinster.”’

iirc Plath hated the public's interest in her personal life and in her relationship with Hughes. She called us onlookers the "peanut gallery."

I enjoyed the LRB piece but also felt a little queasy afterward about having any interest whatsoever in Emily's brother's lover's husband, as it's not necessarily relevant to poems.

Then I got over it, because once you are into this shiznit you may as well get the whole package. Purity is for soapmakers.

Also, for Alfred:

Bitchy little spinster I know, I know, it's serious...

The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot-
The big strip tease.

I've nearly finished the Clark biography, Red Comet. I don't see what else one could ask from a biography. It's meticulous, clear-eyed, compassionate; Clark has no framing narrative to follow, so - this far at least (October 1962) - there's no apportioning of blame, no sense that everything is heading for the vortex of her suicide (even if, well). Clark is a good critic, too - especially of Plath's short fiction and the later poems.

It's clear that 1950s New England was perfect in some ways but a hellscape of gender norms and expectations in others. The central event of her life was her post-New York depression and the disgraceful treatment at McLean. The suicide attempt and her subsequent internment are superbly recreated. It's a brutal and maddening indictment of patriarchy and institutional care.

Hughes doesn't come out of it well. How could he? I have a full sense of why Plath was so obsessed with him and a better understanding of the power of his early poetry; also, that he was an utter shithead but he's a believable shithead if that counts for anything. I don't think the punishment fits the crime but that's an ugly, glib and probably stupid way to frame it.

There's something, as ever, to be said about the limits of biography. Cleaving so close to the journals and the letters gives an illusion of an inner life but who of us is ourselves in our private journals and letters? Even if Plath more than anyone *seemed* to be building a version of herself in her private communication.

Obviously, the premise of the thread is bollocks. The price she paid is indefensible, but The Bell Jar and the later poetry are fucking astonishing.

yeah i loved Red Comet

the only thing i didn’t love was the critical analysis of her childhood poems: that felt like a bridge too far for me.

Good posts.

I can see the logic of looking at the juvenilia though. Clark doesn't have a project, as such, but one thing she is trying to do is to give Plath complete integrity. The through line from her early poems is clear inasmuch as she inhabits and inscribes landscape with meaning from the very start.

yeah i can see that, it just feels unnecessarily invasive. like, just as a human being? like once you embark on a career publishing poetry that’s one thing, but to treat her childhood output with the same kind of critical rigor is a bit much. at least to me. i just kept thinking “if Sylvia read this part she’d be rightfully annoyed or upset by it” idk

I finished the book. It's great. A couple of things.

1) The chapter on the 'afterlife of a poet' is a bit workmanlike after the immense rigour of the rest of the text. It's outside the scope of the book but it felt a bit loose after everything else. I guess after 8 years (!) of working on it, Clark wanted rid.

2) Al Alvarez doesn't come out of it well. Another 'how could he?' I suppose, but god, what a self-serving arsehole.

3) Olwyn. Christ, Olwyn.

4) There's a critical thread running through the text positing that Plath stood 'too close to the fire'. It goes something like the following. There's a well of poetic inspiration, Yeats had access to it, Lawrence too, Nietzsche, some of the Romantics. Freud and Jung mapped it, to some extent. Plath, who'd come up under a New Critical framework, was also drawn to it and knew it in her bones. When she met Hughes, he embodied the essence of it, was poetic inspiration made flesh - he, and the darkness they summoned together, were the missing pieces of the puzzle that enabled her to fall through her own trapdoors fully into that dark thought-cave, or word-hoard or whatever Romantic bullshit you want to call it. And, being a woman, she wasn't able to handle it. After her death, Alvarez wondered 'if all our rash chatter about art and risk and courage, and the way we turned rashness and despair into a literary principle, hadn't egged her on'.

5) Might as well call it the 'Lady Macbeth Gambit'.

The Janet Malcolm bio is so good about those matters.

I need to go back to it. Having engaged so closely with the poetry, it'll be like a new book.

I've got Jacqueline Rose's book too. Have you read that Alfred? Anyone else?

I just read Red Comet thanks to seeing this thread come up.

3/4 of the way through it, my bf walks past me one afternoon and says "HAS SHE STUCK HER HEAD IN THE OVEN YET".

But no, this book was good - I'm actually very suprised how comprehensive its sources were. Was she only able to do this because most of the people involved are dead now?

ETA: it certainly is a contrast to Bitter Fame, which I regret even bothering to read, since I found more out about its biases (esp Dido Merwin's rank essay).

I think about how I'd hate it if certain ppl I knew for 10 minutes in my youth jumped on the bandwagon to wax vicious about me. Olwyn and Dido hardly knew her, and yet.

100%! i think about that a lot, like some bitchface who’d shove me into a locker as soon as look at me saying “mm yes VegGrrl was very troubled, we were worried about her”

LOL exactly, and I can think of a specific person I know who would do exactly that.

I have some sympathy for Stevenson after reading The Silent Woman, and I remember liking her bio when I read it in 1994 (!); but that was a lifetime ago.

Y'all should check out Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz.

great piece on Plath by Tricia Lockwood & the new Plath Collected Prose in the London Review of Books - excellent read

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n12/patricia-lockwood/arrayed-in-shining-scales