PLATH
Reading again from THE VINTAGE BOOK OF AMERICAN POETRY, I came across Sylvia Plath's small collection. I love Gary Snyder and no disrespect to Mark Strand (whose poems appeared after Plath's) but reading the work of Sylvia I am reminded what draws me to poetry in the first place.
Three poets have been life-altering for me. Li-Young Lee. William Carlos Williams. And Sylvia Plath. I think I learned more about poetry (and by that I mean about the type of poetry I wanted to write) from reading "The Colossus" as I have in reading countless other poems.
In my undergraduate study, I used to get into a hot, huffy puffy debate with a professor I rather liked. I wonder if he just wanted to see if I could argue. He'd take the stance that Sylvia Plath was only a poet of major recognition because of her suicide, her larger-than-life death through affixiation. For added bonus, he liked to add on that it was impossbile to read her work and not think of her head in the oven.
I don't know what you all think about this, and like I said, I think he may have just been plying me into a debate, but I found myself asking a particular question I had never thought of--So what? So what if people think of her sticking her head into an oven? It didn't diminish her poetry. It didn't strengthen it either. It's hard to see past the presence of suffering in her work. She's often frightening, scary even, with the places where she is willing to take the reader. And as a reader who is willing to be taken to those vulnerable lands, I find myself doing more, connecting more, thinking more, spanning more of my life when thinking about what she had to write through in order to create these poems.
This is my argument about Kooser's poem about the blue notebook. Not that Kooser can't write poetry. There are other of his poem's which I highly admire. But that it's nearly impossible for me to juxtapose "Daddy" with his poem. And again, it is not a matter of personal preference, per se. Surely, one could argue it is. However, I mean to say that if we are objective and truly interested in the work of the poet, the peeling away of layers that hide poems, then I am more impressed with what Sylvia accomplishes.
To me, one's life is of fair consequence to their poetry. Their life and art may run parallel for a time, but there is a separation. For Plath, her division is clear. She forced her life and art to run along in one breath. I like to think, though, that her art works on a slightly higher level. She didn't kill herself to make her poems better. Her poems simply became better after she killed herself.
I am terribly interested in what you all have to say about this.
After reading THE COLOSSUS, I realized what I might be as a poet. I started writing these very abstract poems to a father in Korea who never knew I existed. Then I started writing to my birth mother. Then I started trying to create a mythos for the father: I put him in a Brown suit. Then I made a discovery: that I still had love for both of them. This is something I had buried, I suppose, as means of not hurting my adoptive parents, whom I love as well. It is a difficult thing to love poetry like this. You find yourself pressing your own limits in what is shared and what is not.
These are some of the most holy lines I know. From "The Colossus":
"I shall never get you put together entirely,
Pieced, glued, and properly jointed...
Thirty years now I have labored
To dredge the silt from your throat.
I am none the wiser." (369, VINTAGE)
Tapping into this poem, she does what most poets do: uses art as subject matter. A small sidebar though: who else would believe a statue was her father?
posted by Jae Newman @ 8:18 AM
7 Comments:
First let me say how much I dig Plath, so I'm very into your post. Now, while it maybe true that I was initially attracted to Plath because of the aura of tragedy she cast, I became hooked on her poems (especially "Daddy") because of the way they bled, screamed, carressed and moved in me. I agree that her suicide doesn't diminish or validate her talent-she simply had it. exactly, so what if she stuck her head in the oven? Would she be any less of a poet if she had lived till 70? I'd like to think she would have even grown more potent.
Yes, Jae, I have some things to say about Plath, her life, death, and work. One thing is, I have not read much of her poetry before her final book, "Ariel," but my understanding from reading her daughter's preface to an edition of that book is that there was an "Ariel voice," a tone and clarity which hadn't been present in her earlier work. The last two years of her life Plath's work reflected a part of her personality which had been mainly repressed, the part that spoke a rather chilling "truth" about herself and everyone in her life. It may, or almost certainly was the case that Plath could not survive this expression of brutal honesty. So, did her suicide make the poems great? It's more like the poems couldn't have come to exist without the inevitability of the suicide.
I have often encountered language when reading commentary on Plath along the lines of "her achievement is unparalleled." I do think the fact of the suicide, the intense drama of it, has much to do with such comments. I don't think Plath is "head and shoulders above" all 20th century female poets in terms of skill, intelligence, etc. But in terms of "power," how COULD anyone equal her achievement --- by the time Sexton suicided, the suicide thing had been done. The fact is, given the sheer numbers of poets that are writing now, it is very very
hard to stand out, will probably never be possible to become the kind of compelling figure that Plath is for an audience made up of countless non-poets as well as poets (I was taught to appreciate Plath first by a group of English language students in socialist East Germany).
So, Jae, I guess I agree with your teacher somewhat, and I've said so in a roundabout way. Thanks for your post, and all your posts, they are very interesting.
Dear Bloggers,
Here I am taking the risk of baring my soul to you about what I deeply feel is a very serious misconception.
Please DO NOT ROMANTICIZE suicide among poets. DO NOT ROMANITICIZE alcoholism or drug use or smoking among poets. DO NOT ROMANTICIZE infidelities, broken marriages, abandoned children, and unkept promises among poets. DO NOT become seduced by the "drama" of depression and suffering. DO NOT wish it upon anyone, especially not for the sake of art.
I am much older than most of you bloggers, and until you are my age (46) and have seen how such mishandlings of a person's life can REALLY HURT other family members, you may not understand the seriousness of this issue.
Great art CAN BE MADE by decent, responsible, hard-working, mature adults who do not drink, smoke, use drugs, or have affairs, and who show up to work on time. As evidence, I submit T.S. Eliot and Gwendolyn Brooks.
Plath is from a different, earlier era. Don't rely entirely on that time for heroes and heroines of poetry. Look for new models of hard work and responsibility in the young poets of your own generation. Be one yourself.
Don't take me wrong -- I'm not a righteous fundamentalist. On the contrary, I'm a humanist (and have been for 30 years) who acknowledges that I have made plenty of mistakes in my own life. But I refuse to sacrifice my husband and child for the sake of creating "drama" in my art.
Ask the children of poets who have committed suicide -- ask them how much the poetry of their absent mother/father is really worth to them.
Gwen
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I came to Plath without much knowledge of the circumstances of her death. I was aware that she had killed herself, but I wasn't drawn to her poetry because of that fact. "The Colossus" was in an anthology I was reading. The power and language of that poem left the impression, not the life or circumtances of the poet. Her work stands on its own. When viewed in the context of her life and death, another dimension is added. I'm not convinced that this added dimension diminishes her talent or makes her work discountable.
When considering her work from a critical point of view, what does her suicide have to do with anything? Also, why does her suicide become more important when considering her work than John Berrymen's when his work is considered? Or Hart Crane? Or Randall Jarrell? Or Sarah Teasdale?
Gwen,
Speaking of misconceptions, I wasn't trying to romanticize Plath's suicide, it's just a fact that her name stands out among 20th century poets as one of a few that the general public is likely to have heard of. By saying her work has power because of the suicide, this is what I'm speaking of. We as poets may look at her work more "objectively" to assess whether it's good poetry. I am certainly not suggesting that Plath should be imitated, in fact
I was trying to say the opposite.
I would certainly hope that more
"balanced" poets might achieve or surpass the stature of Plath. But remember, just last year there was a new movie about her. Perhaps there's a challenge in this for all of us, to write the best poetry we can while remaining as balanced as we can. But some of us DO have "issues." Does that mean we shouldn't write???
It's kind of a truth that the earlier you die, the more likely you are to be romanticized, because you never had to grow old, boring, complacent, and guarantee you'll never have to hear people say "her earlier work was so much better."
Eric Clapton will always have a harder time maintaining his status than Jimi Hendrix.
Rimbaud didn't kill himself but he did stop writing at a very young age and then died fairly young and tragic. In his writing life, he's forever the young, brash, romantic, fearless lover ... he never became the tired out-of-fashion ex.
There's power in that, and I see it in our reaction to Plath's work as well.
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