defend the indefensible: sylvia plath

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...