defend the indefensible: sylvia plath

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 ...