defend the indefensible: sylvia plath

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