defend the indefensible: sylvia plath

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?