defend the indefensible: sylvia plath

i could go on and on. i'm a bookworm.

pls do; are those all american?

lol britishes

some Canadians here and there...

now i'll just list:
Bruce Andrews, Kevin k*ll*an, Jessica Grim, Jena Osman, Kathleen Fraser, Nathaniel Mackey, Kamau Brathwaite, Jacques Roubaud, Lytton Smith, E. Tracey Grinnell, Stan Apps, Juliana Spahr, Jared Stanley, Peter Culley, Ben Lerner's first book, Mark Wunderlich's first book, Dennis Cooper's older stuff......

and of course, a lot of young poets who don't have much out yet except chapbooks.

don't give us it, bnw

thx, ttitt

the cool thing about poets is if you can google their email address (usually at a school) they'll respond 97.83% of the time.

some living American poets I like:

Rae Armantrout (probably my fave), Aaron Kunin, Claudia Rankine, Charles Simic, Ashbery (duh)

I am pals with, and hence biased about:

Mon1ca Youn, St3ve Burt, Mark Wunderl1ch

i love Rae's older stuff, and saw Aaron give a fucking amazing reading a couple weeks back....

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

Yeah, I don't want to overstate that point, and I'm not uninterested in their unique backstory, it's just that (as with JD and NO) I've largely given up trying to decide which one is better.

thinking maybe a separate thread to post poems we like, talk baout poetry, stuff like that?

so this thread can go back to hatin' on/stanning for/zinging in the vicinity of plath?

maybe this one?

Poetry Corner

More lyric stuff: Kazim Ali, Martha Collins, Anne Carson.

I saw Kazim Ali read here and he has a marvelously kooky reading voice. Also I corrected the math in one of his poems.

I am pals with, and hence biased about:

Mon1ca Youn, St3ve Burt, Mark Wunderl1ch

Wait, all these people are my pals too and one was best man at my wedding. Who are you?

argh crap THIS ONE

Contemporary Poetry

Who are you?
― Guayaquil (eephus!), Wednesday, August 26, 2009 10:45 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

his name rhymes with "jew janiel"
― fleetwood (max), Wednesday, August 26, 2009 3:35 PM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

oh hey there true manuel
― Miss Fitzhenry (s1ocki), Wednesday, August 26, 2009 3:45 PM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

new spaniel
― cutty, Wednesday, August 26, 2009 3:50 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

blue granual, of popular beat combo thermos
― Roberto Spiralli, Wednesday, August 26, 2009 3:57 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ha ha, who knew. squirrel, i am Monica's math friend whose first name rhymes with "lizzie borden."

There are also:

The Poetry Thread
Poetry Thread, part two: A Game Of Chess

xpost to eephus

Hey there you- didn't we meet up quite randomly at the MSRI dedication thang?

indeed!

hi, honey, no one cares!

irl, i don't think i know a single poet who enjoys thinking about or reading Sylvia Plath at this point in time. same with ginsberg.

who gives a shit?

for the record there's a bad sentence above - I don't consider Plath greater than Berryman or Lowell, "other lesser confessionals" meant "confessionals you can name besides these ones" e.g. Sexton

Snodgrass quite underrated these days

Berryman (the only one of the aforementioned that I know well) is all-time for me. I had to stop reading Dream Songs last year cuz I was at a really bad place in my life and the darkness in them was starting to get suffocating... but I recently picked it up again and I'm glad I did

first dream song is still my fav & one of v.few poems burned into my memory probably forever; but #29 (posted upthread) is one of my favs too

I have this constitutional aversion to the confessional, even after giving Lowell a genuine try after that 2003 collected poems got published. I'd rather read Merrill, Bishop, O'Hara, and Ashbery.

eh, different strokes; I like most of the names you just mentioned but Berryman's style is so electrifying I don't even pay attention to what he's "confessing" half the time

wish I could say more on the actual topic of this thread but I haven't read Plath since I was assigned to do a project on her in high school. I don't recall enjoying it very much (though I suspect I was a pretty bad reader/she went over my head most of the time), and I always think I ought to give her another chance, but there's always something else I wanna buy instead... *shrug*

They've all written poems I love though. The concision of and enjambments in "Near the Ocean" are breathtaking, and Plath's highwire act of imperiousness and vulgarity is unequaled; her strangeness eludes much of her collegiate claque.

calling berryman confessional is selling him short

otoh the same is true of plath and probably also of everyone called 'confessional' ever

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/jun/05/sylvia-plath-rage-laughter/

I posted this on the LRB thread. It's compelling, but...

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n24/joanna-biggs/im-an-intelligence

re-reading Bell Jar and i think i will always stan for Plath

i dont know if i’ll articulate this the way i think of it but in her poetry and the bell jar there’s something i love about the way her direct, vivid-yet-blunt (& often grotesque) descriptions are presented so unapologetically in very refined, calm settings and she never belabors them or refers back to them, she just lets them, sit, & moves on


she’s not drawing attention to a “gloomy” mindset, or indicating it with any kind of moody gothy setup. like rooms and places and landscapes are always pleasant or inoffensive — she really captures the way weird or ugly thoughts and similes just land & fly away in one’s thoughts without necessarily being shown outwardly?

idk if that makes sense but anyway i love her

i recently read part of the recent Heather Clark “Red Comet” bio of plath and while i annoyingly didn’t get to finish before i had to return it, it is so impressively comprehensive and human and demythologizing, i am going to reborrow & finish it

i highly recommend

I read The Bell Jar in February 20121 and whooped at every other sentence -- a hilarious, scary novel.

I recommend the book published last year about Plath and Sexton meeting for martinis at the Ritz.

xp great post

also i never knew ~insulin~ shock therapy was a thing until rereading bell jar this time

horrifying https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_shock_therapy

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

omg at this thread's early exchanges

the bell jar is monumental, her poetry...i've not encountered anything that isn't great

the holocaust imagery in daddy and lady lazarus always offended me. today i realized that it is supposed to. she is reveling in her solipsism, the rawness of her experience, not framing it in a way that is easily consumed and digested by someone like me. at her best when she is transgressive, uninhibited, and uncomfortable.

i think ariel is my favorite.

White
Godiva, I unpeel—
Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.

the same rawness and uninhibited openness to changing experience that permits TBJ's terrifyingly seamless fall from hilarious social satire to the case against life under medical abuse :(

right. even in the social satire parts of the bell jar, she permits herself to be mean. she often laments the burden of living up to other people's expectations -- especially gendered ones -- but in her writing she doesn't seem to do that at all and this is her genius i think

i re-read Ariel again after Bell Jar - one of my new old favorites is ‘Letter in November’

the rat-rail pods of the laburnum
golden apples, red autumn, all the wintery colors in the mist

i enjoy her visuals a lot. and i love how her word choices uh “feel”? in yr mouth when you say them out loud

I read Elm just before I went to sleep last night. Sweet dreams.

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

I think about Tulips, often. I find Plath too raw sometimes. Maybe I mean too real. I think (late) Stevens aimed at the real in a similar fashion, but it never felt this flayed.

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free——
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

xp absolutely haunting poem. I think about it all the time.

and the final couplet:

The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.

Yikes at the early parts of this thread.

I finally read The Bell Jar. I enjoyed the shit out of it, reader! It's one of those books that, when you read it in public, you imagine people around you can see and hear the prose so loudly does it jump off the page: lines that wound, lines audacious and hilariously funny, lines that make you wince.

On that last point, it's kind of gauche or clumsy in places and I couldn't decide if this was a deliberate aspect of the narrative voice. She clings to similes too readily (on some pages there are five or more) and I found myself highlighting lines of excess, or where she personifies herself - things like 'I shivered' or 'my eyes sprang with tears'. It's something you pick up in a lot of student writing.

that tendency feels absolutely part of the excoriation. it's a celebration of and a final judgement upon her life and the forces that broke it. i'm p sensitive to overdoing similes and here it feels wry rather than gauche

that central chapter where it flips from being a humorous satire to sheer horror is still one of the most haunting chapters in literature imo, it's so sudden and brutal

Yeah, gauche is unkind. I think I'm so attuned to marking clunky student writing, seeing it in the wild like that is jarring and unsettling. Even the satire is brutal, though. Some of it made me think of Ballard - how dead-eyed everything is, how stark.

And yeah, passages like:

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.

Holy shit.

the most metal writing, gonna throw some horns 4 sylvia, reign in power

I can take or leave Bell Jar.

From a search it doesn't look like the letters to her mother have been mentioned. That's my favourite collection of her writing besides some of her poetry.