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A Reflection From “Beyond The Espresso Machine” January 31, 2007

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I’ve just had a meeting with Dr.Scanlon and Professor Emerson about the first half of Ariel and I found it really helpful in clarifying some of the issues about this study that were worrying me.
I was having an insane amount of difficulty detaching Plath’s personal life from her poetry. I knew that this would be nearly impossible but I was hoping that if I stuck with the poems themselves I would be able to see them purely as poems and not in relation to anything I know about Plath herself. I was doing this in an effort to prove to whoever might care, that I am not interested in Plath because of her tragic legend but rather becuase of her outrageously great poetry. I realize now that she sought to write confessional poetry, her poetry is feuled by her personal life and that the most important thing to keep in mind is that there is undeniable skill within her poems which prove that she was a poet not a tragedy. I could try to read her poems and pretend to know nothing about her life, but the poems themselves reveal a great deal about her life so even that would be a difficult task. So, in a revision of my origional aim, I am going to try to bring her poetic skill to the forefront and not feel quite so guilty when I find myself wondering about her personal life.
We also discussed the theme of Ariel (not that it necessarily needs a theme but…) as being something different from what i’d origionally decided. I had stated that there was a sense of illusion and false creation in these poems, and while that does exist in a number of the poems, there is a greater sense that Plath is claustrophobic, that she is surrounded and trapped by all kinds of barriers that keep her from being able to appreciate or feel the freedom of her own mind. The intense amount of stress in her poems create a feeling of claustrophobia, as well as an insistent allusion to “hooks”. Life and the stuff of life are kind of holding her back.
This of course, lead to the disscussion of sexism in the world of poetry. I was relating my confusion of emotion versus skill that I’d discussed in my previous post and it brought up the startlingly large difference in the social stigma placed on women poets (especially women poets who have emotional disorders). Plath writes in the poem “Tulips”:
“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-”
It is upsetting because a male poet repeating these sentiments would be lauded for living in his mind and intellect and being in touch with his inner self, whereas Plath and similar female poets are seen as being out of their minds and this is seen more as a cry for help or a denial of “feminine duty”.
Plath is startlingly bold in her assertions and very clearly in touch with her feelings, and it is this boldness that causes people to constantly reassert that she was “crazy” because if we marginalize her as “crazy” it might squash other women’s desires to agree with her. I would really like to celebrate her honesty and give her credit for giving a voice to ideas that exisited but were mute.
I dunno today was great, it gave me a lot to think about and I just wanted to share! 🙂
ps. If you’ve never read “Lesbos” you really really really should, it’s super great! Here is a link: http://www.sylviaplathforum.com/lesbos.html

Tears Don’t Write Poems January 30, 2007

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Whereas Ariel is most commonly considered Plath’s greatest poetry, it is also usually associated with a strong desire for revenge. It is impossible not to see some obvious anger in a number of her poems, but I once again think it is too pejorative to categorize Ariel as vengeful poems feuled by rage. In a sense it undercuts her contribution as a skilled poet to asses her greatest poetry as only great because she was so manic. So, yes, I agree that among her best poems (or at least some of my favorites) “Lady Lazarus,” “Lesbos,” and “The Applicant” there is an undeniable sense of urgency and anger, but these poems are incredibly intense and the skill should not be overshadowed by her emotional state.
This is a tricky line in poetry; at what point do you separate the poet (especially the confessional poet) from his or her emotion in relation to their skill as a poet and the product (poem) they produce? That’s confusing, but what I mean to ask, is how much of the credit for great poetry do we give to the poet versus how much do we imply that the greatness is simply a carefully harnessed emotional release? I’m idealistic, but I want to give the credit back to the poet.
Just as you cannot fully separate Plath’s poetry from her biography, you similarly cannot separate said poetry from her emotional awareness, but I think in some backwards sense that to give her poetical credit to her emotional outbursts or manic depressive nature is giving credit to Hughes for feuling that rage. I won’t give him anymore credit than he already gave himself for creating Sylvia Plath the poet. Unless of course he meant that he gave her a lot of material to work with.
But I digress….
I read the first twenty poems in Ariel this week and they are truly remarkable (I’m having a great time reading them in order like this)! Whereas The Colossus seemed to grapple with an insistence on being noticed, Ariel seems to handle falsities or deceptive illusions. It is almost as if she takes the benign subjects from The Colossus and shows how they have become overly indulged and even (in some cases) villainous, but nevertheless, nothing is what it seems.
In regards to her awesome skill, I tried to scan several of the poems including “The Rabbit Catcher” (7) and found that the attention to form is undeniable. The poem is six stanzas of five lines each and I believe (if i scanned correctly) that the Trochee is the dominant meter. While the meter and line legnths are not regular, there are lines that are so dominated by stress that you really have to read them out loud.
“I felt hands round a tea mug, dull, blunt.”(22)
She packs so much into each short line, that you truly feel claustrophobic by the end of the poem which makes the final line resonate even deeper:
“The constriction kiling me also.” (30)
No matter what her emotional state was when she crafted this poem, it is obvious that she put a ton of time and effort and thought into writing it. Her emotions might have helped her articulate some of her ideas or given her ideas to articulate, but Plath truly makes you share in the emotion of her poems and I think that someone writing simply out of revenge or with some sort of alterior motive would be less concerned with how we (the reader) shares in the experience and more concerned with their own emotional satisfaction, which would probably result in some sloppy poetry.

Fun Tidbits (aka: things I didn’t know)
* Thalidomide is a non-barbituate sedative or hypnotic that caused deformation in fetuses when taken in the early stages of pregnancy
*”Tulips” was written when Plath was in the hospital for an apendectomy
*Susan O’ Neill Roe-the woman who “Cut” is dedicated to, was Plath’s children’s babysitter in the last few months of her life
*Ruth Fainlight-the woman who “Elm” is dedicated to, is a poet born in 1931 in New York who has since lived in London. She and Plath were friends and you can see their correspondence at: http://www.poetrysociety.org/journal/articles/janeandsylvia.html (it’s really interesting, check it out)

also for even more Sylvia Plath information I found this website called neuroticpoets.com, i’m not sure how credible it is but it’s kind of amusing.

Obviously A Daddy’s Girl January 29, 2007

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I am currently reading the first twenty poems in Sylvia Plath’s Ariel (the restored edition which came out in 2004). I must first rant about the foward written by Frieda Hughes (Plath’s daughter). I completely understand that i can never completely understand Frieda’s situation: being a daughter (and poet in her own right) to two extremely famous poets, one of which committed suicide when she was only four; however, I am surprised that in re-releasing and restoring Ariel to the arrangement Plath had indicated (which Hughes had rearranged) Frieda, in the foward, seems more bent on vindicating her father’s legacy then upholding her mother’s. This of course makes sense when you consider that she didn’t really know her mother and admits to not even reading Ariel until she was thirty-five, but it seems that rather than write about her reactions to the poems, she seeks instead to argue for her father’s decisions and baisically tell everyone to back off.
She talks about how devoted Hughes was even after the separtation, frequenting Plath’s apartment to “babysit when my mother needed time for herself” (xiv) (who calls taking care of your own children babysitting???) and how he shielded Frieda from her mother’s “bad” side until she was much older and even justifies his publication of the former Ariel quoting him as saying “I simply wanted to make it the best book I could” (xvi). The problems I have with this bizarre un-Plath-centric foward are that it has so very little to do with Plath’s legacy or the celebration of the restoration. In an attempt to get people to stop harping on her father and the infamous death of her mother she ends up bringing these subjects once again to the forefront.
She even comes off as abrasive when she says towards the end of the foward:
“Criticism of my father was even levelled at his ownership of my mother’s copyright, which fell to him on her death and which he used to directly benefit my brother and me. Through the legacy of her poetry my mother still cared for us, and it was strange to me that anyone would wish it otherwise” (xvii)
I cannot imagine where she would even get the idea that people wouldn’t or didn’t want Plath’s funds from her posthumous publications to go to her chidren! so i don’t even know where that accusation comes from.
I guess what really bugs me about this foward is that it is so cold and so accusitory that when you finish it you almost dont’ want to read the poetry anymore because you’ve had so much of your origional motivation bullied out of you. I actually had to put the book aside for a full day before I worked up the energy to put aside Frieda’s shaking fist and read Plath’s words.
It wasn’t all bad though she does share one sentiment that I completely agree with and that is what i’ve stated as my purpose in this study, she writes, “I saw such poems as ‘Lady Lazarus’ and ‘Daddy’ dissected over and over, the moment that my mother wrote them and being applied to her whole life, to her whole person as if they were the total sum of her experience.” (xvii) so supposedly, she agrees with me in some respects….although i will try to “dissect” those two poems later on.

Anyway I know this extremely long rant has very little to do with Plath’s poetry and it was simply an unfortunate error that Frieda’s foward caught my attention, but i felt too strongly to just let this argument go (and i’m too biased against Hughes I guess) As i’ve said, it will be impossible to completely divorce Plath’s life from her poetry and here is an instance where that is very much the case. My next post will be happier and more poetry focused, I promise!

P.S. I will also later discuss Frieda’s poetry which professor Emerson has put away in a box in her basement because it is that bad…..i’m just saying…..

‘YouTube’ Never Dissapoints January 27, 2007

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Okay so in my constant (bizarre) attempt to prove that ‘YouTube.com’ does not, in fact, have a video on everything, I am once again bested. I simply searched for the words “Sylvia Plath” and found this totally insane video. It is an actual recording of Plath reading “Lady Lazarus” which is all very nice, but it is set to this video montage of overly dramatic teens being overly dramatic. It includes a ouiji board, flames, skeletons and of course a bell jar….it is pretty much laughably terrible but if you close your eyes you can hear Plath and I always think it’s neat to hear an author read their own work because I believe it is the best way to hear a poem recited in the exact tone it was meant to be read. So anyway that’s my exciting Saturday post…I will go into the poem itself later as it’s one of my absolute favorites but for some lighthearted weekend fun watch this video!


*oh and note how surprisingly deep Plath’s voice is, I don’t know why this is “surprising” but it is somehow. It is so deep and controlled that it adds a kind of haunting quality to the poem.

Never Overlook The Colossus! January 26, 2007

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Last week professor Emerson and I read The Colossus and Other Poems
, it was the first time that either of us had read the entire collection cover to cover and I was particularly interested in finding a common theme that bound the poems in the volume. Perhaps it is my lingering obsession with sequences from last semester’s directed study, but I can’t help but try to find some sort of reasoning and order in any poetic work I’ve read since then.
I decided after reading The Colossus several times through that the overarching theme is an insistence on being noticed. Throughout the volume she tackles subjects of varying size and importance: from the tiny splinter in “The Eye-Mote,” to a man’s suicide in “Suicide Off Egg Rock”. It is clearly evident in each poem that the subject (despite their sometimes fervent objection) is pushing through an obstacle and coming to an unavoidable forefront (many times literally and symbolically as in “Mushrooms”…see title of blog).
The final poem in the volume, “The Stones” is one of the only poems in the volume that uses first-person narration, and I think that it is Plath’s description of her own moment of being, which brings the volume to a very profound crescendo as she both links herself to her previous subjects while simultaneously separating herself out for the first time as poet and subject. This poem concludes with the lines “Ten fingers shape a bowl for shadows./My mendings itch. There is nothing to do./I shall be good as new.” To me this poem is a very direct foreshadowing to future poems in Ariel such as “Lady Lazarus”, but there is also a present sense that she is describing herself as whole and having arrived, just as the other subjects in the previous poems. The line “There is nothing to do.” is important because it both implies that she is being restored by someone else meaning the power is not in her hands, and there is a further implication that she isn’t necessarily content with her restoration. I’m not entirely sure what to make of this so far, but perhaps the fact that this particular poem has such an Ariel tone means that after reading Ariel, I’ll have a better grasp.
Overall, I think that while Ariel is absoluetly her best and most compelling work, I still truly loved The Colossus and I’m glad I spent the time considering it because the poetry (while maybe not her “best”) is still pretty damn great!
P.S. I apologize in advance for my terrible grammar
P.P.S. Can anyone see the photo of Sylvia Plath I posted in my first entry? I can see it on my computer but I noticed in professor Emerson’s computer it wasn’t visible.

Here we go… January 25, 2007

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This is my first (admittedly feeble) attempt at blogging so we shall see how well I can keep up with it. I am extremely excited and nervous to take on the poetry of Sylvia Plath this semester and it is my hope that I can validate her poetry purely on the basis that it is fantastic poetry; with the ultimate goal of separating it from her tragic biography.
My advisor in this pursuit is professor Emerson. She suggested that I title this blog “thinking outside of the oven”, This is both a highlarious and accurate description of what i’m attempting to do. I realize that it is going to be nearly impossible to divorce Plath’s life from her poetry, as she was a confessional poet, but I think that her poetry is too often lauded simply because people love a good tragedy. Too many people read her poetry looking for clues to her death or fall into insanity, and I’d like to read her poetry and discover the themes that shape her volumes and other such underestimated features that make her poetry so sensational.
We shall see where this takes me…Sylvia Plath

Hello world! January 25, 2007

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Welcome to blogs.elsweb.org. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!