Sylvia Plath
If the moon smiled, she would
resemble you.
There are now innumerable places on the Internet where you can hear her read her poetry. Click here for just the text, or here for Plath reading from "Ariel", her final collection.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but
annihilating.
Both of you are great light
borrowers.
Her O-mouth grieves at the
world; yours is unaffected.
And your first gift is making
stone out of everything.
I woke to a mausoleum; you
are here
Ticking your fingers on the
marble table, looking for cigarettes,
Spiteful as a woman, but not
so nervous,
And dying to say something
unanswerable.
The moon, too, abases her
subjects,
But in the daytime she is
ridiculous.
Your dissatisfactions, on the
other hand,
Arrive through the mailslot
with loving regularity,
White and blank, expansive as
carbon monoxide.
No day is safe from news of
you,
Walking about in Africa
maybe, but thinking of me.
I once possessed a British Council tape of Sylvia Plath in interview and performance. She read with almost hysterical alacrity, a voice from a Woody Allen movie: neurotic, shrill, all edge and self-absorption, yet also phenomenally intelligent, and distraught, weighed down, half-vanquished by the clarity with which such extraordinary intelligence is compelled to perceive life.
I hardly ever played the tape; its harshness was detestable, its self-indulgence in self-pity nauseating. How dare this affluent, middle-class, suburban woman, how dare she compare her plight with that of Auschwitz Jews, how dare she affront bathos and hyperbole by drawing universal morals from the slicing of an onion and her finger?
I came to suspect that, in Sylvia Plath, the spoiled-brat tantrums of every-little-princess have been raised to the pedestal, in the vain hope of mitigation-through-Art: she shrieks, she spits, she stamps her feet, she smashes all her favourite toys, but she does it in rhyme and metaphor: and thus it isn’t naughtiness, but Art: the John McEnroe of poetry, justified by genius.
Yet the angst, the anguish, were clearly genuine: why else the suicide? Or was even the suicide mere poetry, the gas-oven mere metaphor? To kill oneself, after all, is the ultimate threat of the attention-seeker: and this sad woman, crying out for help in every line, perhaps she didn't mean it, perhaps she thought some gallant rescuer – her beloved Ted even - would come in time, to complete her marvellous dramatic gesture in an outpouring of love and sympathy that could inspire more poems. Certainly she had the spite, the spleen, the vanity, to pull off such a stunt. What a pity it succeeded. And yet, how wonderful for those of us who inhabit her posterity, that it did succeed.
I once possessed a British Council tape of Sylvia Plath in interview and performance. She read with almost hysterical alacrity, a voice from a Woody Allen movie: neurotic, shrill, all edge and self-absorption, yet also phenomenally intelligent, and distraught, weighed down, half-vanquished by the clarity with which such extraordinary intelligence is compelled to perceive life.
I hardly ever played the tape; its harshness was detestable, its self-indulgence in self-pity nauseating. How dare this affluent, middle-class, suburban woman, how dare she compare her plight with that of Auschwitz Jews, how dare she affront bathos and hyperbole by drawing universal morals from the slicing of an onion and her finger?
I came to suspect that, in Sylvia Plath, the spoiled-brat tantrums of every-little-princess have been raised to the pedestal, in the vain hope of mitigation-through-Art: she shrieks, she spits, she stamps her feet, she smashes all her favourite toys, but she does it in rhyme and metaphor: and thus it isn’t naughtiness, but Art: the John McEnroe of poetry, justified by genius.
Yet the angst, the anguish, were clearly genuine: why else the suicide? Or was even the suicide mere poetry, the gas-oven mere metaphor? To kill oneself, after all, is the ultimate threat of the attention-seeker: and this sad woman, crying out for help in every line, perhaps she didn't mean it, perhaps she thought some gallant rescuer – her beloved Ted even - would come in time, to complete her marvellous dramatic gesture in an outpouring of love and sympathy that could inspire more poems. Certainly she had the spite, the spleen, the vanity, to pull off such a stunt. What a pity it succeeded. And yet, how wonderful for those of us who inhabit her posterity, that it did succeed.
There are now innumerable places on the Internet where you can hear her read her poetry. Click here for just the text, or here for Plath reading from "Ariel", her final collection.
You can find David Prashker at:
Copyright © 2016
David Prashker
All rights reserved
The Argaman Press
No comments:
Post a Comment