And I can chart the course of flights of fancy

[sovay]

Apparently it's National Poetry Month. Thanks to darthrami for alerting me, because otherwise I would entirely have missed this opportunity to post some poetry that I like.

(Cut for Sylvia Plath.)

I didn't grow up reading Sylvia Plath. Other than a few encounters in high school with "Daddy," "Metaphor," and "Mirror," and a friend who read The Bell Jar, I had very little familiarity with her work until this summer, when I picked up The Colossus and Other Poems and discovered that I loved her poetry. I'd mostly heard about her suicide. Poet-women who kill themselves, you know that sort of thing . . . I think it put me off. But her work amazes me: how tactile her language is, how much it engages weight and motion and sound braced against sound as well as image, and I'm only sorry I didn't read her sooner. Here are two from The Colossus of which I am particularly fond. You can probably guess why. But I think there's something in there beyond what my obsessions like to see. These, I wish I could have written.

Suicide Off Egg Rock

Behind him the hotdogs split and drizzled
On the public grills, and the ochreous salt flats,
Gas tanks, factory stacks—that landscape
Of imperfections his bowels were part of—
Rippled and pulsed in the glassy updraft.
Sun struck the water like a damnation.
No pit of shadow to crawl into,
And his blood beating the old tattoo
I am, I am, I am. Children
Were squealing where combers broke and the spindrift
Raveled wind-whipped from the crest of the wave.
A mongrel working his legs to a gallop
Hustled a gull flock to flap off the sandspit.

He smoldered, as if stone-deaf, blindfold,
His body beached with the sea's garbage,
A machine to breathe and beat forever.
Flies filing in through a dead skate's eyehole
Buzzed and assailed the vaulted brainchamber.
The words in his book wormed off the pages.
Everything glittered like blank paper.

Everything shrank in the sun's corrosive
Ray but Egg Rock on the blue wastage.
He heard when he walked into the water

The forgetful surf creaming on those ledges.

(This one, especially . . .)

Full Fathom Five

Old man, you surface seldom.
Then you come in with the tide's coming
When seas wash cold, foam-

Capped: white hair, white beard, far-flung,
A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves
Crest and trough. Miles long

Extend the radial sheaves
Of your spread hair, in which wrinkling skeins
Knotted, caught, survives

The old myth of origins
Unimaginable. You float near
As keeled ice-mountains

Of the north, to be steered clear
Of, not fathomed. All obscurity
Starts with a danger:

Your dangers are many. I
Cannot look much but your form suffers
Some strange injury

And seems to die: so vapors
Ravel to clearness on the dawn sea.
The muddy rumors

Of your burial move me
To half-believe: your reappearance
Proves rumors shallow,

For the archaic trenched lines
Of your grained face shed time in runnels:
Ages beat like rains

On the unbeaten channels
Of the ocean. Such sage humor and
Durance are whirlpools

To make away with the ground-
Work of the earth and the sky's ridgepole.
Waist down, you may wind

One labyrinthine tangle
To root deep among knuckles, shinbones,
Skulls. Inscrutable,

Below shoulders not once
Seen by any man who kept his head,
You defy questions;

You defy other godhood.
I walk dry on your kingdom's border
Exiled to no good.

Your shelled bed I remember.
Father, this thick air is murderous.
I would breathe water.

Comments

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Ah! That last one... I need to read more Plath, for I was thoroughly put off her by "Daddy", which was crammed down my throat in high school and analysed to death, and I didn't go back. These do good things to my head (see my journal) and I shall have to look into it. Thank you.

[sovay]

The more I think about it, the more I think that teaching poetry in high school may be a doomed endeavor. At best, and ideally, it introduces you to someone whom you might not have discovered otherwise; at worst, and far more commonly, it scares the students away. And the way poets are often taught, it's all about how their personal lives informed their poetry—one of the reasons I think I never imprinted on Sylvia Plath before this, because we were handed "Daddy" and asked to think about Plath's relationship to her father, "Metaphor" and her relationship to Ted Hughes, "Mirror" and her relationship to herself. It wasn't until I could read a whole range of her poetry on its own, without commentary, exegesis, or psychoanalysis, that I realized how good a poet she actually was. Nothing to do with her suicide, or her gender: just language and what it does to your head. I am very glad it did good things to yours. Mine, too.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I have vowed that, should I ever end up in the unenviable position of having to teach poetry, I will keep the poets' personal lives out of things as much as possible, because I have never run across a genuinely good poem in which the poet's biographical circumstances had to be understood beforehand in order to produce meaning. If there's no way to get anything out of a poem without knowing what the poet's aunt likes having for breakfast, then I suspect it should only be taught as a what-not-to-do example. Unfortunately, I think that starting with a bio must be the thing that occurs to poetry teachers as Making Sense and Creating a Connection, because it's the start I've had on every English-language poet I've ever been formally taught. And oh gods, the 'analysis' we had to do, which always stopped at the most basic levels... I recall raising my hand in an English class once and saying something along the lines of 'I know what this poem makes me feel and think about, now can we discuss how the poet set things up for me to feel and think the way I do?' and getting a hemming and hawing response that could be summed up as 'Well, everyone reacts to poetry differently, so you kind of have to treat a poem like a really pretty stone you picked up or something and never assume that a poet intended anything in any way at all', which is an observation with some miniscule value, but totally obscures the entirety of the technicalities of language usage, and the fact that poets wouldn't write if they didn't want to say something. I suspect that this is also why I came away from school with the idea that poets were somehow supernatural, because there was all this damn mystique about technique. /rant... I shall go read Plath now, and thank you for sending the link.

[sovay]

this is also why I came away from school with the idea that poets were somehow supernatural

And now that you've achieved supernature?

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Heh. I still don't know how I do it, even when I know how I do it. I'm just glad I do do it, because I couldn't imagine giving up either poetry or prose. I always assumed my poems would end up the way the work of the great-grandmother for whom I am named did: bound into a thin chapbook, posthumously, by loving descendants, and read for duty's sake and for familial affection. (Her poems are, well, readable-- one never winces, never smiles.)

I vaguely recall your saying poetry was unexpected for you, too. Did you always write it and then start sending it places eventually, or did it come on you of a sudden during college or something like that?

[sovay]

Late onset: I caught a bad case from T.S. Eliot and never recovered.

Discounting the truly awful stuff I wrote in elementary school (please God let it have disappeared or melted or spontaneously combusted by now), and the exception of one piece in high school, I didn't write any poetry until my freshman year of college. I seriously think it's because nuqotw gave me a copy of Eliot's Inventions of the March Hare—college juvenilia and rough drafts of what would later go on to become famous pieces like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"—and my subconscious said to itself, "Hmm. All his early poetry sucked, and he's still famous! I can work with this." So I wrote one poem in 2000 and sixteen in 2001 and things sort of went from there.

My first acceptance was actually for a poem ("Hallows," written December 2000) even though my first published piece was fiction ("Shade and Shadow," written December 2000 / January 2001). After a while, it dawned upon me that I was writing more poems than short stories, and they were probably selling better, too. But I still didn't think of myself as a poet until sometime after I had won a Rhysling Award—feeling only mildly like a total imposter, because I wasn't yet a member of SFPA and still rather startled that somebody had liked my poem enough to nominate it in the first place—and I realized that when people asked me what I wrote, I'd started answering, "Short stories and poetry." Poetry. Right. That stuff that takes much less time than fiction and has line breaks. Hm. How bizarre. I didn't think I wrote that . . .

So I have no idea how this works, either. But it makes me happy.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Eliot... that... sucks... whoa. Concept. I'm going to have to go look at that, because it's an odd idea.

Looking at your chronology there-- you sold the first poem you wrote? Or at any rate pretty damn close to it? That's really cool.

[sovay]

Er, yes, actually. Thank you. It didn't come out in print until 2002, though, because the magazine almost folded; and the next piece I sold them, which I consider really the first publishable story that I wrote in college and probably only the second publishable story I'd ever written, killed it. I felt like such a plague-carrier.

[gwynnega]

Yep, yep, yep. Plath's poetry has been more clobbered by her biography than probably any well-known modern poet. Fortunately some segments of Plath scholarship have wised up and are discussing her work in more wide-ranging ways (for example, a book called The Other Sylvia Plath that talks about her environmentalism, her writing about the differences between living in the United States and the UK, etc.).

[gwynnega]

It's as if because of the biographical element, people can't seem to take the poems at face value as they would with anybody else's poems. It's always, Oh, what does this line refer to about her father? Oh, what day did she cut her thumb? Did she take thalidomide? Sheesh...

[gwynnega]

She described it to a friend as "light verse" (taking Auden's def at the time, humorous verse to be read aloud, I think).

Yes - and "Daddy" IS funny, and meant to be (with the villagers dancing and stamping, etc.).

And how inappropriate it is for Sylvia to appropriate Holocaust symbolism to represent Sylvia's Pain.

If a male poet had done the same thing, he would've been Political and Speaking for All of Suffering Humanity. Plath was very politically aware, and it's crazy how much that gets minimised (just as, come to think of it, Woolf's political stuff gets ignored by the death cult).

[debka-notion.livejournal.com]

Hmm- we got a little of that in High School, but really I think the only thing that got overdone was the "Every word has to mean something, and it has to mean what I (the teacher) want it to mean". While we got some backgound on the writers/context ("he wrote this about a patch of land where the trees were about to be cut down" "he wrote this after reading a new translation of Homer" "She's still alive"), I don't remember it being the primary lens through which we analyzed poetry. But then, my 11th and 12th grade English teacher got me to like all sorts of poetry that really didn't impact me at all, at first. So maybe my class was an exception.

[sovay]

And lucky you'd be for it . . .

Not all the English classes I took in high school were so biographically focused, but that's because after two years I got out of the regular progression of classes ("British Literature," "American Literature," et cetera) and took American Studies and Semiotics. Those were far more interesting, let me tell you. But 10th grade English—wherein we read Plath—was deeply painful.

[debka-notion.livejournal.com]

SOunds rather familiar- I was honors track the whole way, but 10th grade English was also rather lousy for me. 9th grade was nice for much of the year, and 11th and 12th were good- but 10th was almost as bas as middle school, and much of that was Horrid.

[marchharetay.livejournal.com]

this one is my favorite so far - i love the pacing & it's one i don't get tired of hearing out loud.

http://oldpoetry.com/poetry/13622

[sovay]

Even in your Zen heaven we shan’t meet.

I hadn't read this one before. Thanks!

[marchharetay.livejournal.com]

you're welcome - thanks for these (found via rush)

i didn't know about this one until a professor handed it out back in college

[sovay]

I never really imprinted on Anne Sexton the same way, even though I came to her earlier: we had a copy of The Awful Rowing Toward God in the house when I was growing up, and I read it, and it did not make my blood sing. But perhaps it was a later book, or I should give her another try now that I'm out of my adolescence. What of hers do you really like?

[sovay]

Oh man, Awful Rowing is really really really late, and most of it is first drafts, and it is definitely not the first Sexton book I wld start anyone off with.

Whoops. This may explain my reactions . . .

From your description of Transformations, I think I've read several of its poems—at least, I know I've read a fair amount of Grimm retold by Anne Sexton—but not for years, and my impression of The Awful Rowing Toward God may have put me off them as well. So I think I shall check out that one first. Imagistic tendencies make me happy.

Thanks!

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Transformations has the dual virtues of being both lovely and findable. It's been acknowledged a bit in recent years by the present writers who do fairytale retellings, but I keep waiting for a critical acknowledgement of it as a significant event in modern poetry of the fantastic, and have come to the conclusion that no one's going to.

[sovay]

Transformations it is!

. . . Why don't you do some kind of article on it for Strange Horizons or IROSF or whatnot? I'm sure you could link it to fairytale retellings in fiction, which would open up a whole host of possibilities.

[gwynnega]

I like The Death Notebooks a lot (Jong wrote a very cool review of it when it came out), but otherwise I agree that the late books are not a good place to start with Sexton. Transformations is probably an ideal place to start...though the first four books are pretty great.

[gwynnega]

I shudder to think how differently the Dream Songs, for example, would've been treated if written by a woman...

[gwynnega]

But it's enjoyable bile! :-)

::waves to sovay::

[sovay]

But I'll shut up and go away now.

Why? You're so informative.