This Thursday, my wee poetry book group – The Bard’s Book Club – will be discussing poems from Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. Each month, as I prepare for these discussions, I find myself asking not only what we should talk about, but why? What makes this poet worth looking at, as opposed to others. With Sylvia, this question struck me as particularly complex.
When I was in graduate school, a fellow poet asked if I would mind being interviewed for a critical paper addressing Sylvia Plath’s continuing influence on contemporary women poets. I immediately agreed—partly because my ego requires that I accept any and all opportunities to be quoted, and partly because, although I knew I felt a kinship with Plath, I wasn’t (I’m still not) exactly sure why. Although I’ve read both The Colossus and Ariel, Plath’s prose—namely The Bell Jar—was what stuck with me most. And not because I ever struggled with a similar mental instability, but because when I first read it (and here is my embarrassing confession of the day) I was so jealous of the “novel’s” writer heroine. (And I use “” because it is such a thinly veiled autobiography). She was winning prestigious awards, scoring prestigious internships, and just generally gaining in writerly prestige. Sure, she was descending into a mire of depression, but did I mention all the prestige?
Yeah…. I was pretty misguided right after college. But on the other hand, my “jealousy” was also kind of motivating. I remember thinking that if Sylvia Plath was writing about being rejected by an esteemed writing course, then that must mean that anyone could be rejected. And if Sylvia Plath was struggling to deal with life in New York, then maybe it wasn’t so bad that I didn’t go to college there. When I wasn’t jealous, I identified with the protagonist’s struggles to figure out how she fit into the world as a woman—get married, act proper & polite, or take job “befitting” a woman, as a secretary or stenographer. Like I said, I was just out of college, so I was asking myself all the same “what do I want to be when I grow up” questions. (The older I get, I find I’m still asking myself these questions, I just answer from a different vantage point.)
So, anyway, my experience of Sylvia was always very me-centric—and had surprisingly little do with her actual poetry. But I guess that’s not all that surprising, unfortunately. First of all, Sylvia became such an icon for women writers (and women?) that, as a woman, she could be your icon just by knowing her story—and not her writing. She struggled with depression—and of course she did (or so, angsty young feminists might say): she was married, raising children, and trying to live up to 1950s upper-middle-class expectations of women—all while also trying to be an artist. Woe! Her death echoed as a cry for help among all us. Give us liberty or give us death! Hoorah! But I don’t think that’s what she intended, and I don’t think that’s what she would have wanted. Would anyone want to be famous because they were in pain? It’s kind of cruel actually. When you’re depressed, you sometimes think that the world would be better off without you. By aggrandizing Sylvia’s death, I wonder if, in a way, we reinforce that point? Would she be less important if she hadn’t died? Would we have gotten the point if we couldn’t superimpose her life story onto her art?
Ah… I’m being cynical. Because then I think about the work. And I think the reason why the poems are so brilliant and why they resonate with so many women is not because we can read her life story in them (although we can), but because, as much of herself as she put into each poem, Sylvia always allowed enough room for the reader to put herself in as well. The poems are at once deeply personal and deeply mysterious. Her images are dark, slippery, haunting, visceral, and at times completely elusive. I have to chuckle when people talk about Sylvia as “confessional” because, honestly, (here comes another potentially damning confession) sometimes I just don’t “get it.” I wonder how it’s possible to confess anything in language weighted with so much metaphor and allusion. Sometimes it’s the political references, sometimes the abstraction of images. Sometimes, I just feel a little lost.
But here’s the thing: I once had a mentor who said that people need to worry less about “getting” it and more about feeling it. And that’s never a problem with Sylvia. As I said, I’m re-reading Ariel (actually reading the Restored Edition, and no matter how opaque some of the poems) I’m always feeling it: anger, frustration, irony, rapture, awe, humor. I’m feeling it. Each poem is a barrage of emotion—Sylvia’s and mine—so artfully, imaginatively rendered.
Considering that amazing artistry, along with the political and personal context of her poems, the question of why talk about Plath is replaced by the question of why not talk about her more? Or, perhaps, why not about her work more? So, this Thursday, I’m looking forward to talking about Sylvia Plath – not in a National Enquirer/Paris Hilton sort of way; I’m looking forward to really digging into her poems, poking around the places that I don’t “get” but that I really really feel, and figuring out how they work, why they work, and what I can learn from her.
I know what you mean about “feeling” it (although having never read Sylvia, I haven’t “felt” her yet). I don’t know why, but talking about feeling it reminds me of Maya Angelou, and a TV spot that she was in…usually skipping over the commercials with the DVR…i recognized her face, doubled-back and then played it three or four times. I felt what she was saying, and I was awestruck by her language. Thinking back, I can only describe it as having an almost divine quality.
So yeah…Maya rocks.
that’s so good to hear! sometimes its really hard to not get trapped in the literal/linear pattern of reading exclusively for comprehension (thank you so much, standardized testing). you just can’t do that with poetry… it’s not that poems aren’t literal or linear, but the best poems are never as straight forward as they might seem, yet you still end up feeling like you’ve learned something, or you understand something, even though you maybe don’t know exactly why you feel it. or at least, that’s what happens for me.
Autumn, when I read Ariel, I was lost for at least half of it (Ted’s version, not hers). I felt Sylvia all the way through the poems, but I didn’t understand quite a bit of them. No shame there.
thanks! i used to always feel embarrassed to say that i was lost — even if i liked something, i felt like it was some kind of failing to not know what it “meant.” although i still really prize accessibility, i’m being to think that “meaning” is overrated.