SPAIN SPAIN SPAIN February 28, 2007
Posted by amanda in : Uncategorized , comments closedSo, on friday I get to go to Spain for Spring break!!!!
My roommate and I will be in Barcelona for a week and i’m totally excited. My original plan was to find out where Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes spent their honeymoon so that it would be a relevant vacation rather than just a vacation vacation. Unfortunatly, they stayed in Benidorm, Spain and that is pretty far away from where we’ll be, so we probably won’t make it over there. Fortunately, I found this Ted Hughes poem “You Hated Spain” from Birthday Letters so if I decide to trust Ted Hughes just this once I can feel guilt-free for not pursuing Plath in Spain. I don’t know if I can or can’t, I need to review her journal entries from that trip but in either case, here is a link to Ted Hughes reading the poem. Although it might not be him….this is debatable
http://www.ourmedia.org/node/288371
HAPPY SPRING BREAK MARY WASHINGTON ENGLISH DEPARTMENT!
I am SUCH a nerd February 27, 2007
Posted by amanda in : Uncategorized , comments closedokay so the title to this post is the truth…..but anyway, I was looking through Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters and I came across this poem “Wuthering Heights” which is a response to Plath’s response to Emily Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights which we’ve just read in the Bronte seminar and I completely loved!!!
SO, then I googled it and found another poem called “Wuthering Heights” by Sylvia Plath herself 🙂
I LOVE THESE CONNECTIONS!!!
so just for fun here is a link to the Plath poem (which is way better than the Hughes poem and also I couldn’t find a link to the Hughes poem)
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/wuthering-heights/
Enjoy!
Your Poetry Is Great….How Surprising! February 27, 2007
Posted by amanda in : Uncategorized , comments closedLast night I read the foreword to the 1965 version of Ariel (Hughes’ version) by fellow confessionalist poet Robert Lowell. I was totally shocked that in this barely three page document Lowell manages to insult and discredit Plath a vast majority of the time. Of course his insults are under the guise of compliments but they are weak pseudo-compliments that strip her of her title “poet”. I can see how he could have had the misogynistic notion that he was honoring her memory but the way every sentence is worded implies that she had zero command over her poetry and she was really more like a witch with spells that created the poems rather than a skilled poet. For instance in the first few lines he writes, “Sylvia Plath becomes herself, becomes something imaginary, newly, wildly and subtly created-hardly a person at all, or a woman, certainly not another “poetess,” but one of those super real, hypnotic, great classical heroines” (vii).
Then, he goes on to guess about the overall conciet of the volume and in a desperate attempt to tie it to her suicide writes, “This poetry and life are not a career; they tell that life, even when disciplined, is simply not worth it” (viii). (AHHHH that quote made me really mad)
Then, he ends the foward with a lengthy paragraph in which he describes their brief encounters (she casually attended his poetry seminar at Boston University), complete with a detailed description of how she looked: “She was willowy, long-waisted, sharp-el-bowed, nervous, giggly, gracious- a brilliant tense presence embarrassed by restraint” (ix). Finally, he ends with a casual sentence about how he was totally shocked by her sucess…..how nice.
I guess this shouldn’t be surprising because it seems as though Lowell really hardly knew Plath, so what’s he going to say on her behalf, but at the same time I was expecting a tribute of sorts or at least some aknowledgement of her honest-to-goodness, hard-fought, deeply earned poetic skill! Another reason why this bugs me so much is that it is just another totally uninspired, uncomplimentary foreward to a mounting collection of poorly delivered forewards in Plath’s volumes (ie: Frieda Hughes in the restored edition….read a previous blog entry). Everyone has an agenda, and that agenda is never “oh wow this is a totally amazing collection of poems….let’s celebrate it because that Sylvia Plath is/was one amazing poet!”. It’s just so weird that when someone famous dies everyone rallies around to claim a relationship with that person and yet at the same time they all justify their ignorance.
I don’t know why I expected more from Robert Lowell but I did. His foreward seemed far too reminiscent of the letters exchanged between Charlotte Bronte and Southey (see Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Bronte). It seems like another established male poet not wanting to over-gratify the aspiring ego of the female writer, simply because she’s female, only in this case it is an even more confusing stance because the writer in question is dead, so why not compliment her?
I dunno, this strange “alterior-motive/hidden agenda” motif in Plath’s forewards seems like something to pursue…
Sylvia Plath The Ambivalent Bee God February 26, 2007
Posted by amanda in : Uncategorized , comments closedI met with professor Emerson today and we (finally) got to discuss the bee poem sequence at the end of Ariel. It was nice to validate my idea that the poems are extremely scattered in their assertions and ideas about the bees and that the only consistency is the use of perfect dichotomies (ie: power vs. powerlessness). By “scattered” I mean that they present this chaotic web of descriptions about various ways and situations in which Plath kept or encountered bees and in all four poems (not including “The Swarm) she never comes to a clear conceit as to how she feels about the bees or herself or her relationship with the bees. This ambivalency to make definite assertions is heightened by Plath’s seeming innablility to characterize herself; throughout the poems she is Plath the poet, Plath the eager bee keeper, Plath the fearful beekeeper, Plath a bee, Plath a vengeful domineering god, and Plath a benevolent god. I have read (and blogged about) many different critical takes on these bee poems, including the article that says that they are all about her father and her father as a nazi, but i think these poems are actually about herself and how she see’s herself in the world (shocking, I know). True, she may have gotten the idea to try her hand at bee keeping from her father, and she may have originally become inspired to write poems about bees because of her late father, but I think the poetry produced from her adventures (and misadventures) with the bees is incredibly self-reflective and has very little to do with Otto Plath. The bee sequence becomes this tiny meta-world of self-evaluation, that consequently turns out to be her final attempt at self-evaluation, and I think it ends on a very hopeful note. Throughout the poems she grapples with her own humilty, self-worth and power. The bees are merely a catalyst for this self-analysis, they provide for her a maleable subject that sometimes bends to her will and at other times tests her power. They also mirror her existence in a convenient way, at times being separate bee armies apart from the world and at times being one single bee-mind-entity working together against the world; much like Plath herself could often view herself in a secular light as a working single mother or in a kind of other-worldly light as a removed troubled poet. To view the bee poems in this way is at once nicely consistent with Plath’s confessional poetry and in another way troubling and reductive because it allows me to simply shrug and claim purposeful inconclusiveness on the part of the poet. I am beginning to accept that for the most part all I can do is shrug and pick an argument when it comes to Sylvia Plath because there are so many presented for me to choose and they are all (for the most part) convincing, so when I pose my own suggestions, even if they are inconclusive, only partially substantiated and slightly reductive, at least I trying to think on my own!
Professor Emerson and I did discuss at legnth the final idea in the poem “Wintering” which is the final poem in Plath’s Ariel. The last line reads, “The bees are flying. They taste the spring”. This final line of the final poem is so startlingly resolute and satisfying. Plath’s poems are many things but satisfying is rarely one of them, at least in the literal sense of having a concrete, hopeful, quasi-certainty. This line implies that the bees have made it. That after months in her cellar, and even longer as her property with her as their ambivalent god the bees are going to live and thrive after all. It seems then that Plath also “tastes the spring” and feels as though she may live another year. Professor Emerson told us in poetry about the southern superstition that if an elderly person lives through february they will live for another year and this poem seems to fit that notion. It almost makes Plath’s suicide seem more like a test (like how she tested her skills at bee keeping) and if she were found she’d have had another year. Plath successfully committed suicide on February 11 and so I know that makes this idea even more tragic but it’s something to think about…
anyway this idea is far more streamlined then my last few posts…so that’s a nice change and here is another video, just a short video about bee keeping!
You Can Run, But You Can’t Hide February 22, 2007
Posted by amanda in : Uncategorized , comments closedI’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between talent and personality. By “personality” I am referring to it in the most pejorative sense of the term. Harkening back to a question posed by professor Emerson in an earlier post (specifically the Dixie Chicks post): When do artists cease to be artists and begin being “personalities”?
I cannot help but gender my response. I think that artists turn into (or are turned into) personalities when they threaten the status quo. We are happy to indulge an artist, whether they be poet, author, singer or celebrity as long as they are merely entertaining us, but as soon as they say, paint or write something controversial we begin to scrutinize. We are particularly unforgiving when the artists in question are women. In the last century when we’ve had this explosion of mass media it seems we’ve used it to bully people into submission. We put these women on pedistals, examine their lives, point to their flaws and say “see? you don’t want to end up like them” and of course we don’t! I love the Dixie Chicks, but I would never want to have death threats or scandal, and similarly I love Sylvia Plath, but i would never want my personal life or tragedy capitalizied on or exploited. But at the same time as much as i don’t wish to emmulate their lives, it doesn’t mean i’m not listening to their messages or ignoring their contributions. I guess what it comes down to is that it doesn’t really matter….it is irritating and shameful that these extreme liberties are taken at the expense of these strong women’s privacy and dignity, but the smart people know what to listen to and in the end the legacy is in the art, if only because the art lasts longer!
This might be a simple sentiment and an overly-reductive answer to a complicated question, and i’m quite possibly idealistic, but that’s what I think!
Let Us Eat Cake February 22, 2007
Posted by amanda in : Uncategorized , comments closedIt’s been a while since i posted and I have blog-guilt.
My internet is down so I’m having to write this in word, which I really don’t like because then I know just how terrible my spelling and grammar are. Nevertheless, I had to blog about this article I just read (thank you Dr. Scanlon). It is called “Daddy, I Have Had to Kill You”; Plath, Rage, and the Modern Elegy” by Dr. Jahan Ramazani. This article claims Plath as one of the major contributors to the modern elegy, in particular the modern feminist elegy. He discusses three of her elegies in Ariel (“Full Fathom Five”, “Little Fugue”, and “Daddy”) as elegies to her late father Otto Plath. Ramazani says that while typical male elegies regard the dead with a sense of mourning and bonding culminating in a kind of celebration, Plath opened the door for criticism and the expression of rage towards the deceased subject. He also discusses the idea of “melancholia” where the poet (specifically female) turns her rage towards herself both as an act of connecting with the deceased and of revenging against the deceased. He writes, “While all Plath’s elegies are angry, her early ones turn rage inward, resulting in poems of bitter self-reproach, and only the later ones directly attack her father” (1143). Ramazani goes on to describe the new elegiac form Plath employs in the three poems listed above, and how they do become increasingly directed at her father and less at herself and yet she is still in some ways sadistic in her confused desire to relate and revolt from her father’s memory.
Altogether this is a very VERY convincing article and I like that it is able to marry both Plaths’ poetic skill and autobiography in a way that gives her an intense amount of agency not just in her own poems but likewise in an entire contemporary poetic movement. He discusses poets who influenced or took steps in preceding her (very bold) moves, including Emily Bronte! And he also discusses poets who followed her lead, imitating her new elegy, including: Lowell, Sexton and Rich. The problem I’m having is that ALL of the articles I’ve read are convincing, they all make very different claims, and in most cases these claims are mutually exclusive.
I’ve now read articles that attribute her poetry to PMDD, an article that says you can’t really know Plath or her autobiography at all through her poems because she used her poetry as a means of trying alternate personalities, several articles that accuse her poetry as being written publishable revenge against Ted Hughes, and some that say I should forget her autobiography and look at how she wrote. My fascination with Sylvia Plath is in no way diminished by these varying opinions and in fact the opposite is happening; I am possibly more obsessed than when I began this study, but now I feel scattered, like I don’t know which viewpoint to follow. This is in some ways a very lucky problem because I can’t go wrong, and I still hope to come up with my own argument although it is becoming quite apparent that the odds of finding something new to say (something new and not completely ludicrous) will be nearly impossible. In a way I wish this were a year long project because even though I’ve read a tremendous amount about and by Plath I am mystified that the semester is nearly half over and there is still so much I could and plan on reading. I have a meeting tomorrow that will hopefully help me get past/sort out some of these ideas and through with the bee poems and possibly encountering some new poetry will do me some good. I feel very ADD right now and I’m sure it shows in this post.
On a more focused note: I made the Sylvia Plath Tomato Soup Cake that I mentioned in the last post and it turned out pretty good!!! So come by tomorrow afternoon if you want to try some.
I am also really excited with all of the connections I am making between Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson and The Brontes. The only thing better than studying one poet is being able to subtly sneak in the study of other great poets and Plath really lends herself to this pursuit. I am beginning to connect these writers to the quote I have for the title of this blog and see them as synonymous with Plath’s “mushrooms”. These marginalized, reclusive, “crazy”, feminist writers are taking over the world, or at least the Mary Washington English department….and I, for one, couldn’t be happier!
Tactless?…..maybe February 14, 2007
Posted by amanda in : Uncategorized , comments closedsoooo it’s a snow day and I was bored, which is proably not something a college student should admit and maybe bored is the wrong word, and really I mean restless. Lately my remedy for this kind of listless feeling is to think “what would Sylvia Plath do???” okay I know this is a scary sentiment but I mean it in the most innocent way. Generally I read or write or think about reading and writing, but today was different. In an effort to savor the relatively small amount of poetry I have left to encounter I don’t really want to read any (especially because I want to continue to dwell on the bee poems and keep them fresh for next week’s meeting). It occured to me that in her journals Plath talks about baking and how much she baked during her marriage. She found baking theraputic and I can always apprecate a suggestion like that!
So I googled “Sylvia Plath Recipes” (and believe me the irony did not escape my attention and I know how sick I am)
I found this really kind of endearing article by Kate Moses (the same author of another article I mention in an earlier post) it discusses Plath’s kind of obsessive baking pastime and includes one of her “family-recipes” which sounds kind of interesting. I think if I can succesfully clear the ice of my windshield I’ll try to make this and I’ll let you know how it turns out.
Here’s a link to the article, if you scroll down, the recipe can be found at the bottom 🙂
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,894765,00.html
Enjoy the snow day Mary Washington!
Watch Out For Bees February 13, 2007
Posted by amanda in : Uncategorized , comments closedI’ve spent this week reading critical articles about Syliva Plath and her Bee poems at the end of Ariel. I felt (as many people do) that these poems deserved to be separated out and clustered together as she had clustered them both literally and thematically in her volume (the original/restored editions anyway). Luckily the articles I read for this week had many opinions about these five poems.
Personally, I see them as especially conflicted as compared to the other poems which is only compounded because there are so many about the same topic. The main conflict (is kind of obvious I know) is whether or not she or the bees are in control. Based on the order, I think she gains more and more control as the poems progress. The order FYI is: “The Bee Meeting” “The Arrival of the Bee Box” “Stings” “Wintering” and there is also a poem called “The Swarm” which she did not have in her original manuscript thus it is not in the restored edition with the rest of the bee poems…which actually helps cement my theory. The first poem, “The Bee Meeting” is appropriately enough a description of her initial encounters with the bees. It is unclear whether she is describing a real event or a dream but she details the entire process of harvesting honey from bees. It is actually less about the threatening nature of the bees as it is an introduction to the idea that the bee colony works as a united team to defend the queen and how we are threating to their system. It ends with the line “why am I cold.” A question stated as a sentence because she and we obviously know why she feels cold.
The second poem, is my personal favorite “The Arrival of the Bee Box” where she describes a literal wooden box of bees she has had delivered and because it is night they are simply sitting in her house and it is her observations of how much power she has over their lives. She writes “They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.” and it is a stunning realization that might seem kind of psychotic but it is the first time she has felt this way (or at least expressed it through her poetry) becasue though she has written many poems about motherhood those relate a feeling of independence from versus these bees which she apparently feels control over. This poem ends with the lines “Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free./The box is only temporary.”
The Third poem is “Stings”. I find this to be the most complicated of the bee poems although she is once again feeling bolder amongst the bees. In this poem she becomes or speaks through the ageing queen bee. So even though the bees are getting more of an upper hand in this poem, she is the head of the bee colony so she too is in a place of power.
The fourth poem is “Wintering” which is noteable because it is the final poem in “Ariel” which completed Plath’s vision to write a volume that begins with the word “love” and ends with the word “Spring”. In this poem it seems as though she has moved the bees into her cellar for the winter. This poem not only shows her as powerful but also demonstrates how unified the bee colony is. In some ways I get a sense of longing from this poem.
The fifth and final bee poem is added as an appendix to my restored edition on page 190 and it is “The Swarm”. This poem gives the bees the most power, turning them into an unstoppable army. I can in a way see why Hughes added this to his version because it is about bees and as long as he was meddling he might as well strive for consistency, but I can also see why Plath left it out. It is a good poem but a huge departure from how she talks about the bees in the other poems. This one is almost too obvious in the bee as army metaphor. It wouldn’t really fit with the other poems because it would be impossible to stick it in the middle of the other ones and a totally harsh way to begin the small bee sequence and obvioulsy she couldn’t end the sequence with this violent (however triumphant on the bee’s part) image.
So now the question remains…why the fixation on bees?
Even though scholars disagree as to her purpose behind these poems, they all agree that initial interest in the subject came from her late father. He was a german entemoligist who studied honey bees and wrote books about them. There is also biographical evidence that when living in her country home in the final year of her life, Plath also tried her hand at bee-keeping.
One article posed the argument that these bee poems are literally an ode to her her father that express her feelings about him using the bees as a catalyst. There is even evidence in this article to suggest that the german imagery and the nazi imagery are due to some evidence that Otto Plath was a fascist.
The other article I read was by Breslin and it tried to argue that you cannot truly know Plath through her poems because she used her poetry to try on different personalities and the bee poems are no exception. It remarked upon her various confidence levels in these poems and how they show that she was almost unreliable as a constant narrator.
I’m not sure which opinion I’m more likely to agree with because the fist seems to simplified and the second seems to neglect the autobiographical nature in a great deal of her poetry.
This was a really long, ranting, inconclusive post and I’m sorry about that! I meet with professor Emerson tomorrow and hopefully after that meeting i’ll have more of an idea of how to streamline my varied thoughts about these poems 🙂
*as an interesting side note and reward for reading this terribly boring post…..here is a fun fact: Hitler’s father also studied bee keeping…….FUN
also in response to my last post about the dixie chicks, professor emerson posed this queston to me this morning and i’d like to think on it some more but it is interesting to consider: When does a celebrity (be it poet, musician, actress, etc) stop being an artist and start becoming a personality?
for instance: The Dixie Chicks made one politically charged comment and the focus was taken completly off of their music and put onto their personal lives and now they have almost reached politician status in the amount of political sway public opinion has given them. Likewise Plath, after her suicide, she became less of a poet and more of a “personality” and her poetry was used primarily as a way of seeing into her personal life…..I guess this is similar to the questions in my dialogue with Jim Groom in the PMS post….but it’s something more to think about.
If I Could I would, And I Will Try! February 11, 2007
Posted by amanda in : Uncategorized , comments closed*FOR SOMETHING MORE SERIOUS IN NATURE CHECK OUT THE COMMENTS BETWEEN MYSELF AND JIM GROOM IN THE NEXT POST….
The Dixie Chicks Just won five grammys and i’m totally totally beyond words excited about this….i feel like I should try to relate this to Sylvia Plath in some way so that’ll be my goal haha.
I guess I always root for the underdog.
I am also a totally obsessive person and once i love something I love it pretty much forever without exception.I’ve loved their music since middle school (or I guess since they started out), they are my absolute favorite band of all time and these past few years they suffered from what i will now term “Ariel” syndrome. All of their talent and greatness was reduced to emotional female venting and villified. However, unlike Plath they were validated tonight. The best part is that they don’t even need validation because they have (their movie proved) so much self-assurance, so all of these awards are just a bonus!
Anyway this link is tenuous at best but whatever…it’s my blog and this is important to me so i’m gonna share it!
HOW’S THAT FOR POETIC JUSTICE?!?!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/11/AR2007021101680.html
Enjoy another fun post!
I’ll get back to serious business later 🙂
Worst Case of PMS Everrrr! February 11, 2007
Posted by amanda in : Uncategorized , comments closedSo, I just read the most unique two part article by Kate Moses called “The Real Sylvia Plath” it was written in 2000 and posted on salon.com. Moses argues (surprisingly convincingly) that Sylvia Plath committed suicide because she suffered from an extreme form of PMS.
*Now, before I continue, let me reassure you that I realize that why or how she committed suicide is neither here nor there because she did and nothing can change that, and I still believe that her poetry is the greatest regardless of her emotional state. This article does not challenge her poetic skill, but it does give a very interesting scientific (possible) explanation for her suicide…and i want to share it!
The theory was developed in 1990 that Plath suffered from PMDD (premenstrual dysphoric disorder). Apparently, her archives contain both her calendars and journals in which she marked the dates of her cycles and the physical symptoms she was experiencing (respectively). The symptoms she had that correspond with this severe form of PMS include: “low impulse control, extreme anger, unexplained crying and hypersensitivity…extreme fatigue, insomnia, hypersomnia, extreme changes in apetite and itchiness…conjunctivitis, ringing in the ears, feelings of suffocation, headaches, and heart palpitations” it is also worthy of note that she got bad sinus infections once a month (2). At this point my heart goes out to Sylvia Plath more than ever. Moses writes “Close reading of the “Ariel” poems in terms of Plath’s menses noted the discernibly cyclic pattern of rise and fall in mood and tone in the poems as well as their many images and themes of barrenness, fertility, psychic pain, bleeding and relief, always controlled by the overseeing influence of the inspiring but uncaring and all-powerful moon goddess” (3). Pregnancies also exacerbated these symptoms, of which Plath had three (one resulting in a misscarriage). To me the most interesting phenomenon discussed in this article, is that despite her knowledge of her physical symptoms and her careful charting and the symbolism in her poetry…evidence suggests that it was all an unconscious coincidence and that because PMS was just being discovered around the time of her death and there are journal entries which suggest she still considered her physical state a mysery. To add extra insult to injury the doctor responsible for studying, discovering and treating PMDD was living in London in 1963 and she had made an appointment with him for only two weeks after she committed suicide!
I’m still not sure if I completely buy this argument or even really care, but it is interesting and the coincidences are hard to overlook.
Anyway it’s something to think about…