jump to navigation

You Can Run, But You Can’t Hide February 22, 2007

Posted by amanda in : Uncategorized , comments closed

I’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 closed

It’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 closed

soooo 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 closed

I’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 closed

So, 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…

Blackbird February 9, 2007

Posted by amanda in : Uncategorized , comments closed

Yesterday was really interesting! I got to meet Dr. Donovan the editor for Blackbird the online literary journal at VCU, which recently published a newly discovered Plath sonnet. He told me the story of how they found the poem and were able to get the publishing rights:
apparently one of the MFA graduate students was writing a paper on F. Scott Fitzgerald but what she really wanted to do was study Sylvia Plath, so she asked around to see if there were any links between the two authors. She found a library that had a huge amount of data on Fitzgerald, including Plath’s undergraduate copy of The Great Gatsby. So, then she went and found an article about this particular book of Plath’s and how on a certain page (which you can see by going to blackbird’s website) there is a note “L’Ennui” which corresponds to a poem. Having never heard of this poem, the student contacted the Lilly library which has all of Plath’s manuscripts and asked for the poem which (for a fee) they sent her. They sent her two typed pages: one with Plath’s name and address at the top and another without. The student inquired as to where this poem was published and the library responded that it was not published because the copy that didn’t have her name indicated that Plath maybe didn’t want to publish it. Blackbird worked for two years to get the rights to this sonnet, contacting Faber and faber (Plath’s publishers) and both of Plath’s children who now have the rights to her work (they never succeeded in reaching her children) and finally after paying on two-hundred dollars they recieved publishing rights! News of the new poem spread around the world (including a weird amount of interest from Turkey….which is weird) and gave a great deal of acclaim to the Blackbird journal.
I also learned that there are many pieces of Plath’s Juvenelia in this same library that have still never been published. I think it is really interesting that they would publish her journals and letters and all kinds of documents that she couldn’t have possibly envisioned being publish(able) and yet they don’t publish these early poems that are so helpful in understanding the origins of her creative process, claiming that she didn’t intend them to be published!
Another great thing about this Blackbird publication is the way in which it introduces the poem and has links to the origional scanned documents. Dr. Donovan agreed with me that it is a shame that she is not given credit for her poetic skill and rather her death is treated like a masterpiece. In his effort to curb this belief, he displayed the poem as a kind of momento to her early self-discipline and practice as a poet. Because it is true, from a very young age Plath worked extremely hard, read as much as she could and wrote at legnth each and every day, and amongst her writing she created a lot of poetry, that while nowhere near as skillfully beautiful as her Ariel poems, are incredibly valuable stepping stones on the way.

so, visit Blackbird and check out “Ennui” by Sylvia Plath!

Just So I Don’t Forget February 8, 2007

Posted by amanda in : Uncategorized , comments closed

This is really more of a bookmark than an actual post, but I wanted to note that I read an article yesterday that stated that “Medusa” was actually written about Plath’s mother! I think this is interesting because my immediate assumption when I read such words as “umbilical” is to assume that she is speaking about her own children immediately disregarding the fact that she is someone else’s child….

*more on this later….including: the implications of this new subject and then this subject in comparison to her other poems about maternity.
*********************************************************************
AND I’M BACK:

So this article I read gave some insight into Plath’s relationship with her mother Aurelia. Apprently in adulthood (despite kind letters) Plath and her mother did not get along. There are entire transcripts of Plath talking to her therapist about how much she hates her mother. Theoretically the problem lies in Aurelia’s attempts to live vicarioulsy through her children, which put added pressure on the already self-assured perfectionist Plath and resulted in little praise. This now makes so much more sense in terms of the poem “Medusa” which describes a blood-sucking, Life-leaching monster…tied somehow maternally to the speaker. It also helps to explain Plath’s sense of detachement in the poems she wrote about her own children. It makes perfect sense (to me at least) that if you are dissatisfied with your own mother, you would try to be the opposite kind of mother to your own children. The opposite of a mother striving to live vicariously through her children is a mother who detaches herself almost completely from the lives of her children, recognizing their individuality from her immediatly. In a way this softens my opinion about Plath maternally as well. It is less that she wished to be detached from her children and more that she was trying to detach herself from them because she saw it as the best way for them to thrive.

I could be way off base here but I think this makes sense!

Everybody Is Crazy February 7, 2007

Posted by amanda in : Uncategorized , comments closed

After another really great meeting with professor Emerson I am once again prompted to revisit my aim in this project or rather speculate on something brand new yet totally relevant.
We spoke a lot about the idea of “passing” or rather the notion of “crazy” people (whether they be emotional or physical or anything outside of the realm of typical normalcy) walk amongst us everyday in an effort to hide or “pass” as “normal”. In the article I eluded to several posts back I quoted the author as describing Plath’s life as “coping” and I think this is a similar sentiment. I am left to wonder if this “passing/coping” situation is really occuring or if we try to convince ourselves this is the case to make our lives easier, because we can’t be held accountable if we never notice. There is also the idea of self-accepted eccentricity, or rather the notion that the people we label, stigmatize and isolate as “crazy” know and don’t care, and it is really our own discomfort with the idea that they know and don’t care that tries to make us believe that they are likewise ashamed and trying to “pass”.
It is so easy to look at the end of Plath’s life and shrug and say “eh she lost her mind and she commmitted suicide, but she was crazy and it’s what she wanted” and I wonder why it is so easy for us to give her back her agency at the end? How it can be that her whole life’s talent is reduced to crazy emotional impulses out of her control, where everyone wants the credit and no one wants to give it to Sylvia Plath the poet, but her suicide is absolutely hers? The way they look at how premeditated it was and how carefully planned it was and yet no one saw it coming because she was so good at “coping”?
I don’t know it just seems horribly unfair to take the power out of her poetics but restore it to her death and then to treat said death like one of her masterpieces.

I leant Professor Emerson this documentary called “The Beales of Grey Gardens”. It was filmed in the seventies by two brothers, Albert and David Maysles, in which they spent countless hours at the East Hampton estate “Grey Garden” with mother and daughter recluses (big) Edith and (little) Edith Beale. Little Edith is a first cousin to Jaqueline Kennedy, thus they are old debutantes. The two woman around 60 and mid 80’s respectively live alone in this dilaptated estate that is always on the verge of condemnation by the Hampton authorities. The film chronicles their lives and thoughts including dancing and singing and poetry recitation. I personally am obsessed with them. I think they are completely charming and so very much in control of their own lives, however, reviews on the films are mixed, and many people who watch them find it sad and label them crazy.
Just for fun, here is a clip of the movie, and tell me what you think!
this is a long and confusing post I know, but stick with me! and here is a reward:

it is interesting to wonder how gender plays into this idea of crazy, and if Plath had been a man, would we not be looking for someone to blame for his suicide rather blaming the man himself? and is it really any better?

Midnight Musings February 4, 2007

Posted by amanda in : Uncategorized , comments closed

It might be important to first note that if you cannot sleep you should not read Sylvia Plath…it is NOT soothing!
I am reading the second half of Ariel (the restored edition) and I’ve now read everything but the bee poems at the very end, i’m not sure why i’m saving them, but they seem to belong to their own sub-category and I would like to read them apart, so, I’ll probably get to them on Tuesday.
But, as far as my initial reactions to this second half of the volume, there are a few incredibly striking changes. I am immediately aware of why the critics laud these final twenty (or so) poems as her strongest, because they are undoubtedly so. They are eerily vivid and varied as compared to her earlier poems.
“Nick and the Candlestick” is a nice departure from her other poems about babies (i.e. “Morning Song) in many cases she is still rather removed and subservient to the baby, but there is also a sense that she worships him. She quite literally compares him to the christ child: “remembering even in sleep,/your crossed position” which, albeit isn’t completely non-creepy, but isn’t altogether non-endearing either. This poem reads incredibly charming especially when you get to the poem “Medusa” which I think (although only tentatively still) is about a baby and even if it’s not, it is so visually upsetting either way that i’ll need to do more research to comment further.
The moon becomes a star figure (pun intended) in these poems. “She” (as the moon is consistently a feminine figure) is this sterile, mostly sinister, incredibly regal being that involves herself in almost every poem to some capacity. I was very interested in the poem “The Rival” which I had never read before but which really describes the moon or rather Plath’s moon, as synonymous with the human subject of the poem (possibly and again tentatively her mother…but I am quite probably very wrong). It is one of the clearest articulations of the moon’s attributes according to Plath (here are a few lines):
“The Rival”
If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
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.

(73)

I will do more research on these poems but i’ll leave with that for now….(notice how vivid and clear this is….and could not possibly be simply emotional outpourings)