Information on Anne Sexton @ Poets.org here. Some film clips here. Listen to her read "The Truth the Dead Know" here.
Read Adrienne Rich's biography at Poets.org here. Check out an article in Boston Phoenix on her work here. Watch this video and listen to her read "What Kind of Times are These." And definitely check out this awesome animation of her poem "Diving into the Wreck."
After this reading, reading these poems (the ones we were told to focus on) aloud twice, my tiny apartment seemed dark and threatening. My stomach twisted. So, I turned on extra lights just to feel a little warmer.
ReplyDeleteI like the version of "The Truth the Dead Know" that Anne Sexton actually reads much better than the version printed in our book. It seems to me that it hugs the theme of the title better, making the entire poem more cohesive. But, I suppose that this just serves as a reminder of the volatile state of an author's work- like what Oscar Wilde said "This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again." I also found it interesting that "Sylvia's Death" was written in a style that more closely resembled Sylvia's own poetic conventions, with shorter stanzas, staccato lines, and brief, dark images.
"Lady Lazarus" astounded me. It followed me to bed. I could hear those lines as I tried to sleep. It was incredibly creepy. Pain is a language that Sylvia Plath speaks fluently. The short lines allow the reader to move on, keeping the poem from being too dense. But, still the poem is heavy. The blending of God and Nazi elements at the end, along with the tidbits of Nazi torture throughout the poem elevated (or, should I say down-trod?) the entire tone to a whole new level of bizarre anguish.
But I have an issue with confessional poetry. How do you remark on someone else's pain? How do you evaluate and criticize it? Weigh it and parcel it? That's how I feel while trying to write about these poems. There is so much of a personal nature, so much memory and confession that trying to tear each poem apart seems like tearing apart a human being.
First of all, Whitney, your post is awesome.
ReplyDeleteMy own problem with confessional poetry is -- and this is something we touched on in class today -- the extreme and necessary narcissism of its authors. After my first encounters with the work of these bipolar, alcoholic and/or suicidal writers -- a list which would include Berryman, Lowell, Plath and Sexton -- I ended-up condemning all lyric poetry as an egocentric abuse of the powers of poetic speech; this in spite of the fact that the lyrical mode holds a vaulted place within Western history as the oldest, most basic and continuously undertaken type of poetic project. Though I've since recovered from my extreme reaction and have retracted my wholesale condemnation, I still find these particular writers incredibly irritating and of dubious quality, ethical influence and relevance.
For instance, I simply don't care about Plath's bizarre "Daddy" problems and find her self-identification with European Jewry during the Holocaust as wildly off-base on several aesthetic and ethical levels... For a white, upper-middle class woman -- because she happens to have had (heavens no!) an aloof and discontent father -- to equate her melancholy childhood with the fate of those who endured Auschwitz is stupidly incongruous and ahistorical to the point of autism. But then, how could history (the history of other people, after all) carry any real force for someone so completely self-absorbed? At best, historical events can be subsumed as strictly symbolic happenings and reduced to a sort of self-informing shadow play. It's the sort of mindset that might, for instance, bend a real-life suicide-bombing into a metaphor for a memorable orgasm, etc.
But my critique thus far only has to do with personal taste and the convolute 'ethics of representation'. I find these writers more interesting from a historical vantage point, particularly as symptomatic of a refocusing on selfhood that had its roots in psychiatry and that subsequently led to the commonplace enunciation of taboo speech. If one can speak of retrospective teleology -- by which I merely mean the causal fact that the future is always grounded in the past* -- these poets served to free up the limits of expression which we presently enjoy (and suffer). Or perhaps it is naive to say that a handful of particular people were the true cause of our current expressive latitude... at the very least, they serve to signify a dilation of the speakable and were, in a sense, sacrificed to this widening circle of expression which was experienced and documented by them as a circle of hell.
* A commonsense reversal of Doctorow's point that history has to be experientially rewritten in a perpetual present.
Note: I don't include Rich in my critique.
ReplyDeleteJustin, I wholeheartedly agree with your issues with confessional poetry. It is absurd that a woman who was a well off as Sylvia to compare her relationship with her dead father to that of Holocaust proportions.
ReplyDeleteBut this leads to the question of what then, was Sylvia playing at? She had to realize that her suffering was not on par with that of the millions tortured and murdered by the Nazis and their supporters. Plath must have had a reason. When I first read "Daddy," I assumed that she included the references that she did as a way to comprehend her father's roots and the country of his origins. And because she was upset with him, chose the least pleasant and most horrific images as a way to lash out at him. Like the eight year old child she was, she uses the most outlandish terms to describe how she feels to uphold the tone of the poem.
Or, perhaps Plath is putting into poetic form what she feels as the depressed and emotionally disturbed individual that she was. In a rational mind, these equations of her father and everyday sufferings with torture are not logical. But, in the mind of the depressed and those fighting the very life that they live, might this make sense? Maybe these dramatizations are the only way that Plath is able to convey to her readers the emotions that she feels. For if they are her emotions, and she really does feel that way, how can one looking in from the outside say that her assumptions are invalid? Granted, it could be said that she never went through the torture camps but no one else has lived her life or spent a moment in her head. Therefore, the ability to strike her assertions as mere presumptions is invalidated.
Then again, I do feel that there is a great deal of contrivance in this poem and that from her many edits, the poem grew into a life of it's own. Possessed a form that she polished into a poetic monster of emotion. The bones of the poem probably hold her basic underlying emotions, and then (for the sake of readability and poetic convention) she embellished. But, once again these are only the guesses of a single, novice reader.
I actually really like confessional poetry. I mean yeah, we can all look at a tree, call it pretty, and write some poem about it. But how these writers take their experiences and turn them into poetry is amazing to me. Sure, they are dramatizing the experiences. But really, who doesn’t when they’re upset? I think it just makes it that much more interesting. It’s like they’re giving us a little look into their thought process so maybe we can understand their feelings about situations. Sylvia Plath has to be my favorite so far. Her poem “Daddy” left me thinking for a while. I did think it was weird she compared her father to the Nazis, but I also think the poem wouldn’t have been as good had she not made the comparison. Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving into the Wreck” was good at first, but after watching the animation I thought it was ten times better.
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ReplyDelete(As far as I can tell, it erased my first post, so I'm trying again.)
ReplyDeleteAh, thanks for the response Whitney and your critique of my critique. As I said late in my first post, it comes down, finally, to personal taste. For one thing -- and here's my own vague bit of confessionalism and psychoanalysis -- I think the emotional and moralistic tone of my reaction confirms the notion that we hate most in others what we hate and fear most in ourselves.
Obviously, as you get at, there are inner experiences and feelings that are totally out-of-sync with material reality -- that's one of the things we are learning from the literature of modernism generally: that material and technological security and ease do not give birth to psychological comfort -- if anything, quite the opposite. They often give birth to isolated work and leisure experienced as solipsistic entrapment (bell-jarred being), sociopathic individualism fostered by capitalist competition and a sense of never-having-accomplished-enough (the result of tacitly extending the concept of 'natural resources' to the self); and let’s not forget ennui, angst, anguish and so on. However, I still feel that confessionalism of this kind is essentially churned out by those stuck at the unenviable psychological level of teenagers… however masterful the technical aspects of their work. (I actually like a good bit of their poetry... though typically not their more 'selfy' pieces.) I particularly dislike lugubrious self-mythologizing tendencies and tend to think of the ego as only a tiny, blinkered fraction of what 'we' actually 'are'. I was raised Catholic so you'd think I'd be more receptive to poetry that centers itself around confession... Ultimately though, I feel like these poets really and truly had their heads so far up their own, so to speak, asses, that they died of suffocation. Also, the often explicit ideology that this type of poetry has a successful therapeutic function is, to me, a bit of transparent nonsense -- an inept apologetics (mis)informed by the tenets of psychoanalysis.
Once again though, it comes down to personal taste and whether or not one finds this type of poetry 'useful' and/or beautiful.
I tend to think of cultural and linguistic practices as occurring and evolving more or less autonomously at a structural, 3rd-person level (while obviously still impinging upon and structuring 1st-person experience.) This is what I was (more importantly) trying to get at with the idea of a large-scale "dilation of the speakable," and the sudden permissibility of previously taboo speech topics. I was thinking about this again today. I think that this "dilation" of expression, the widening of communicative possibilities, has mostly to do with how, in modernity, we began viewing the self as an object amongst objects, to be explored as just one case of object-being. This de-centering of the human subject -- boasted famously by Freud himself (he viewed his own role as comparable to Darwin’s and Galileo’s) -- was accomplished primarily through psychoanalysis, behaviorism and other self-proclaimed empirical/clinical approaches to personhood.
I think confessionalism, in large part, traces the trauma and the violence done to selfhood in modernity... in fact, it almost makes me happy to be within the relatively hollow surface-world of postmodernity... My response is inadequate and I have other things to do but there's a start anyway.
Sylvia Plath was probably half of the reason that I decided to pursue English so nedless to say, I kind of have a soft spot for her. I could see how confessionalist poetry is so painstakingly personal and how that might make it irrelevant to read. I, on the other hand, am very interested in people's true persons (hope that doesn't just make sense to me...). I find Sylvia to be so vulnerable and so romantic in such a dark way that I can't help but to dig it. I think Justin's statement above about finding use or beauty in confessionalist poetry is precisely accurate. I do not find refuge or help in Plath or Rich or any of them...I just enjoy them for the shear beauty.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite poem we had to read by Sylvia Plath was "Lady Lazarus". In this poem, Plath draws a connection between her suicide attempts and the attempt of the Nazis to exterminate the Jews. While this poem is depressing, it is written with an air of determined arrogance. She seems as if she believes herself to be victorious over death. She seems to be saying that she, along with the jewish race, will rise back with power. In the end, she compares herself to a phoenix, and says "…i eat men like air." She is presenting herself not as a depressed and suicidal woman but a women with a re-birthed power and determination. This poem is to me a warning. Plath is saying that suicide attempts have made her stronger, and the attempts at jewish extermination have made the jewish race more powerful and young. That is what i got from this poem.
ReplyDeleteThe poem "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath was probably the first poem that I actually found to be interesting. I think this is because I'm in the process of finishing my senior thesis on whether one can choose what to believe. The last line of the poem, in which the speaker says that she is through dealing with the issues with her father, was the most interesting of the poem. I don't believe the speaker when she says this. I think that she wants to believe that she's through, but it won't be possible for her. For her to believe this, she would have to change all of the other things associated with her father. One's beliefs are like a web, and you can't just change one belief and keep all of your others. They're all intertwined. This is why I don't believe the speaker.
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