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May
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Posted by Christopher Waldrop
May 21, 2008 |
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Mirror
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see, I swallow immediately.
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike
I am not cruel, only truthful –
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me.
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
–Sylvia Plath
How many poems can you say stick with you so intensely that you remember where you were when you first read them (for instance, a classroom with burgundy carpet and faux wood desks that you, a southpaw, found inconvenient because they were made for right-handers), even the book they were in (a thick anthology with an eggplant-colored cover)? Mirror was like being kicked in the stomach. I never fell into Plathophilia, but I did read her Collected Poems straight through, and went back and re-read Ariel, Lady Lazarus, and Cut. Maybe I missed becoming obsessed because of, well, of this Y-chromosome I carry around, or maybe it’s just because I managed to skirt her work until my teenage years were coming to an end. I did know at least one genuine Plathophile, though, a girl who told me she tried to kill herself three times then gave up because she knew she’d never be as good as Plath. Because I know the poetry, though, because I know how damned good and powerful it is, I could understand her obsession, as well as Elizabeth Bachner’s own recounting of her discovery and enthrallment:
My Sylvia Plath obsession started because, as a ten-year-old rummaging around the public library in search of “grown-up” books, I read some of her poems and got a strange rush of vertigo, and I wanted to feel that again. I spent the next decade religiously exploring the intrigues and biography wars that bubbled around in the wake of her thirty-year life. Everyone knows about Sylvia Plath’s suicide, and how her husband, Ted Hughes, cheated on her with their friend Assia and then abandoned her. Many people now know, too, that Hughes burned some of Plath’s journals, that he had a daughter with Assia, and that Assia, too, committed suicide, killing herself and their four-year-old daughter, Shura. When I was sixteen, I lived near the Fitzroy Road apartment where Yeats once lived, and where Plath had gassed herself. By the time I first read The Bell Jar at eighteen, I was already beginning to burn out on Plath-lore — the whole thing seemed sour and depressing. I barely skimmed Ted Hughes’s volume of poetry about his relationship with Plath (Birthday Letters), or his tribute to Assia and Shura (Crow). I didn’t watch the movie Sylvia, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and her mom, Blythe Danner, when it came out in 2003.
But Sylvia Plath has subtly, secretly, even, stayed a big part of my life. Sometimes when I walk down the street, her poems run through my head like rock songs.
In reviewing Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath’s Art Of The Visual, a collection of essays edited by Kathleen Connors, Bachner adds, “Every few years, Plath is exhumed, and piles of new material are exposed — yet her grave is somehow bottomless.” I remember when her unabridged journals were published; I remember seeing (or maybe just imagining) a distinct difference on different sides of the Atlantic. British critics, who prefer Ted Hughes and think he got a raw deal (after all, he only ran off with another woman, then, after Plath’s death, became her literary executor, destroying some of her journals and re-ordering the poems in Ariel) and who focused on a single passage in which she describes picking her nose in excruciating detail. American critics took a broader view, I thought, talking about the inherent power of even her most private writing.
Reading the review of this new book of Plath’s painting, my first thought was, “She was a painter TOO?” Here was a woman driven toward perfection in everything, but also driven to try everything. It seems nothing frightened Sylvia Plath. Lady Lazarus may be her most famous poem, but it also reveals the extent of her genius. She knew she would keep coming back.
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