Pouring Yourself Into

How we need another soul. How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into. ~ Sylvia Plath

From my reading tonight...

The little toy wife

Erased, sigh, sigh.

Four babies and a cocker.

Sylvia Plath - Amnesic 

Post Card - Sylvia Plath

The Liquid Soul...

“How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into.”  -Sylvia Plath

Shadow

 

 

 

 

"I thought the most beautiful thing in the world

must be shadow."- Sylvia Plath

Reading Sylvia Plath 50 Years after her death is a different experance

 Poet Tess Taylor reflects on how we read Sylvia Plath's poetry,  50 years after her death.


Source NPR 

Sylvia Plath - October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963

"I wonder about all the roads not taken and am moved to quote Frost...but I won't. It is sad to be able only to mouth other poets. I want someone to mouth me."  - Sylvia Plath

The Worst Enemy to Creativity

"And By the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." - Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath 80 years later-

Today is the birthday of Sylvia Plath. Plath is perhaps one of the first poet that caught my attention in such a way to interest me in poetry as an avocation. There were poets who I found interesting prior to Plath (Frost for example comes to my mind) but it was Plath that first really spoke to me about the power of language in such a way that I wanted to experience first hand that rich trans-formative process that occurs when one's mind and soul battle in an inner discourse to find the right words for the page.

Ted Hughes once said (and I'm paraphrasing here) that he believes she never failed to finish a poem. She may have started with one idea and ended up somewhere else entirely (who hasn't) but she was seriously driven to by her writing. From biographies and her own journals I know that she was constantly alert to the world around her for - looking for material for her next poem.  I believe this was very much a part of her brilliance. I would say that she lived a poet's life; always a poet in the moment. I believe this is one positive  lesson that writers can take from Sylvia's life.

A Poem Takes Place

"A door opens, a door shuts. In between you had a glimpse: a garden, a person, a rainstorm, a dragonfly, a heart, a city. I think of those round glass Victorian paperweights ...a clear globe, self-complete, very pure, with a forest or village or family group within it. You turn it upside down, then back. It snows. Everything is changed in a minute. It will never be the same in there - not the fur trees, nor the gables, nor the faces. So a poem takes place."  ~ Sylvia Plath

Ted Hughes Honored Today

 

Ted Hughes (left) is honored today by his inclusion at the Poet's Corner in the South Transept of Westminster Abbey.  The practice of honoring  the greatest poets with a tomb or stove is a 600 year tradition in Britain.  (pictured on the right is photo of some of the markers)

The list of those honored before him include the likes of Dryden, Browning, Tennyson, Shelly, Keats, Blake, Hopkins and Eliot.

Hughes' inclusion came after some heavy duty lobby  by a number of poets including Seamus Heaney and Simon Armitage.  Britain's Poet Laureate from 1984 till his death in 1998 on might have though Hughes o be an early lock for the honor.

I've read a number of Ted Hughes' published works. While his first book, Hawk in the Rain is outstanding and won critical acclaim  when published in the late 1950's it is Birthday Letters, published the year he died that I most remember him for.  This work forever links him and his response to the final work of his first wife Sylvia Plath.

I have to say that while Hughes is a masterful poet, I have often wondered how long i would have been before his talents were truly recognized without Sylvia.  I was her belief in Ted and her dogged work typing manuscripts and sending them off that netted his recognition  for Hawk in the Rain. I have always seen Ted as the more laid back Brit and Sylvia with that American ambition driving him forward.

We are limited...

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.” 

 Sylvia Plath  - October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963

Strange

At approximately 2:30 a.m. I was awaken and strangely my thoughts were of Sylvia Plath.  At first I thinking how strange this is the anniversary of her death until I realized that it was the morning of the 12th and she died February 11th, a fact that had escaped me yesterday.

Then it dawned on me how strange the poem draft I wrote last night (see below) and the ghosts of writers.

Feeling a little bit of twilight zone here.

Rest in Peace Sylvia...

"Last Letter"

The New Statesman publishes a previously unseen work by the late poet laureate Ted Hughes that shed some light on the final days of Sylvia Plath.  Above, Actor Jonathan Pryce reads the poem.

This is sure to start a whole new round of discussion and debate about the Hughes-Plath relationship.

Sylvia Plath 1932 - 1963

Today is the anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s death in 1963. It’s hard for me to understand that all these years later in some quarters the debate still rages as to the significance she plays in modern poetry.

One may or may not particularly like Plath’s poetry, but what poet’s work is universally appreciated. Many people cut their poetic teeth on Plath’s poems. I was one who was captivated by the powerful genius that propelled her language. It is not surprising to me that her poetry was particularly meaningful to many women, but it did surprise me that it could and did transcend gender in my case. While Plath was not the singular poet who inspired my interest in poetry to the extent that I too wanted to be a wordsmith, but she was certainly one of the cornerstones in building up that interest. I may not have found others to help cultivate that interest were it not for Plath.


I realize that one opinion far from constitutes a universal truth, but there is significant agreement among many that was a major force in poetry. I realize that many detractors maintain that Plath’s status is due in large part to her almost mythical life & death with emphasis on the latter. Obviously no one can ascertain the amount of attention drawn to Plath solely on the bases of her infamous death. What I don’t often hear from her detractors is specific arguments about her poetic form, syntax, subjects, devises, etc. Oh, a few will offer critical judgment of the confessional style that many believe her poetry tends to fall into, but those individuals will typically use that argument across the board for the likes of Berryman, Sexton, Lowell, Snodgrass, Starbuck, Snodgrass, et al.


It is hard to fault Plath’s craft; her ability to formulate and process language onto a page with a minimum of words and a maximum of authority over those words. Her work has earned her a spot among the major poets of our time. Her death is simply a sad footnote.


The Collected Poems (P.S.)  
Ariel: The Restored Edition
Crossing the Water
Collected Children's Stories (Faber Children's Classics)

The blood jet is poetry; There is no stopping it.

Today is the birthday of Sylvia Plath