Thursday 26 September 2013

Celebration and Exploration of the Poetry of Sylvia Plath



Our first public event of the autumn season is a celebration and exploration of the poetry of Sylvia Plath, one of the most haunting and powerful voices in English poetry of the last century. You are invited to attend the next Stort Poetry Group meeting to share your favourite Plath poems with us all. The meeting will be on Wednesday, October 2, at 7.30 in the Theatre Bar at Rhodes, South Road, Bishops Stortford, which has proved a very acceptable venue.

Sylvia Plath is one of the most individual voices in English poetry, and her life one of the most tragic and controversial of Twentieth-Century poets. Her biographical details are well known – her breakdown and hospitalisation in her native USA written about in her novel The Bell Jar, her romance and marriage with the charismatic poet Ted Hughes, and the breakdown of that marriage, followed by her suicide in London, with her most brilliant volume of poems published after her death. She has been responded to in many different ways – as a feminist heroine, as a feminist martyr, as a confessional poet, as a breath-taking innovator in poetry, as Hughes’ equal or superior as a poet, as his muse, as his victim, as an American poet, as a British poet, or as someone just uniquely herself. 

You can decide for yourself, and share your opinions at the Celebration and Exploration of the Poetry of Sylvia Plath. If you would like to make a more formal presentation of your response to Sylvia Plath as part of the evening, please contact me.  Otherwise, simply turn up at this free event on October 2.

Online Sources for Sylvia Plath

Information, texts of poems etc on these sites:

Poetry Foundation: Sylvia Plath

<http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/sylvia-plath> (very full biography emphasising psychological themes + exhaustive bibliography)
< http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/sylvia-plath#about > (lots of poems, mostly early)

A celebration, this is: A website for Sylvia Plath

<http://www.sylviaplath.info/> (exhaustive detail of publications etc, biography, lots of stalkerish photos, and links to some very cultish websites)

Poets.org from the Academy of American Poets:  Sylvia Plath 

< http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/11 >

The Poetry Archive: Sylvia Plath 

< http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=7083 > (no texts, but two recordings)

Internal.org: Poetry Archive: Sylvia Plath

< http://www.internal.org/Sylvia_Plath > (lots of poems, all breaching copyright)

Hello Poetry: Sylvia Plath

< http://hellopoetry.com/-sylvia-plath/ > (lots of poems, all breaching copyright)

All Poetry: Sylvia Plath

< http://allpoetry.com/Sylvia_Plath > (6 poems)

Some Sylvia Plath Poems

Sylvia Plath, Ariel

Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue  
Pour of tor and distances.

God’s lioness,  
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to  
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye  
Berries cast dark  
Hooks—

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,  
Shadows.
Something else

Hauls me through air—
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.

White
Godiva, I unpeel—
Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.  
The child’s cry

Melts in the wall.  
And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive  
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

Sylvia Plath, Morning Song

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival.  New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety.  We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses.  I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's.  The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars.  And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Sylvia Plath, Lady Lazarus


I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it--

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?--

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot--
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

'A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart--
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash--
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there--

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

23-29 October 1962

Calendar for 2013-4

Apologies for delay in posting this! Please note that dates for 2014 are approximate only - we need to meet on nights when there is no major function at Rhodes, so may shift a day or so either way. Correct dates will be posted when they are confirmed.


October 2  Celebration and Exploration of the Poetry of Sylvia Plath – bring your favourite poems, and your own insight and enthusiasm - we will need some volunteers prepared to make a presentation on an aspect of Plath’s work & life or on specific poems

Tuesday, November 5  Discussion: Language, Poetry & Communication – just what is poetry? does it need rules? how does it communicate? what is a poem? what isn’t a poem? - bring problems, questions, examples, poems

December 4  Workshop – exchange our poems & obtain feedback; could combine with someone introducing a poet, if anyone is interested?

February 5 International Night – poems from as many countries as possible, in original language and in translation - we will need volunteers to read poems or to bring in friends who can

March 5  Planning for Stort Poetry booklet + poems on theme of “Childhood”

April 2  Narrative Poems – sharing and discussing our favourites

May 7 Visiting Poet – to be announced

June 4 Poetry writing “en plein air” - where to be decided!

July 2 Launch of Stort Poetry booklet -I’d suggest a reading, friends & family invited of course, and possibly even with a visiting poet, but we will plan all this beforehand