|
|
 |
A Woman At War:
|
By this time I had spilled one drink, partly into my mouth, partly over my hands and the floor, and the jazz was beginning to get under my skin, and I started dancing with Luke and knew I was very bad, having crossed the river and banged into the trees, yelling about the poems, and he only smiling with the far-off look of a cretin satan. He wrote those things, and he was slobbering around. Well, I was slobbing around, "blub, maundering" and I didn't even have the excuse of having written those things; I suppose if you can write sestinas which bam crash through lines and rules after having raped them to the purpose, then you can be satanic and smile like a cretin beelzebub.
Then the worst happened, that big, dark, hunky boy, the only on there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard into my eyes and it was Ted Hughes. I started yelling again about his poems and quoting: "most dear unscratchable diamond" and he yelled back, colossal, in a voice that should have come from a Pole, "You like?" and asking me if I wanted brandy, and me yelling yes and backing into the next room past the smug shining blub face of dear Bert, looking as if he had delivered at least nine or ten babies, and bang the door was shut and he was sloshing brandy into a glass and I was sloshing it at the place where my mouth was when I last knew about it.
We shouted as if in a high wind, about the review, and he was saying Dan knew I was beautiful, he wouldn't have written it about a cripple, and my yelling protest in which the words "sleep with the editor" occurred with startling frequency. And then it came to the fact that I was all there, wasn't I, and I stamped and screamed yes, and he had obligations in the next room, and he was working in London, earning ten pounds a week so he could later earn twelve pounds a week, and I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hairband off, my lovely red hairband scarf which has weathered the sun and much love, and whose like I shall never again find, and my favorite silver earrings: hah, I shall keep, he barked. And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face. His poem "I did it, I." Such violence, and I can see how women lie down for artists. The one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge, with hulk and dynamic chunks of words; his poems are strong and blasting like a high wind in steel girders. And I screamed in myself, thinking: oh, to give myself crashing, fighting, to you.
I discovered Sylvia Plath somewhat haphazardly. A friend of mine casually mentioned the name on a Smashing Pumpkins messageboard, and for some reason, I set out to find out more about this woman.
I ended up writing a 29 page paper on Plath, called "Amidst Fierce Flames: The Historical in Plath's Ariel." It was basically a look at how Plath used historical, cultural, and political references in her work to communicate a feminist point, through close examination of "Lady Lazarus," and "Daddy." Her words have become a huge part of who I am, as she is someone I can strongly identify with.
It becomes quite obvious to anyone looking for Plath sites on the internet that over half of them are nothing but disrespectful cult-ish praisings of Plath, treating her as a novel suicide and a female martyr. So my goal with this site is to present a respectful portait of a fine female writer, who is all too often dismissed as a "mad" confessional poet. Therefore, here I have assembled what I believe to be the aspects of Plath most necessary to someone attempting to understand or read Plath for the first time.
Words: My favorite poems of Plath's.
In Plaster: Pictures of Sylvia Plath.
Cut: Links to other Plath sites I have found helpful and informative.
Readers
by Frieda Hughes, Sylvia Plath's daughter
Wanting to breathe life into their own dead babies
They took her dreams, collected words from one
Who did their suffering for them.
They fingered through her mental underwear
With every piece she wrote. Wanting her naked.
Wanting to know what made her.
Then tried to feather up the bird again.
The vulture with its bloody head
Inside its own belly,
Sucking up its own juice,
Working out its own shape,
Its own reason,
Its own death.
While their mothers lay in quiet graves
Squared out by those green cut pebbles
And flowers in a jam jar, they dug mine up.
Right down to the shells I scattered on her coffin.
They turned her over like meat on coals
To find the secrets of her withered thighs
And shrunken breasts.
They scooped out her eyes to see how she saw,
And bit away her tongue in tiny mouthfuls
To speak with her voice.
But each one tasted separate flesh,
Ate a different organ,
Touched other skin.
Insisted on being the one
Who knew best,
Who had the right recipe.
When she came out of the oven
They had gutted, peeled
And garnished her.
They called her theirs.