plath unhinged THE COLOSSUS I shall never get you put together entirely, Pieced, glued, and properly jointed. Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles Proceed from your great lips. It's worse than a barnyard. Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle, Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other. Thirty years now I have labored To dredge the silt from your throat. I am none the wiser. Scaling little ladders with gluepots and pails of lysol I crawl like an ant in mourning Over the weedy acres of your brow To mend the immense skull plates and clear The bald, white tumuli of your eyes. A blue sky out of the Oresteia Arches above us. O father, all by yourself You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum. I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress. Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered In their old anarchy to the horizon-line. It would take more than a lightning-stroke To create such a ruin. Nights, I squat in the cornucopia Of your left ear, out of the wind, Counting the red stars and those of plum- color. The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue. My hours are married to shadow. No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel On the blank stones of the landing. sylvia plath 010102 ... scheherazade 'plath' is a disagreeable noise. a bit like 'plah', similiar to 'pfaff'. "what did you think of soandso's new haircut / that coffee / this sentence?" "plath" use it in a sentence today. 010818 ... unhinged 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. Gentleman, ladies, These are my hands, My knees. I may be skin and bone, Neverhteless, 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 knockes 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, 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 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. 010818 ... paste! neruda and plath in the same day? i think i have a crush on you. 010818 ... unhinged i cannot take credit for neruda. that was all the workings of noah. he has that way about him. 010819 ... bloodjetpoetry death goddess. cookies and milk left behind. towels stuffed under the door. how i wish i had been your child. i think i made you up inside my head. the blood jet is poetry it cannot be stopped you hand me two roses two children 011119 ... unhinged there is a charge alright...she just forgot to mention that i'm the one being charged 011120 ... crimson The woman that Ted Hughes left Plath for committed suicide a few years later the same way as Plath: she put her head in an oven. 030815 ... shoccolo plath is a coward, and an imbecile, despite being a prominent figure in modern literature. after all, understanding the world means finding a way to exist in it, without it affecting your personal notion of truth. 030815 ... oldephebe I'm so glad I came across this page - I've always been kind of darkly awed by plaths writing, very dark, and some of it resonated with me - that sent this discordant shimmer oscillating through my fundamentalist mores poetry, man - these days it's one of the few things that generates a truly authentic response in ah me. (awkward construction, so what else is new?) 030815 ... pipedream i've always loved plath...but i agree with schoccolo up there- suicide is a cowardly thing to do, but im surprised nobody did anything about her repeated attempts to kill herself; maybe nobody cared after all... i've loved that blend of arrogance, anger and angsty darkness that plath exudes; her juxtapositioning of words and images into a unique web of fascination...she's like a large cat pacing around in a cage and hurling itself against the bars again and again. apparently she wrote with a thesaurus in her lap. 030816 ... oldephebe yep 030816 ... oldephbe my god! I have just started getting into Plath and *pipedream* thankyou for introducing me to this wholly original, redoubtable, powerful, fierce female voice!! Her wholly innovative juxtapositions (i like the way you ah described her style) set(s) upon ones soul like a seige, and a not unwelcome one at that - brilliant, trajic, and yet brilliant (the exhaling meteors across the sky kind of brilliance! ) and ah I find reverberations of dadaist deconstruction in some of her writing as well - sort of like smearing anarchic swathes of the rhetorical equivalent of fecal matter (god I am so uptight some times, everything must be primly qualified and ameliorated by polysyllabic obfuscation!) all over the totems lining the patriarchal pantheon - just brilliant - sure exasperating diachotomies yeah but still nonetheless a primal, primeval incandescence - exuberance - fury - a not unconsiderable cognitive reach - makes me kind of embarassed to re-read some of my scrawl upon the wall now hers' Is a voice that could truly rend stone towers into splintered surrender - what a truculent soul i am feebly scratching at the oak doors edge - i am stubbing my talons against its towering implacable breadth - later 030816 ... oldephebe relentless inner critic: Hey chief! it's spelled oldephebe 030816 ... shoccolo i love plath's work - she is beautiful and insightful. though we can find enlightenment in her writing, we cannot find it in her example. the tragedy is, perhaps no one listened to her repeated notions of despair, but i think it's entirely possible that she told no one. wanting to die is a very hard thing to discuss with the people who love you, when it's a reality in your mind. she was brilliant. she suffered a lot of grief, knowing things she had no control to surpass, in life. there was only one way out. i call it cowardly, because she deserted the people who needed her most - her children. if anything, they were her only reason to stay strong... 030817 ... pipedream actually...when you write like she did, there isn't any voice louder than that. i think either people were still of the notion that killing yourself is just not a real possibility- something that YOUR people do- or just that nobody cared. her kids were too young anyway. and oldphebe: you are very eminently welcome ;) tragic (the typo tweaker strikes again!) 030818 ... oldephebe Birthday Present What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful? It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges? I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is what I want. When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking, I feel it thinking 'Is this the one I am too appear for, Is this the elect one, the one with black eye-pits and a scar? Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus, Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules. Is this the one for the annunciation? My god, what a laugh!' But it shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me. I would not mind if it were bones, or a pearl button. I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year. After all I am alive only by accident. I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way. Now there are these veils, shimmering like curtains, The diaphanous satins of a January window White as babies' bedding and glittering with dead breath. O ivory! It must be a tusk there, a ghost column. Can you not see I do not mind what it is. Can you not give it to me? Do not be ashamed--I do not mind if it is small. Do not be mean, I am ready for enormity. Let us sit down to it, one on either side, admiring the gleam, The glaze, the mirrory variety of it. Let us eat our last supper at it, like a hospital plate. I know why you will not give it to me, You are terrified The world will go up in a shriek, and your head with it, Bossed, brazen, an antique shield, A marvel to your great-grandchildren. Do not be afraid, it is not so. I will only take it and go aside quietly. You will not even hear me opening it, no paper crackle, No falling ribbons, no scream at the end. I do not think you credit me with this discretion. If you only knew how the veils were killing my days. To you they are only transparencies, clear air. But my god, the clouds are like cotton. Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide. Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in, Filling my veins with invisibles, with the million Probable motes that tick the years off my life. You are silver-suited for the occasion. O adding machine----- Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole? Must you stamp each piece purple, Must you kill what you can? There is one thing I want today, and only you can give it to me. It stands at my window, big as the sky. It breathes from my sheets, the cold dead center Where split lives congeal and stiffen to history. Let it not come by the mail, finger by finger. Let it not come by word of mouth, I should be sixty By the time the whole of it was delivered, and to numb to use it. Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil. If it were death I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes. I would know you were serious. There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday. And the knife not carve, but enter Pure and clean as the cry of a baby, And the universe slide from my side. Sylvia Plath 030818 ... oldephebe full of glittering dead breaths - my god 030818 ... pipedream *blinks dreamily and tries to breathe* 030819 ... oldephebe her rhapsodies and allusions to death or to the diurnal impulses warring within her - I mean without those arrested immolations how pedestrian would her poetry be? I mean I haven't read much of her work but ah being a jazz saxophonist - i know that there are these unquiet fires that feed or inform my sometimes blistering treks into the undiscovered country, and I like it - I like going to the edge and seeing how and or if I come back - seeing what is wrought in the (improvisatory) kiln - and ah it becomes really hard for me to judge someone obviously plagued or haunted by these impulses that seared this indelible imprimature upon their souls - i can't step inside their skin an taste their pain - umm I am not imminently qualified to render any informed insights upon the tempestuous mosaic that made up/constituted plaths genious - her restive mind - but for some strange reason I've been able to forge intimate relationships with artistic women who seemed to have one characteristic in common - they were either b-polar or manic depressives - maybe her fathers death at such a young age - combined with his obvious teutonic patriarchal tirades or exudations, helped to cultivate some of these diachotomies - like I said i'm not informed enough - just kind of blee blah blah ... blah. I haven't even begun to factor in her mother, single parent - academic and all that but her lines resonate really deeply - ah any way - I'd appreciate hearing some informed or intuited conjecture on the potential origins or impetus for many of the stark juxtapositions in her work, with special emphasis on her numerous allusions in "The Birthday Present" hmm that wine has a subtly juanty and