Dear all
I read it somewhere, you know one of those things that you cut/paste in your
journal, but will look for the proof later. For the moment though, I
remember bits... Sylvia lived under the shadow of Hughes, so they said, she
wrote 'rebellion' - just as Dickinson did. It was that era, the female voice
was subjugated. The male voice was dominant, so Sylvia and the girls wrote
about their suppression. And if ...in this atmosphere there was the eternal
personal struggle to empower her voice alongside her equal (as she would
have viewed Teddy's poetry) it was in trouble, far deeper than anyone could
have possibly imagined. She ended her life, sadly, because of this 'female'
struggle.  Her poetry stands testimony to this.  Whether you like her poetry
or not you cannot dismiss the history of the women's suffrage movement
vis-a-vis 'feminism' and esp. in literature going back to the days of
Virginia Woolf.
It's my opinion that the female voice still struggles and that the female
poet in her attempts to be as feminine as possible is still misunderstood by
the other half of the population - as Adrienne Rich wrote in connection to
the female voice in (Adrienne Rich Poetry and Prose - a Norton Critical
Edition) 'she goes to poetry or fiction looking for her way of being in the
world, since she too has been putting words and images together; she is
looking eagerly for guides, maps, possibilites; and over and over in the
"words' masculine persuasive force" of literature she comes up against
something that negates everything she is about: she meets the image of Woman
in books written by men.'  eg. Belle Dame Sans Merci, Juliet, Tess or
Salome.
So, Rich goes on to say that to find that female voice she read Sappho and
Dickinson and in even reading these women, she found that she was looking in
them for the same things she had found in the poetry of men. Even though she
wanted female poets to be the equals of men, she still found them sounding
the same as men.
One could say that when it comes to 'taste' some only have it in their mouth
and that males (not all, thank god) are very mis-informed about the struggle
of the female voice.
Helen

>From: Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: [log in to unmask]
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: I saw something nasty in the bell jar
>Date: Fri, 07 Jul 2000 00:09:17 -0700
>
>I think that I'm living proof that one needn't be tasteful to dislike
>Plath's work. And I don't find all those who like her work distasteful,
>only some of them.
>There is such a thing as a difference of opinion. But apparently not in
>Plath's case. Why should this be so?
>
>At 07:15 AM 7/7/2000 +0100, you wrote:
> >
> >Jon Corelis wrote:
> >
> >>    On one occasion I played the Plath's recording of Daddy to a woman
>of
> >my
> >> acquaintance who had never read it.  As soon as it was over she
> >> remarked, "What a nasty poem!"
> >
> >But of course. The main reason Plath is worth reading is that, as  a real
> >poet, she lacked taste. A lesser poet would have shared your sensitive
> >friend's reaction, would have repressed the urge to write in tasteless
> >unladylike, abnormal ways. Plath had the courage and integrity to write
>as
> >she knew the world was,  and damn tastefulness.
> >
> >Isn't there always a "Wound and the Bow" dimension to great poets? I
>think
> >of Eliot, with the intellectual/moral courage to write the world as he
>felt
> >it, not just stay inside the limitations of nice polite Georgian prosody.
> >The cost of this was that part of what he expressed was his nasty
> >anti-Semitism.
> >
> >It's not the job of the poet to be tasteful or comfy. It's the job of a
>poet
> >to write and be damned. And there will always, as this Plath thread
>shows,
> >be a long queue of tasteful people ready to do the damning.
> >
> >George
> >______________________________________________
> >George Simmers
> >Snakeskin Poetry Webzine is at
> >http://www.snakeskin.org.uk
> >
> >
> >
>

________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com



%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%