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Mairead,

Glad you're winding down... I'm not thinking
I ever got wound up and re "Three Caryatids",
it looks like I'll be asking Margaret Scott where
said poem was published (Ralph Wessman: can
you please think of this if you attend the Hobart
launch?). I was quoting my city's newspaper.

Secondly, no I don't have a Collected Plath...
I've only just lost borrowing rights as I'm just
finished up at Melbourne Uni. Many books which
I previously accessed through the Uni library are
slowly being added to my library through 2nd hand
bookshops (Iggy Pop too). Yes I've got Rimbaud
but that's because I was given "A Season in Hell"
for my 13th birthday by the other writer in my family.
Rimbaud's immaturity is a separate issue and doesn't
justify Plath's.

My mention of four women poets suffering innatention
through Plath's sensational status, was a random group
(largely poets contemporary to her, and/or mentioned
on this thread). I'm looking to add some of their books
to my library, along with Plath's collected (Granite Pail
by Neidecker would be good too).

It should be said, that apart from the first collection and
the Ovid translations, I can't find the poems of Ted Hughes
worthy of re-reading. However, if you are intemperate on
a subject, don't expect polite responses.

I'm glad she wrote good poems on childbirth, so does
Jennifer Strauss (and Margaret Scott, I think), but the
woman on the street knows of her through writings on
death/suicide.

It sounds like you teach Plath, partly so you can show
students 'the other Plath'. Fine. I'd teach other women poets
because the student's access to Plath is unavoidable. Then again,
I don't teach poetry, just write it and review it, sometimes
edit it. I like David Antin's comment quoted by Scott Hamilton
just now.

David Antin: 'If Robert Lowell was a poet I don't want
to be a poet if Socrates was a poet I'll think about
it"

What about, "If Sylvia Plath was a poet I don't want
to be a poet if Jennifer Strauss is a poet I'll think about it."

And read people before dismissing them, Mairead. Jennifer
Strauss, Margaret Scott, not the least. Your comment 'it was acceptable
 for a woman to write about motherhood provided she had lost her children'
pisses me off partly because Jennifer's children are friends of mine.

yours


Hugh Tolhurst



----- Original Message -----
From: <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Cc: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, July 07, 2000 9:38 PM
Subject: Winding down on Plath


>
> Dear Hugh,
>
> Just a few points as I'm winding down on this topic.
>
> > Both Plath and Lowell are poets I read 1st at
> > around 18-20 years old. As was my normal method then, everything
> > I could lay my hands on by their hand was read, biographies and
> > some critics too.
>
> Me too.  Maybe there is a temptation to repudiate our late adolescent
> reading in order to prove we've grown up.  As I have never grown up, I
> have no need to repudiate.  Did you read Rimbaud then too?  I did.
> Why has nobody the knives out for Rimbaud? I think Plath is
> way out of line, not because she writes about death but because she
> writes about birth.  Her poems about pregnancy and childbirth greatly
> outnumber her poems about death.  Few people talk about them.  It is
> culturally acceptable to write poetry about death, but not birth, hence
> the great tradition of the elegy, and the absence of any tradition of the
> ..... birth equivalent (the magnificat!).
>
> My favourite line of Plath's is in prose, "It was
> > a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs..."
> >
> It's not at all surprising that your favorite line of Plath is prose.
> It was quite acceptable for her to write prose.  The Bell Jar, published
> very shortly before her death, received favorable reviews, free of the
> restraining sexism of The Colossus reviews.  Andrew Jackson made a very
> interesting connection between Plath and Mary Shelley.  Shelley had two
> things going for her, as opposed to Plath: a family literary tradition and
> that she wrote prose.
>
> > That's a line to which the gothic attaches, but which doesn't seem
> > to involve appropriating the suffering of the Rosenbergs, merely
> > notes what was news. A hint of Lowell influence attaches
> > to an elegy in my first collection - I tend to think Plath influences
> > me away from her, though her metaphors can be brilliant,
> > there are better writers whose work touches on dark places
> > in their lives.
>
> Your privileging of death exemplifies your culture.
>
> James Schuyler is much better to give a gay male
> > example, of a poet writing and demystifying his darker experience
> > rather than myth-making. Yes, Plath writes well often and some
> > of her poems are striking and original and some pieces expand
> > the sorts of subjects 1960s poetry by women discussed, without dealing
> > directly with the subject of suicide. An Australian poet prominent in
> > the late 1960s, Michael Dransfield, whose heroin related poems
> > pointed to what was in fact an early death, was accused of
> > 'cloak trailing' by David Malouf, and 'self mythologising' by
> > many critics. Many of Plath's poems on suicide, seem to
> > be building a mythology around her, though I too think the
> > 'Bee' poems to be fine, as with much she wrote near death.
> >
> > I'm assuming "Three Caryatids..." is an uncollected early piece,
> > and Collecteds often leave out things the editor thinks too minor.
>
> Cop-out!  *I'm* assuming that you don't have The Collected Poems of
> Sylvia Plath, which included 50 early poems and lists all juvenilia
> extant at that time.  You should produce this poem, as you made such a
> point of it.  As I said, the title is uncharacteristically long.  I wonder
> was it a doodle or a first draft.
>
> > It's my view that Elizabeth Bishop, Fleur Adcock, Margaret
> > Atwood, Louise Gluck all suffer from some inattention through
> > being less sensational than Plath. It's interesting that you
> > express no interest in reading a Tasmanian woman poet who
> > often writes well of dark subjects (Margaret Scott), and who
> > was Plath's near contemporary and social peer.
> >
> I don't follow the logic of your grouping Bishop, Atwood, and Gluck
> with Plath, unless it is that they are all North American women.
> This seems very loose.  It's not at all interesting that I express "no
> interest in reading a Tasmanian woman poet who often writes well of dark
> subjects," as my comments were directed at the trivial comments attributed
> to Margaret Scott, which you posted: we were not discussing her writing.
> Furthermore, I am not at all interested in "dark subjects."  My scholarly
> interests are metaphor, example, and childbirth.
>
> > We are bombarded with books on Plath's life and work, I'm
> > sick of them. Give me Winter Driving by Jennifer Strauss, a
> > book about surviving bereavement and caring for bereaved
> > children, a book that shows of appreciative reading in Sylvia Plath
> > but which also shows of reading in life.
>
> I don't know the book by Jennifer Strauss.  Certainly it falls into a
> tradition: with the exception of Anne Bradstreet, the earliest secular
> poems about childbirth were expressed through elegy: it was acceptable
> for a woman to write about motherhood provided she had lost her children.
>
> > > Yes, we are all poets here, and yes you are intemperate.
> >
> Yes.
>
> Mairead
>



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