black shoe, in which i have lived like a foot

sylvia plath's son committed suicide this month. you can get quite a full story here. what feels odd for me, as the article reflects, is that this man's life seems overshadowed by his parents, more specifically the barrage of suicides that surrounded them. i think plath's career was overshadowed by her death. what i mean is that her death became more famous than her poems.

one of many things that i find strange about this article is the way that the author quotes the poetry of plath and hughes when talking about their son. that just seems so weird to quote poetry in an article as though it were some kind of personal statement or as if it pertains to anything concrete.

i resisted plath for a long time because i really just thought of her as a narcissistically depressed, one-note type poet. i became more interested in her when i heard two of her poems read theatrically this year at sarah lawrence. the first was "daddy" which may be her most famous poem. i  don't know what this poem does for me on the page, but when read aloud, by a guy no less, it was some freaky, freaky shit.

"lady lazarus" is the other. i have to say i enjoy this poem much more for the reason that it actually scares the bejeezus out of me. it's incredibly haunting. i love when a speaker can be totally vulnerable and remain on the offensive in a poem-- it's like the speaker doesn't compromise- sticks with a confident tone. 

the key line in "lady lazarus," the one that highlights intent and tone is "do i terrify?--" the dashes, as though there is some lingering silence after the question. as a reader, this is the first line where i feel the anxiety in this poem, and what i love about it, is that when it's asked, my internal response is not an automatic yes, but suddenly i am receiving the poem differently, understanding the speaker's tone differently. plath is a little more subtle than i initially gave her credit for. 

while on the subject of dead poets, read this poem by hayden carruth.

Graves

Both of us had been close 

to Joel, and at Joel's death

my friend had gone to the wake

and the memorial service

and more recently he had 

visited Joel's grave, there

at the back of the grassy

cemetery among the trees,

"a quiet, gentle place," he said,

"befitting Joel." And I said,

"What's the point of going

to look at graves?" I went 

into one of my celebrated

tirades. "People go to look

at the grave of Keats or Hart

Crane, they go traveling just to

do it. What a waste of time. 

What do they find there? Hell,

I wouldn't go look at the grave of

Shakespeare if it was just

down the street. I wouldn't 

look at-" And then I stopped. I

was about to say the grave of God

until I realized I'm looking at it

all the time....