Blackberrying

  - Sylvia Plath 
 

Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,   

Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,

A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea

Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries

Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes

Ebon in the hedges, fat

With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers.

I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me.

They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides.

Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks—

Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.

Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting.

I do not think the sea will appear at all.

The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within.

I come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,

Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen.

The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven.   

One more hook, and the berries and bushes end.

The only thing to come now is the sea.

From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me,   

Slapping its phantom laundry in my face.

These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.

I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me   

To the hills’ northern face, and the face is orange rock   

That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space   

Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths   

Beating and beating at an intractable metal.

from: Collected Poems. Copyright 1992.

"I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am."

Those words, of course, come to us from Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. It was the prompts for the Poetry Project this month that brought these words to my mind. Don't ask me why. The connections in there are mysterious and elusive.

This month the Project asks us to consider:

What would have made me appreciate poetry more when I was younger? 

                                 & 

How would I raise a poetry reader?

When I was young, I looooooooved reading. But I didn't discover poetry until middle school. Even then, I didn't care for most of what we studied in school. (Some of it I still don't care for, and I think it may be specifically because I did study it in school.) 

We studied 'classic' poetry and were told how wonderful it was. It goes without saying that we were expected to love it whether we understood it or not, and most of us didn't. (understand it or love it)  We were told the exact meaning of each piece. (no room for interpretation) Each reading was for a specific purpose. (never for pleasure) And we were never made aware that there were many more choices either: poets, poems, subjects, styles . . .

As my middle school days were winding down, an English teacher encouraged me to write poetry. In doing this she changed poetry from something that was outside of myself and distant, to something that flourished on the inside. I never looked back.

I raised three avid readers; but although I love poetry and am constantly on the hunt for new (to me) poets and their offerings, none of my spawn really care much for poetry. 

What can I say? I tried my best. 

Ours was a house full of books, where reading was just what everyone did. I never had to force my kids to read. Because they saw it all the time, they internalized that it was just a normal part of life. For two of them, this was in spite of learning disabilities. (all bragging aside) 

We read together. I found as much 'child friendly poetry as I could for them, and I shared the pieces that moved or amused me. I also encourage them to explore their own creativity. All to no avail. As much as they all love reading, they're just not into poetry.

 
So, to recap ... While raising my own children, I avoided all the things that I believed turned me away from poetry when I was young so that I could encourage the love of poetry in them. 

And I found . . . that it made no difference. 

My highly scientific conclusion is that although we can foster an openness to great writing, we can't foment a love for any particular genre, writer, or piece. 

However, every bit of imagination and creativity that we feed our children nurtures their very being. When we plant such seeds, the gardens that grow can't help but be wondrous! 

  




Eric G. Wilson has some ideas on fostering the love of poetry in young people in Poetry Makes You Weird. He shares with his students what the poetry says to him, how it has opened his eyes.

But I now no longer unleash the literary giants. I simply tell my disgruntled students about the first time I read, as an undergraduate, these lines:

There's a certain Slant of light,

Winter Afternoons—

That oppresses, like the Heft

Of Cathedral Tunes—

I had often witnessed beams of dull December light with a melancholy I didn't understand. Dickinson's flash clarified my feelings: In the impoverished glow of the cold time were heavy reminders of brightness I desired but couldn't possess. But this affliction had fever, intimations of future heat that was luminous, like hymns.

Dickinson's verse spelled out the abstruse, made the strange familiar. In this new intimacy, however, was a novel astonishment: The chilly light from that day onward exposed the enigmas of longing, both tormenting and radiant. Her poetry left me amazed—caught in wonderment as well as labyrinth.

And that brings us back around to Sylvia Plath:  

"I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am."

BOOK REVIEWS. Sort Of.

Ariel - Sylvia Plath   

Mine is the "restored edition" published by Plath's daughter Frieda Hughes. There has been a great deal of controversy over which is the better (or more righteous) version, this or the original published by husband Ted Hughes.

Let me go on record as saying, "I don't care."

As I said, I don't care about the controversy, but I did think about what I might do were I to make the decision to take my own life. I would purposely leave my writing in a state which captures me as I see myself, to give others a glimpse of my interior world.

Perhaps this is not the most polished representation of Plath's work, but it is certainly a snapshot of an immense talent at time of turbulence and change. She was at both her weakest and her strongest. Frieda feels that when her mother died leaving this unfinished manuscript, she was "caught in the act of revenge."

It is a haunting and powerful work.

The Swarm


Somebody is shooting at something in our town --
A dull pom, pom in the Sunday street.
Jealousy can open the blood,
It can make black roses.
Who are they shooting at?

It is you the knives are out for
At Waterloo, Waterloo, Napoleon,
The hump of Elba on your short back,
And the snow, marshaling its brilliant cutlery
Mass after mass, saying Shh!

Shh! These are chess people you play with,
Still figures of ivory.
The mud squirms with throats,
Stepping stones for French bootsoles.
The gilt and pink domes of Russia melt and float off

In the furnace of greed. Clouds, clouds.
So the swarm balls and deserts
Seventy feet up, in a black pine tree.
It must be shot down. Pom! Pom!
So dumb it thinks bullets are thunder.

It thinks they are the voice of God
Condoning the beak, the claw, the grin of the dog
Yellow-haunched, a pack-dog,
Grinning over its bone of ivory
Like the pack, the pack, like everybody.

The bees have got so far. Seventy feet high!
Russia, Poland and Germany!
The mild hills, the same old magenta
Fields shrunk to a penny
Spun into a river, the river crossed.

The bees argue, in their black ball,
A flying hedgehog, all prickles.
The man with gray hands stands under the honeycomb
Of their dream, the hived station
Where trains, faithful to their steel arcs,

Leave and arrive, and there is no end to the country.
Pom! Pom! They fall
Dismembered, to a tod of ivy.
So much for the charioteers, the outriders, the Grand Army!
A red tatter, Napoleon!

The last badge of victory.
The swarm is knocked into a cocked straw hat.
Elba, Elba, bleb on the sea!
The white busts of marshals, admirals, generals
Worming themselves into niches.

How instructive this is!
The dumb, banded bodies
Walking the plank draped with Mother France's upholstery
Into a new mausoleum,
An ivory palace, a crotch pine.

The man with gray hands smiles --
The smile of a man of business, intensely practical.
They are not hands at all
But asbestos receptacles.
Pom! Pom! 'They would have killed me.'

Stings big as drawing pins!
It seems bees have a notion of honor,
A black intractable mind.
Napoleon is pleased, he is pleased with everything.
O Europe! O ton of honey!

I love this one, but it hurts.

Mirror
- Sylvia Plath

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful---
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Sylvia Plath: Poet, and Then Some . . .

SLIDE SHOW

Ariel

by Sylvia Plath  

Stasis in darkness.

Then the substanceless blue   

Pour of tor and distances.

God’s lioness,   

How one we grow,

Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to   

The brown arc

Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye   

Berries cast dark   

Hooks—

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,   

Shadows.

Something else

Hauls me through air—

Thighs, hair;

Flakes from my heels.

White

Godiva, I unpeel—

Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I

Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.   

The child’s cry

Melts in the wall.   

And I

Am the arrow,

The dew that flies

Suicidal, at one with the drive   

Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

from: Collected Poems. Copyright 1960.

Poppies in October

by Sylvia Plath  

Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.   

Nor the woman in the ambulance

Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly——

A gift, a love gift

Utterly unasked for   

By a sky

Palely and flamily

Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes   

Dulled to a halt under bowlers.

O my God, what am I

That these late mouths should cry open

In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.

from: Collected Poems. Copyright © 1960.

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. - Sylvia Plath

New Statesman published "Last Letter," a previously unseen poem by Ted Hughes, about the three days before Sylvia Plath's suicide.

In 1963, American poet Sylvia Plath killed herself. Since then, her husband Ted Hughes has refused to respond to accusations that he was to blame for her death. Now, in Birthday Letters, his new book of poetry, the British poet laureate breaks his silence. 

-The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. 

... a young woman with two babies, whose husband had left her, living in a cold house, trying to be a mom, trying to be a writer, trying to put her life together, who didn't make it--who killed herself--and wrote poems full of rage, bravery, and it electrified people. Ted Hughes in the book uses the metaphor of--he talks about her--paparazzo eye. You could say that he's been under investigation for the suicide of Sylvia Plath for 35 years.

- Bob Hass.

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell.
I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.
- Sylvia Plath

Ariel
by Sylvia Plath

Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.

God's lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees! - The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks -

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else

Hauls me through air -
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.

White
Godiva, I unpeel -
Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child's cry

Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

Sylvia Plath Forum. (Closed but still informative)

Morning Song

 





























by Sylvia Plath

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival.  New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety.  We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses.  I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's.  The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars.  And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Anticipation

Heavy Woman
- Sylvia Plath

Irrefutable, beautifully smug
As Venus, pedestalled on a half-shell
Shawled in blond hair and the salt
Scrim of a sea breeze, the women
Settle in their belling dresses.
Over each weighty stomach a face
Floats calm as a moon or a cloud.

Smiling to themselves, they meditate
Devoutly as the Dutch bulb
Forming its twenty petals.
The dark still nurses its secret.
On the green hill, under the thorn trees,
They listen for the millennium,
The knock of the small, new heart.

Pink-buttoned infants attend them.
Looping wool, doing nothing in particular,
They step among the archetypes.
Dusk hoods them in Mary-blue
While far off, the axle of winter
Grinds round, bearing down the straw,
The star, the wise grey men.