Poets From Boston

"It would be pleasant to be drunk: faithless to my tongue and hands, giving up the boundaries for the heroic gin. Dead drunk is the term I think of, insensible, neither cool nor warm, without a head or foot. To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool. I will try it shortly."

"A woman who writes feels too much, those trances and portents! As if cycles and children and islands weren't enough; as if mourners and gossips and vegetables were never enough. She thinks she can warm the stars. A writer is essentially a spy. Dear love, I am that girl."

"But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build."

"My mouth blooms like a cut. I've been wronged all year, tedious nights, nothing but rough elbows in them and delicate boxes of Kleenex calling crybaby crybaby, you fool!"

"As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off."

"You said the anger would come back just as the love did."

"Beauty is a simple passion, but, oh my friends, in the end you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes."

"With a tongue like a razor he will kiss the mother, the child, and we three will color the stars black in memory of his mother who kept him chained to the food tree or turned him on and off like a water faucet and made women through all these hazy years the enemy with a heart of lies."

"My eyes, those sluts, those whores, would play no more."

"It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was."

"And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in their stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone."

"Love! That red disease —"

"I begin again, Dr.Y, this neverland journal, full of my own sense of filth. Why else keep a journal, if not to examine your own filth?"

"God is only mocked by believers."

"Fact: death too is in the egg. Fact: the body is dumb, the body is meat. And tomorrow the O.R. Only the summer was sweet."

"Earth, earth riding your merry-go-round toward extinction, right to the roots thickening the oceans like gravy, festering in your caves, you are becoming a latrine."

"All who love have lied."

"Need is not quite belief."

"I imitate a memory of belief that I do not own."

"I rot on the wall, my own Dorian Gray."

"I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind."

"Dearest, although everything has happened, nothing has happened."

"Why have your eyes gone into their own room?"

"I am murdering me, where I kneeled at your kiss. I am pushing knives through the hands that created two into one. Our hands do not bleed at this, they lie still in their dishonor."

"We are all writing God's poem."

"Even so, I must admire your skill. You are so gracefully insane."

"Love your self's self where it lives. There is no special God to refer to; or if there is, why did I let you grow in another place. You did not know my voice when I came back to call. All the superlatives of tomorrow's white tree and mistletoe will not help you know the holidays you had to miss."

"There is a tendency to see this mother-daughter relationship as the source of Sylvia Plath's early suicide attempt, her relentless perfectionism and obsession with "greatness." Yet the preface to Letters Home reveals a remarkable woman, a true survivor; it was Plath's father who set the example of self-destructiveness. The letters are far from complete and until many more materials are released, efforts to write Plath biography and criticism are questionable at best. But throughout runs her need to lay in her mother's lap, as it were, poems and prizes, books and babies, the longing for her mother when she is about to give birth, the effort to let Aurelia Plath know that her struggles and sacrifices to rear her daughter had been vindicated. In the last letters Sylvia seems to be trying to shield herself and Aurelia, an ocean away, from the pain of that "psychic osmosis.""

"back in those times, even though women were all infected with a yearning for a wild freedom, they continued outwardly to rub SOS on porcelain, using caustic cleansers, staying, as Sylvia Plath put it, "tied to their Bendix washing machines." There they washed and rinsed their clothes in water too hot for human touch and dreamed of a different world. When the instincts are injured, humans will "normalize" assault after assault, acts of injustice and destruction toward themselves, their offspring, their loved ones, their land, and even their Gods."

"With the bravado and despair of a young person, she tore apart the elegant poetic forms of the 1950s, and, using the raw language of everyday speech, she gave voice to the storms that raged inside her, thus freeing herself from the nightmarish visions that had long tormented her. In her novel The Bell Jar, she leads us into the dark corridors of the inner hell that led to her mental breakdown and brought her to the brink of her first attempt at suicide. It is a cruel, stifling world, whose black gates carry the inscription "no exit." Plath took the fact that she was the daughter of parents of German origin as the symbolic definition of her life. It was a fact that could neither be denied nor changed. In her poems, she called the father whom she loved, and who died when she was a child, a Nazi bastard. She, the Aryan child of the postwar generation, reimagined herself as symbolically Jewish, estranged, persecuted, rejected, and condemned."

"Like piranhas devouring their prey, Plath's thoughts rush, churn, thresh -- there is sheer demonic energy here, exhausting to observe and suggesting that Plath's primary motive for suicide might have been the extinguishing of this piranha-voice."

"Plath is an indefatigable graphomaniac who could write as fervently of colds, fevers, nausea, cramps and nosepicking as of an idyllic honeymoon in Benidorm, Spain; she is an inspired hater, and thrills to malicious descriptions of long-forgotten, nameless individuals whose bad luck it was to live near her, or to have met her socially. Yet Plath was always a severe critic of her real work, and considered the journal a place in which she could reveal herself without the strictures of art."

"Anger has always played a role in poetry...What is relatively new for poetry is women expressing anger, which horrifies many readers because it is such an unfeminine thing for women to do. Women are supposed to be nice and courteous, and leave the violence to men. The anger in twentieth-century women’s poetry, beginning with Plath and continuing with Adrienne Rich and many others, especially Black women, has been thrillingly salutary, cleansing the air."

"In the 80s, Plath became a kind of feminist symbol of a victim, of what men can do to women; and the torment she endured is certainly part of the fascination for some. Not just in her life, or in her poetry, but after her death - since she was still legally married to Hughes, he inherited the Plath estate and was either careless with her work or protective of others' (and his own) feelings, depending on your view. He rearranged Plath's order of the poems in Ariel, for example, and added some of her bleakest at the end, such as Edge, which begins: "The woman is perfected./Her dead/Body wears the smile of accomplishment." Plath's order, on the other hand, was more hopeful - it began with the word "love" and ended with "spring". Hughes burned Plath's last journal, "lost" another, similarly "lost" an unfinished novel and instructed that a collection of Plath's papers should not be released until 2013. Her friends say that the victim image foisted on to Plath in the 80s never really fitted the woman, that Hughes was madly in love with her (as his near-death publication of Birthday Letters showed), and that she and Hughes in fact had an unusually equal relationship; but that is not to deny that being a woman and a writer in the 50s was difficult."

"I believe that the consciousness from which creativity comes is this intensity of focus that is the result of practice. Sylvia Plath wrote exercise poems. Writing poetry is itself a form of exercise, a discipline as much as it is a calling and an art. And a discipline always asks for exercise."

"Long after I had been reading her work I came across the recording of some of her poems she made in England not long before she died. I have never before learned anything from a poetry reading, unless the clothes, the beard, the girls, the poor or good condition of the poet can be considered a kind of knowledge. But I was taken aback by Sylvia Plath’s reading. It was not anything like I could have imagined. Not a trace of the modest, retreating, humorous Worcester, Massachusetts, of Elizabeth Bishop; nothing of the swallowed plain Pennsylvania of Marianne Moore. Instead these bitter poems—"Daddy," "Lady Lazarus," "The Applicant," "Fever 103°"—were "beautifully" read, projected in full-throated, plump, diction-perfect, Englishy, mesmerizing cadences, all round and rapid, and paced and spaced. Poor recessive Massachusetts had been erased. "I have done it again!" Clearly, perfectly, staring you down. She seemed to be standing at a banquet like Timon, crying, "Uncover, dogs, and lap!""

"And yet when we think of Plath's death at dawn in an indifferent London it is homely Massachusetts that somehow comes back into view. The idea of death far away from home has a special pathos; embedded in it is the fantasy that the foreign place contributed to the death, perhaps was even the cause of it. Foreignness is threatening, dangerous: if only he or she had stayed home and not drunk that water, not taken that ancient bus over the pass, never ventured into that evil café."

"I was rereading Plath the other day and she is a really an extremely fine, clever poet. In fact, I think Plath has turned out to be a much better poet than Hughes ever was. Of course he won all the prizes, and his name is on the stones in Poet’s Corner and OK, he’s pretty good, but not that good, whereas she gets better and better. ... Her early stuff wasn’t very good, but the poems after she left him – or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that she threw him out – were extraordinary. It’s funny when I reflect on back then, there were these two young poets I really liked, but at some point in those last few years, something shifted for her. What had happened was that Ted had gone on doing what he knew how to do, in a kind of slightly automatic way, whereas Sylvia had that one extraordinary year where she wrote non-stop. At that point she shot ahead."

"The abstract kills, the concrete saves."

"I am deeply grateful to the women who really blazed the way-poets like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath and Maxine Kumin."

"The confessional poets like [Sylvia] Plath, whom I read later when they started calling me confessional, most of their stuff seemed contrived to me and not as greatly honest as it was touted to be."

"I must get back my soul from you; I am killing my flesh without it."

"Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing."

"I am made, crudely, for success."

"Frustrated? Yes. Why? Because it is impossible for me to be God — or the universal woman-and-man — or anything much. I am what I feel and think and do. I want to express my being as fully as I can because I somewhere picked up the idea that I could justify my being alive that way."

"The blood of love welled up in my heart with a slow pain."

"If I didn't think, I'd be much happier; if I didn't have any sex organs, I wouldn't waver on the brink of nervous emotion and tears all the time."

"Ironically, Henry James' biography comforts me & I long to make known to him his posthumous reputation — he wrote, in pain, gave all his life (which is more than I could think of doing — I have Ted, will have children — but few friends) & the critics insulted & mocked him, readers didn't read him."

"I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time."

"I talk to God but the sky is empty."