I was lucky last night. MB, a friend of KS, had a free ticket to Helen Vendler's 92Y lecture on Sylvia Plath, and I was free to take up the offer. Vendler's parents knew Plath's parents, though the two daughters did not meet. A year younger than Plath, Vendler followed the poet's publications in different magazines; Plath's mother would announce her precocious daughter's successes in her Christmas cards. In Vendler's introductory remarks, she characterized Plath as an elegaist, a didactic poet (both parents were teachers), an unsuccessful poet of seasons because she saw only the extremes of black and orange, a lover of traditional poetic forms, a diligent experimenter with stanzaic form, a poet who avoided writing in sequences because they diluted the taste on the tongue, and who learned to deploy flat sentences because they were irrefutable. Vendler also detected the influence on her early poetry of Auden, Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, Dickinson, Stevens,...
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Pretty good, I think. I like the rhyme scheme too.
I was surprised to see your face staring out at me from Silliman's Blog today. Let's hope that gets you a few extra, well-deserved hits.
By the by....I love your poetry and do you have a chapbook yet?
thanks for telling me about Silliman's blog. 800th poet! Whoopee! I'm glad I have a more decent photo up than the one before it.
Hi ckays,
thanks for reading! I have a book manuscript but not a book publication yet. Now if I can find that editor who would fall wildly and deeply in love with me...
Jee Leong
Thanks much,
CAConrad
thanks for dropping by. See you around.
Hi rui,
thanks for being so awfully encouraging.
Jee Leong