Helen Vendler on Sylvia Plath



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, Moore, and Roethke.

The lecture was divided in two: the first half looked at Plath's juvenilia published in The Collected Poems edited by Ted Hughes, and second half focused on her mature poems. Interesting as it was to see how Plath experimented with different styles and tried to overcome the rigidity and formality of her early writing, I could have done with fewer of the immature poems in order to spend more time with her truly accomplished poems.

The mature poems that Vendler chose to spend time on were not the usual suspects, Instead of "Daddy" or "Lady Lazarus," we read "The Everlasting Monday," "Moonrise," "Old Ladies' Home," "Dark Wood, Dark Water," "the satirical "Poem for a Birthday, 4: The Beast," "The Hanging Man," "The Moon and the Yew Tree," "Mirror," "Winter Trees," "Sheep in Fog" and "Edge." Vendler judged "Death & Co." to be a masterpiece, whereas I felt the poem was rather thin. The selection showed Plath working and re-working her master-tropes: moon, trees, water, children. The poems amounted to an obsessive corpus. By the end of the evening, three hours later, I was glad to escape the overly heated, suffocating Warburg Lounge.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Goh Chok Tong's Visit to FCBC

Image
I am surprised by how much this incident is affecting me. I thought I have moved past my former religious life, left it behind in Singapore, but like tin cans tied to a dog it has followed me and is rattling me. I am posting the incident, and my response to it, here on this blog, because I want to remember that the past is not yet past. When Emeritus Senior Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong visited Faith Community Baptist Church on 13 January during a Sunday service, Senior Pastor Lawrence Khong took the opportunity to deliver a hateful anti-gay message . Among other things, he said: We affirm that the family unit comprises a man as Father, a woman as Mother, and Children. This is the basic building block of society, a value foundational for a secure future, a premise fundamental to nation-building. and warned ominously that We see a looming threat to this basic building block by homosexual activists seeking to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code.   Examples from ar
Read more

Wallace Stevens' "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"

Just read three essays from the "Poetics" section at the back of Volume One of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry : "The Poetry and the Present" by D.H. Lawrence (1919); "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by Langston Hughes (1926); and "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" by Wallace Stevens (1942). The first is an artful polemic for free verse in contact with the "insurgent naked throb of the instant moment." The second is a spirited rejoinder to a young Negro poet who wanted to "write like a poet--not a Negro poet." The third, my favorite, is a wide-ranging meditation on the nature of poetry and the role of the poet. So many grand things said but I will only quote a few passages: I am interested in the nature of poetry and I have stated its nature, from one of many points of view from which it is possible to state it. It is an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals. This is
Read more

Steven Cantor's "What Remains: the Life and Work of Sally Mann"

Image
Sally Mann, The Perfect Tomato , 199 0 Since it is moving pictures, a film necessarily captures--produces--a process. It turns photographs into the making of photographs. It joins moments ("spots of time") into a Life. This I expected watching Cantor's documentary on Sally Mann's creation of the exhibit "What Remains." So photographs of a long-dead beloved greyhound "lead" to photographs of the Civil War battlefield of Antietam, to photographs of Mann's Virginian farm bloodied by the police killing of a runaway convict, to photographs of decomposing bodies in a forensic study site, as if each group of pictures forms an independent yet preparatory stage in the creative process. What I did not expect to see is the influence of the film-making on the photography itself. Mann begins to think of her exhibit as a "narrative," and wants the narrative of death to end on a more uplifting note. With such an idea in mind, she takes close-up pic
Read more