Plath and Poetry

Sylvia Plath is a wizard with words. Check out her homepage.

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

Falling in love in your head is maddening. I should know:)

Sylvia Plath may have been a neurotic poet with a strange intelligent aptitude and an unhappy temparament but sometimes I think her life has been given far more importance than her work. She lived and died in unhappiness and is remembered for the way she died rather than what she wrote.

There is a panther stalks me down:

One day I'll have my death of him;

His greed has set the woods aflame,

He prowls more lordly than the sun.

Most soft, most suavely glides that step,

Advancing always at my back;

From gaunt hemlock, rooks croak havoc:

The hunt is on, and sprung the trap.

Flayed by thorns I trek the rocks,

Haggard through the hot white noon.

Along red network of his veins

What fires run, what craving wakes?

What fire drove her to suicide? What blood runs through her poems that still hurts our eyes as we read? Always sadness sparks off creativity. Always the hot oven and the hanging lime promise quality. Sadly for a poet life sometimes is the bait.

Ashy Expectations

When you start out on a blog, you search for things that will fit your daily post. The way you look at things changes since you are always looking for a story. Today I stumbled upon a name John Ash and found a poem of his on Sonnets at 4 A.M.

The poem called 'Streets' has some interesting lines:

What could be going on in the mind of the young,upwardly mobile person shopping for vitamins and beansprouts
hard by The First National Church of the Exquisite Panic?

I'm the young upwardly mobile person too searching for my destiny too in the screen of this computer and the four claustrophobic walls of my apartment in a crooked alley by a noisy street.

Ah, streets where are you taking us?

Really where is life taking us? I'm kind of excited about John Ash's poetry. You might find this review from the Guardian to be an interesting one.

Bereavement and Frost

Have you read Robert Frost?

The poem Home Burial told me a lot about life. It's a story about how the the loss of child affects a couple. Each person has a response that is unique. You can't really blame anyone since there is so much anger when there is loss. These lines resonate with me.

No, from the time when one is sick to death,
One is alone, and he dies more alone.
Friends make pretence of following to the grave,
But before one is in it, their minds are turned
And making the best of their way back to life
And living people, and things they understand.
But the world's evil. I won't have grief so
If I can change it.

Passages that Speak to You

I like to read T.S.Eliot.

Check out this passage from The Wasteland:

'What shall I do now? What shall I do?'

'I shall
rush out as I am, and walk the street

'With my hair
down, so. What shall we do to-morrow?

'What shall
we ever do?'

The
hot water at ten.

And if it rains, a closed car at four.

And we shall play a game of chess,

Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the
door.

That passage tells me about what life really means. On those dead end days, when nothing makes sense, the only solace that seems to exist is the daily routine. However drab, that is the only sense of hope.

Does any passage in any poem speak to you?

Doubt

I've always believed in the power and beauty of language.

But once I felt disillusioned. I mean what's the point? I loved poetry,fiction,non-fiction, anything remotely bookish but where did all that get anybody? Nowhere. Who reads poems any more? No one. Who publishes poetry any more? The few and far between. Who is the greatest poet the world knows today? Eminem?

When I talked to my favorite professor CJ about it, he said:

Don't be silly Neel. Learn more about it. A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
Remember that.

So this is where I'm learning. Hope to be a poet by the end of it.