History and Influences, Part 2

As I have mentally traced my poetic "career," I have realized that my falling in love with poetry has been a falling in love with writing. As in, with my own writing--not that I have loved everything I have written (I certainly have not) but with being able to write. After the childhood experience of reading "The Listeners," I didn't really read poems for a long time. I had some great teachers, including Chuck Sullivan at NC Governor's School, who explained poems to me in a way that made me love them, but I wasn't exactly discovering or reading any poetry on my own. In college, I was lucky enough to have a roommate/best friend who was interested in creative writing. I decided to take a fiction class, but, as chance would have it, that class was full. Introduction to Poetry was open, so I took that instead. Ever since my first assignment from Alan Shapiro to write ten rhyming couplets describing a view through a window, I have been hooked on writing poems.

Typing that out, it seems pretty obvious, and I am sure I am not alone. I remember starting the poetry classes I taught by asking the students, "What is poetry?" Almost everyone included in their answer the idea of self-expression. Perhaps stereotypically, that answer always made me think of an angst-ridden teen scribbling sad or angry poems in a notebook, but it's true. Even if you are not a writer, you have probably written a poem. And if you have ever written a poem, think back--it was probably sparked by some deep emotion or vivid experience, something you had to flesh out for yourself, in your own words.

I say all of that to explain my realization that the poets who have most influenced me have been the poets who have said things I want to say. Whatever their style or specific subject matter, their words, at some point in my life, rang so true to me that when I read them, it was as if I had said them myself (or so I wished, anyway).

Today's post (which took 5 days to write) is about two of those poets: Sylvia Plath and Mary Oliver. These two poets have a lot of differences, but, in my mind anyway, they also have a lot in common. They are both poets I discovered outside of any classroom, and their heightened attention to their subject matter, different though it is, created poems that were exactly what I needed to read at two particular points in my life.

First, Sylvia Plath. It's very unoriginal for a young white woman who writes poems to say she was influenced by Sylvia Plath, but there you have it. I was reading Plath during my second year of college, a time in my life when, for whatever reason (being far away from home; subsisting exclusively on glazed donuts and plain bagels; new-found feminist rage; a long, rainy winter; unrequited love) I was sad a lot. Sometimes I was deeply, deeply sad, and sometimes I was angry. I had a group of girlfriends who were going through a similar time, and we read Sylvia Plath.

Why Plath? I also read a lot of Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich, but Plath particularly stands out to me as an influence. Part of it has to be her biography. She was pretty and smart; she had a rocky love life with another famous poet; she killed herself by putting her head in a gas oven. That shouldn't be glamorous, but it was to me at the time I most loved Plath, and I know I am not alone. There is even a a movie about Plath's life. Perhaps it was the shock value of her life that attracted me to her at first. But what held my attention was her poetry.

My favorite Plath poem is "Elm." You can read the poem here.

I don't really want to explicate the poem, but I will say that I came across the fact that the poem was first published under the title "Elm Speaks" or "The Elm Speaks." Maybe I am slow, but I never thought of an elm speaking until I read that. Rereading the poem with the idea that the elm is speaking kind of clears things up a bit. To me, before I thought of that, I just had the idea that the speaker was like the elm.

And at the time I discovered this poem, I was like the elm too. The end of this poem especially seemed to speak to me:


I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?——

Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.

If we want to be literal about the speaker being an elm, the "dark thing that sleeps in me" is an owl. But to a depressed and confused 20-year-old, the dark thing is/was the depression and confusion. And sometimes, in college, learning for the first time about feminism and colonialism and environmental destruction and the world's history of wars and who knows what else (liberal arts college, anyone?) I often felt "incapable of any more knowledge."

But besides the poem's subject matter, what struck me about this poem was the way it sounds. Plath's use of alliteration, rhyme, and repetition create these awesome, knife-like lines at just the right moments in the poems. Rhyming "that thing in me" with "malignity" is amazing. (Several of my teachers have commented on Plath as a champion rhymer; I am pretty sure one of them called her one of the best rhymers of the 20th century.) And that last stanza is, like a nightmarish nursery rhyme, is simply haunting:

these are the isolate, slow faults that kill, that kill, that kill.

When I was 20, those lines were in my head for months.

Then. Something happened.

Maybe the lines rang even truer? I fell in love with sadness for awhile. It fell in love with it because it was real, but paradoxically, that made it false, a kind of mask. A fault that could, in fact, kill. Like the myth of the crazy artist, it was dangerous.

I didn't want to be sad anymore, but my art was rooted in sadness. Then I discovered Mary Oliver.

Actually, Dean discovered Mary Oliver. And he gave me her book Dream Work. And then I married him.

This is Mary Oliver's "The Summer Day," which I already posted a few days ago. "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" Not end it by putting my head in an oven, thank you all the same.

I want to make it very clear, though, that I am not blaming Sylvia Plath for her sadness, nor am I intending to trivialize her death. Mental illness and depression are very real things. And Plath's depression and despair were real, and her death was tragic. But I don't think it was depression and tragedy that made her an artist. In fact, I think remembering Plath's suicide over her poetry cheapens her art and her life.

For me, I had reached a point at which I was in danger of wearing depression as an artistic mask. Just as Plath's poetry gave me words to name my sadness, even rage, Oliver's poetry gave me words to answer it. (In fact, in her poem "Members of the Tribe," which is not online, she does something similar, if not just that.)

Here are some poems by Mary Oliver that are online. Scroll down and read "The Journey."

Now read the first poem, "Wild Geese."

These poems are still, in my mind, tinged with a certain sadness. They are not the stuff of greeting cards. There is "despair," even "terrible melancholy." But, almost like an ars poetica, these poems allow a way out of the sadness. The way is living, choosing to live in the physical world, and if you are a writer, it is writing.

Overall, I don't find Oliver as technically exhilarating as Plath, but in my favorites of her works, the rich, almost photographically-precise images build with a measured, straightforward voice to create poems with just as much power as Plath's. Obviously, the voices are very different. But both are honest and direct. They are real. Those are certainly three qualities I hope for in my own poetry.

So thank you, Sylvia and Mary, for creating your poems.

Whew. Stay tuned for part 3, when I tackle either the Romantics or the Modernists. Or maybe both?