Tribute: Sylvia Plath
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The following is excerpted from Jacqueline Rose's introduction to the PSA's "Tribute to Sylvia Plath" at The New York Public Library, November 10, 1997. The poets Eavan Boland, Jorie Graham, and Jane Miller read from Plath's work.
I thought I would introduce this event by saying something, briefly, about the problem of legacy and memory. Re-reading Plath for this evening, I was struck by how far the issue of her legacy or futurity has been clouded by the end of her life. I was struck by the power of that moment to crowd out the many other voices through which she addressed the issue of how we carry on over time. It seems appropriate, then, to say something tonight about Plath and memory--since first of all we are here, at least partly, to remember her. Since to write as a woman, and not only as a woman, has to be partly a question of how you remember antecedent voices: how you pick them up, transpose them, and make them your own. And since, finally, memory was something about which Plath had so much to say.
One of the purposes of this evening might be not just unequivocally to celebrate and commemorate Plath--although it is also that--but more precisely to pay tribute to the peculiar colors and affective force she paints around the process of memory and inheritance.
"I am lame in the memory," Plath writes in 1962's "Little Fugue," which is one of my favorite poems of hers, as she reproaches a father for making her legacy (her connection through him to the second World War) impossible by refusing to speak it. The problem voiced by Plath in this poem, and in the far better known "Daddy," which circles around the same theme, is, as I understand it: what should the woman poet do in the face of a history so monstrous for the men who have mostly engineered it, that all they can pass to the daughter making her way into the house of poetry is inaudible--a breach, as it were, in the potential wall of sound? What are the consequences of that silence? For those who lived the history that lies behind it? No less crucially for those who didn't, but who inherit it nonetheless (or, one might say, all the more)?
It is one of the most remarkable things about Plath that, as precisely as her anger was directed at men, she could still mourn this silence and note--along the lines of an analysis which we have heard more and more of since her death--its catastrophic effects. That she could make so finely focused a connection between men's silence and nations gathering or regathering the worst of their strengths: "Now similar clouds / Are spreading their vacuous sheets. / Do you say nothing? / I am lame in the memory." One of the most forceful questions I hear in Plath's poetry is: what does it mean for the woman poet to claim to defy the history of man's making when defiance at its most self-blinding is the problem? (Too many men, with too much power, do this to themselves.)
What I love about this poem is that it describes an inheritance both missing and too present. As great as the problem of silence is the problem of legacy--it can be too heavy, too loud. You may choose from your past (that would be one account of writing), but it is given; something passes itself on and through you, despite yourself. It has to become the grounds, the substance through which you move forward, something you carry while also leaving its inaugurating moment behind.
We might want to say that inheritance--even before we are talking about this voice or that moment--could only be the bearer of ambivalence; that it contains a violence; even before we ask the question of what that particular speaker, history or tradition asked, and asks of us, and makes us feel.
Plath is famous for her merciless and often violent challenge to the myth of benign perpetuity. Instead of seeing that part of her vision as what disqualified her from a share of her own lived future (for what is a future if you have chosen not to live it), we might say that this is also what makes her legacy still so redolent for our time.
This shows legacy for Plath to be as fully political and historical as personal, and one of her greatest gifts was how she moved across the boundary between what presses from inside and outside the mind. It is what I will risk saying she has in common with the three poets who will read her work to us this evening--Eavan Boland, Jorie Graham, and Jane Miller.
I'm always grateful for a new way through Plath, since where to begin and where to end is so difficult in relation to her work. So here are a few lines from each of the readings to follow to give you a sense of the force of remembrance as a preoccupation in her poetry:
They seed so effortlessly!
Tasting the winds that are footless,
Waist-deep in history--
-- from "Winter Trees"
What is the remedy?
The pill of the Communion tablet,
The walking beside still water? Memory? [...]
Does the sea
Remember the walker upon it?
-- from "Mystic"
The train is dragging itself, it is
screaming--
An animal
Insane for the destination, [...]
Pure as a baby.
-- from "Getting There"
Of course their readings will not necessarily coincide with mine; they will, by definition and essence, read differently. But if there is one thing that working on Plath taught me, it is that there is no definitive, final, ultimate reading; that she lives only through the voices that revisit, expand, and modulate her own. We read her today as a form of passage to the next stage.
Before we hear the three poets, let me be true to the vision of legacy, and its difficulty, by suggesting that each of these poets seems to be throwing back a question to Plath.
By shattering the link she also insists on presenting to us--between that woman and that nation, between the woman poet and Ireland's poetic tradition--Eavan Boland sends back to Plath a question about the peculiarities of Plath's European, American, British trajectory, and her self-exiling and imposed exile, up to and including her death.
By writing on the edge of "matter," "spirit" (call it what you will), beyond the limits of the self: "underneath, barely attached but attached, / like a runner, my body, my tiny piece of / the century--[....]" Jorie Graham sends back to Plath a question about the delusions of self-containment, about something which goes way beyond the energies--whatever their force--of any singular mind.
By writing about time beyond the limits of the human, Jane Miller sends back to Plath a question about a form of being "not finally resolvable, not headed anywhere, but anticipatory," as she has written of Graham. About always being, as we say, on the go; about what it means to "fit a shape to suffering."
Plath ran a poetic line through her body and heart out to history and back again. Is this, then, their question to Plath: Are the three poets reading this evening, in their distinct ways, offering us a vision of time and identity so shattered--whether dismally or exuberantly--that it moves beyond any one woman's capacity to capture it, however fierce or bold?
There is a legendary story about Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Adrienne Rich meeting in 1959, eyeing each other across a Boston gathering, asking themselves: "Which one?" That is, which of these three aspiring women poets would succeed. As the account goes, the palm went to Sexton, who had just been awarded her first book contract. What is striking about this story for us today is not the prediction but the exclusion--the fact that it was assumed, in the writing climate of the late 1950's, that there would be a place for only one of these woman poets to be heard (and at the cost of the other two). We could see this evening as a response to that anxiety by gathering together three contemporary women poets who have so successfully made their voices known.
But we shouldn't make of that story a false happy ending, since the notion of resolution is something of which these poets are so deeply and articulately suspicious. We also should not do away with the anxiety, since the intimate connection between anxiety and poetic self-voicing for women is one of the most important legacies of Sylvia Plath.
--Jacqueline Rose
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