I haven’t received my print
copy of this month’s issue of Poetry
yet, but I have been reading around in the on-line issue. I’m caught by a new
poem by Sina Queyras, “Sylvia Plath’s Elegy for Sylvia Plath.” It’s a
remarkable poem, not least for its gutsiness in taking on the fraught legacy of
Sylvia Plath, responding to the difficulty of her poetic, to what feels like
Plath’s inassimilable otherness. Queyras makes a poem out of Plath’s refusal to
be remade, out of her recalcitrant inapprehensibility. That refusal for me is
also a version – though in a very different idiom – of Paul Celan’s practice of
Widerruf (which means something like
revocation, cancellation or retraction), which is itself I think a poetic
version of Hegelian sublation, Aufhebung:
the repeal, the resolution through negation. I’m not prepared, and I may never
be, for a careful philosophical interrogation of these concepts, but I am fine
about invoking them as tropes, as resonant elements of a poetic toolkit. “Sylvia
Plath’s Elegy for Sylvia Plath” strikes me – given the come-and-go controversy
around negative reviewing in which Queyras has been participating over the last
year or so, mostly as a provocateur – as a kind of negative review of Plath’s
poetry (and really of one poem in particular, “Tulips” from Ariel), but “negative” in a much more
complex and nuanced sense than you might think. The poem, after all, functions
at least on first reading as both tribute and celebration, as affirmative. But
what it also does, and does very well, is revise Plath – that is, re-see her
words – by conversing and debating with her poetry as poetry. It’s not
composed, despite the circularity of the title, in anything like the critical
meta-language of the review. Rather, it recasts the decidedly patriarchal
lineage of the Widerruf (a lineage
that might be heard as Oedipal contestation in, for instance, Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence) as what Queyras,
in her mini sonnet sequence published in this same issue of Poetry, calls “otherhood,” a portmanteau
of otherness and motherhood. Queyras takes up and takes on Plath, I want to
suggest, not to wrestle her way elegiacally past a predecessor (like Milton on Shakespeare, for instance, or Ashbery on, say, Stevens), but to address Plath’s
own challenging relationship to canonization and patriarchy, and to reframe
what it means, in Queyras’s terms, to be a “bad / Mother.”
Here is what Freida Hughes says about her own difficult
mother in the foreword to the “restored edition” of Ariel, published in 2004:
Since
she died my mother has been dissected, analyzed, reinterpreted, reinvented,
fictionalized, and in some cases completely fabricated. It comes down to this:
her own words her best, her ever-changing moods defining the way she viewed her
world and the manner in which she pinned down her subjects with a merciless
eye.
As Plath seems to predict in
“Tulips,” written in 1961 but carried forward to posthumous publication in Ariel, Plath sees herself as subject to
both vivisection and autopsy, and not only as subject (patient, body, even
victim) but also as her own surgeon, wielding a merciless scalpel. Plath, that
is, casts herself as both mother and mothered, other and othering. “Nothing,
not even death,” says Queyras’s poem, “frees mothers from the cutting board.” Her
“Sylvia Plath,” though, is much less visual and much more tactile, more
textural, than Plath herself tends to be. In “Tulips,” Plath’s reflexives, the
negations, are characteristically optic: “Nobody watched me before, now I am
watched.” Plath depicts herself, on a hospital bed with her head sandwiched
between two pillows, as the “stupid pupil” of an eye “between two white lids
that will not shut.” Queyras’s Plath, by contrast, is sculptural, material,
rife with aesthesis, wanting to “feel the tulip’s skin, . . . the soft gravel /
Of childhood under cheek,” her words given kinetic dimension, corporeal space
and thickness as they are made to writhe “Across the page . . . ass / High as
any downward dog and cutlass arms / Lashing any mother who tries to pass.”
Echoes of barely suppressed violence seethe and twist through Queyras’s lines,
much as they do through Plath’s; notice how the “firm rhyme” here around “ass”
– hardly an instance of poetical diction, though Plath was often fond in her
late poems of shocking sensibilities, of lashing out at her reader “lightly,” a
little – is drawn off-centre, away from the line-ends of any ersatz “hard
couplet.” Plath’s offspring, if that’s what these lines are, want to shred
neatnesses, prying cracks in their verbal containers.
“Tulips,” from which I’ve been suggesting that Queyras draws
much of her raw material for this poem, was written after Plath underwent an
appendectomy, following a miscarriage. The red tulips, presumably flowers sent
to her in hospital, suggest both vitality and woundedness. Plath refuses remedy,
the distant “health” at her poem’s close, choosing instead to worry
metaphorically at her incisions, to use poetry to pull at her sutures. Craving
the blankness of anesthesia (“I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted / To lie
with my hands turned up and be utterly empty”), she nonetheless builds and
weaves text from her own troubled persistence; poetry consists in the refusal
of her self-awareness to let go: “And I am aware of my heart: it opens and
closes / Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.” Queyras picks up on
the irresolution with which Plath’s poem contingently finishes:
The tulips were never warm
My loves, they never smelled of spring,
They never marked the path out of loneliness,
Never led me home, nor to me, nor away
From what spring, or red, or tulips
Could never be.
Performing their hiatus,
these lines neither empathize with Plath nor refuse her. Despite the
entitlement Plath’s readers’ often feel – our dogged identification with her
cultural predicament as a woman caught between domestic codependency and urbane
independence, between love and loneliness – this Plath settles for neither home
nor escape, but produces, reproduces herself negatively, by refusing either
option.
Hers
is an idiom of ingrained melancholia, of resolute infelicity. Metaphor – consisting
simultaneously of semantic slippage and connective bridgework – emerges from
the roiling fractures of that refusal. In “Tulips,” Plath’s metaphors (falling
into intemperate simile, for example) suggest both likeness and unlikeness,
motherly bond and otherly dehiscence:
The
tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even
through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly,
through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
That disavowal, that
sublation, is also enacted syntactically in Plath’s comma splices, which suture
her open sentences together, like loose stitches, gating without cinching her
red salt flow of words. Queyras picks up on this stylistic tic, as the set of
run-ons that close her poem, which I have cited above, suggest. But Queyras
also distances herself formally from Plath’s poem. The couplets, or perhaps the
two-line bunches, that shape Queyras’s poem recall not “Tulips” but “Berck-Plage,”
which also uses comma splices to create a sense of spontaneous overflow, of
fractal rush. Plath’s texts hover between the immediacy of rough spontaneity
(most of the poems in Ariel tend to
speak, as manuscripts demonstrate, in a holographic present tense, as if
addressing the moments of their own composition) and the considered formal
mediations of obsessive revision, of the reflex of craft. The writing self, which
in Plath often manifests as a cascade of first-person pronouns, is in Queyras’s
text further withheld, suspended in an indeterminate second person for at least
the first half of the poem: “If you can’t feel love in life you won’t feel it
in death, nor / Will you feel the tulip’s skin . . . .” Any empathic connection
to Plath, feeling as if you might feel what she might have felt, reaching
imaginatively across the absolute barrier of her death (though “not how you
imagine it will,” writes Queyras) to draw her voice, liminally, back into the
living frame of your own poem, is also impeded – negated – by the mythopeic
work of Plath’s posthumous dissection and monstrous reassembly as an icon of
fraught womanhood, of otherhood. She refuses to be caught. “The vivid tulips,”
as Plath herself proleptically puts it, “eat my oxygen.” The tropes will always
digest their own maker, her vitality. “Let’s be frank,” says Queyras, but
candour in a poem about Plath isn’t a matter of re-casting details from her
biography, or reshaping lines and fragments from her poetry. Rather, it seems
to consist in facing up to the cancellations and refusals that shape her voice and
her sense of self, of self-elegy. And self in Plath isn’t something that,
Yeats-like, you must remake. Rather, self comes to consist in the work of
revision, in the negatives through which those rewritten poems emerged, and, in
moments such as those of Queyras’s poem, still emerge.
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