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Post by turkoizdog on Sept 13, 2009 22:37:32 GMT -8
Soo making one thread for every Plath poem I like would feel like the virtual equivalent of wasting paper for me, so I made one thread to put stuff by her in.
List of poems to post (to remind myself): The Applicant, Lady Lazarus, Daddy, The Munich Mannequins
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Cut
by Sylvia Plath
What a thrill -- My thumb instead of an onion. The top quite gone Except for a sort of a hinge
Of skin, A flap like a hat, Dead white. Then that red plush.
Little pilgrim, The Indian's axed your scalp. Your turkey wattle Carpet rolls
Straight from the heart. I step on it, Clutching my bottle Of pink fizz.
A celebration, this is. Out of a gap A million soldiers run, Redcoats, every one.
Whose side are they on? O my Homunculus, I am ill. I have taken a pill to kill
The thin Papery feeling. Saboteur, Kamikaze man --
The stain on your Gauze Ku Klux Klan Babushka Darkens and tarnishes when
The balled Pulp of your heart Confronts its small Mill of silence
How you jump -- Trepanned veteran, Dirty girl, Thumb stump.
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Post by turkoizdog on Sept 13, 2009 22:49:48 GMT -8
Daddy
by Sylvia Plath
You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time -- Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one grey toe Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend
Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene
And engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belse. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true. With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew.
I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat moustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You --
Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you
You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do. So daddy, I'm finally through. The black telephone's off at the root, The voices just can't worm through.
If I've killed one man, I've killed two -- The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now.
There's a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.
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Post by Del on Sept 13, 2009 22:55:40 GMT -8
Sylvia Plath is a CRAZY biz-natch!
But she is a genius. The poem I know the well is Daddy, which you have provided.
She just makes ME want to stick MY head in the oven and gas myself to death XD
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Post by turkoizdog on Sept 13, 2009 23:05:08 GMT -8
The poems I've posted thus far are my two favorites. I'll post more later, since I don't feel like looking for the others or flipping through my copy of Ariel and typing them out.
I LOVE Daddy. It's dark, (almost) Seussical (in it's rhyming), with what seems like a tinge of the Electra complex mixed in... I've tried in my own poetry to get a similar style across but it's very hard.
There was a character from the book Poisonwood Bible (Adah) whose style kind of reminded me of Sylvia Plath too...
Also, I HATE how on her gravestone they wrote "Sylvia Plath-Hughes". Ugh, just ugh. Ted Hughes was an idiot who drove his wives to kill themselves. Ugh.
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Post by Gabby on Sept 15, 2009 20:01:21 GMT -8
My teacher made us read The Bell Jar over Christmas break.
CHRISTMAS BREAK!
Heartless b*tch. D;
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Post by Del on Sept 15, 2009 20:31:47 GMT -8
What exactly is that?
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Post by Gabby on Sept 15, 2009 20:33:32 GMT -8
Plath's autobiography, pretty much. She just used different names.
So much attempted suicide. So many crazy people.
Happiness emptied from my life while reading that.
And like, the ending promised hope. But then later on you learned that she freaking stuck her head in the oven with her kids sleeping upstairs. WTF IS THAT
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Post by Lily on Sept 15, 2009 20:39:26 GMT -8
"Here's a Sylvia Plath book and a bottle of Ambien. I'm gonna look the other way, and whatever happens happens."
-Lois Griffin
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Post by Del on Sept 15, 2009 20:40:05 GMT -8
Yeah, she was a crazy snatch.
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Post by Lily on Sept 15, 2009 20:40:41 GMT -8
Ew. Don't say snatch. lol
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Post by Del on Sept 15, 2009 20:41:18 GMT -8
XD
Alright.
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Post by Lily on Sept 15, 2009 20:41:43 GMT -8
^^;
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Post by Gabby on Sept 16, 2009 7:56:19 GMT -8
She was wonderful with words. Description especially. But when you're just describing how blood "booms and ripens" where you cut yourself for the billionth time... it gets old. And extremely depressing. D;
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Post by turkoizdog on Sept 16, 2009 12:01:03 GMT -8
Hmm very true. Daddy has to be my favorite, though. Along with this one:
The Munich Mannequins
by Sylvia Plath
Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children. Cold as snow breath, it tamps the womb
Where the yew trees blow like hydras, The tree of life and the tree of life
Unloosing their moons, month after month, to no purpose. The blood flood is the flood of love,
The absolute sacrifice. It means: no more idols but me,
Me and you. So, in their sulfur loveliness, in their smiles
These mannequins lean tonight In Munich, morgue between Paris and Rome,
Naked and bald in their furs, Orange lollies on silver sticks,
Intolerable, without mind. The snow drops its pieces of darkness,
Nobody's about. In the hotels Hands will be opening doors and setting
Down shoes for a polish of carbon Into which broad toes will go tomorrow.
O the domesticity of these windows, The baby lace, the green-leaved confectionery,
The thick Germans slumbering in their bottomless Stolz. And the black phones on hooks
Glittering Glittering and digesting
Voicelessness. The snow has no voice.
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