Thursday, February 14, 2013

ARIEL


In his introduction to Ariel, Robert Lowell describes the book thus: “In these poems, written in the last months of her life, and often rushed out at the rate of two or three a day, Sylvia Plath becomes herself, becomes something imaginary, newly, wildly and subtly created.” To “become oneself” and simultaneously to be “imagined”, to imagine ourselves alive, one could say, must be the highest (and least-often attained) aim of the poet.

Plath's poems are messages sent through the hazes of hell to those of us fortunate enough to read them, exquisite sculptures carved by a prisoner's fingernail and tempered like Ahab's steel in blood. Even the motions of nature are torture, the poisons of cruelty and submission too deeply-dyed to be filtered out in the cycles that are meant to clean our bodies, to clean the earth. For Plath, natural processes are not sources of relief and re-achieving equilibrium so much as the dominion of the predator, the disease, the fester.

    That night the moon
    Dragged its blood bag, sick
    Animal
    Up over the harbor lights. 

Plath's language is spare but dense, like wide curves of smooth ivory. At other turns it is coldly tactile, a grizzled matrix of lines and edges, like the guts of an agate, or the pulp sacs of a blood orange. Out of context, her stanzas seem somehow more beautiful, and masterful.

    O vase of acid,
    It is love you are full of.


    A vice of knives,
    A piranha
    Religion, drinking


    How you jump—
    Trepanned veteran,
    Dirty girl,
    Thumb stump.


    Where are the eye-stones, yellow and valuable,
    And the tongue, sapphire of ash.


    Greasing the bodies of adulterers
    Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.
    The sin. The sin.

Only a poet of Plath's nearly unbelievable linguistic talents could pull off these poems, which in many ways can be fairly described as “confessional”—only a poet of devastating power and vision and, sadly, deep experience of horror can make this fevered pain into art. Very few poets since (Carolyn Forche and Lyn Hejinian being two stunning examples, both female poets of explosive voice and vision, and both owing much, as do all English-language poets since, to Plath) have successfully made the travails of their daily lives into vital, coruscating effusions of poetry.

The tragedy of Plath's end cannot help but assign mythic depth to her living words. But perhaps rather than attempt to see through those mists, it is more valuable creatively speaking to recognize what her poems achieved: that out of the depths of nonexistence their qualities of levitation propelled the agonies and hallucinations of a human denied her humanity, a being denied her being, up into the air to be breathed by the living. They are a testament to human power (as in “power to,” not “over”), and to the power to be, and to say.



(The first two quotations are from the poem “Lesbos”; the third from “Nick and the Candlestick”; the fourth from “Cut”; the fifth from “Berck-Plage”; and the sixth from the incredible “Fever 103”. All are from the book Ariel, in the meaty part just before the middle.)  

Tuesday, December 25, 2012

autogeography


the sly presence

the wind backing 
     thru the chainsaw's tines 

the insistence 
     on witness 
     on sacrifice 

the ice blossom 
     pending 

the clouds 
     scrolling 
     
the weight 
     waking 
   
apart

     breathful

           the heavy root
                greening

           like

           phosphor 

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

linear b

if we insist on

bonsai-bearded
         abacus

      or

mystical weapons
for buddhists

      or

human sacrifice
naval warfare

       or

titanic oranges

let it be divorced
from verbal loops

dealing, as they do
with holy mountains

Monday, December 17, 2012

a trillion bells

she looks Israeli
her cocoons
drizzling
prehensile burns

sunny lumens
          over Pennsylvania Ave
blue jays glisten
under iron dreams
enhanced
by armor

bulleted hot core
sends steam
into night

Friday, March 16, 2012

Blacksmith

in calcite, trimmed dark
cubes in blue detail
wrote you in smoke
your habitat, I went
hesitant, someday
a willed structure
reaches, limes, a
monk among crossings
since the future curves
write me back
for I am in need of words

Monday, March 5, 2012

10

Our body, released of vaccines,
and rain skids down the sides of the sky
anvils resemble themselves
the world is a forest of flesh.
my kindnesses are clean, my voice
a book of gems twisting
like a Persian prince, the day sharpens
the icicles of Easter;
unfolding the mystical carved boxes
with my nauseous fiancee
I will live in a cellar,
the only antidote to fear

Sunday, February 26, 2012

9

On my way to becoming a tornado
I say, "equally empty," my mind
resting on a fluted thought
my love for you is a city
of atoms in trespass of a flower
Nature requires vedic moments
a day of aerial threats, balsam
half a clamor, but it goes
just like Mars, but not vicious
in tuesday's canyon, low and light
the salesman arrives tearfully
a trilogy of air seeps
from the perianth, black
on him who made it