From Odes

From Meditations in an Emergency

From Lunch Poems

Other Works

Francis Russell O'Hara (June 27, 1926 – July 25, 1966)

My Heart

I'm not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don't prefer one "strain" to another.
I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar. And if
some aficionado of my mess says "That's
not like Frank!", all to the good! I
don't wear brown and grey suits all the time,
do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart--
you can't plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.   

Frank O’Hara was born Francis Russell O’Hara in Baltimore on June 27, 1926 to a middle class Catholic family and was soon afterwards moved to Grafton, Massachusetts.   During his youth, he recognized early on, his own homosexuality, and thus broke with the Catholic church and rejected all religious beliefs.  During that time, O’Hara studied piano and played proficiently and was heading toward becoming a great pianist and composer by 17 (he studied piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston from 1941 to 1944).  In 1944, he began a 2 year stint in the navy and served as a member of the shore patrol as well as served on the destroyer U.S.S. Nicholas.  Though he was never in combat, he was exposed to it.   When he returned in 1946, he attended Harvard and decided to major in English, not music.  He met John Ashberry his senior year at a party.  In that time, he was already a dedicated and serious writer who considered poetry his saving force from death.  In 1950, he earned a master’s at the University of Michigan, and then joined Ashberry in New York where he secured a desk job at the Museum of Modern Art.  Frank O’Hara loved New York City.  It’s evident in his poetry – its many gestures of love for the city and its pleasures.  He has become known as America’s most enthusiastic poet of city life.  Frank O’Hara was very social and had numerous lovers, one being Joe LeSueur, whom he roomed with in New York for 11 years. 

While in New York, O’Hara became a central figure in the art and literary scene, during one of its most creative periods (abstract expressionism movement).  He wrote influential art criticism and was friends with painters such as Willem de Kooning and Larry Rivers (he even appears in some of his paintings).  He was a curator who was “at home” among the group of newly emerging artists, bringing a non-establishment style into the art world. 

On July 24, 1966, O’Hara was struck by a beach buggy on Fire Island when he and his friends were waiting for a beach taxi to pick them up after a party.   He died the next morning.   

O’Hara wrote prolifically.  He got his writing done in spur of the moment opportunities, whenever there was time and inspiration (lunch breaks, parties, etc).   Many of his poems were left around his apartment or sent in letters to friends.  By the time of his death in 1966, he had published only a fraction of more than 700 poems he wrote in his lifetime.  His first book was A City Winter and Other Poems (1952), followed by Oranges (1953), and Meditations in an Emergency (1957 – his first book with a commercial press).  O’Hara first received national attention when his work was published in Donald Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry 1945-1960.  All the volumes published during his life contained no more than half of his poetry; only 1 book of poems (Lunch Poems) was available outside of New York in his lifetime.  Frank O'Hara has been criticized for his subject matter, that what he writes about are not necessarily the subjects found in "good poetry."  However, he is a life poet, who seems to write on the transience of being and experiencing, where he establishes a sense of formlessness (rather than order) in his poetry.  In his opinion, he disliked theorizing about poetry where his attitude towards the craft of poetry was that "there ought not to be much."  And when it comes to his poetry, there's a sense that he's not moralizing, rather he aims to capture the fleeting pleasures of observances and feelings, creating poetry with an alluring and desiring pull.   

O’Hara’s Books (published during his lifetime)

A City Winter and Other Poems.
Oranges: 12 pastorals.
Meditations in an Emergency.
Second Avenue.
Odes.
Lunch Poems.
Love Poems (Tentative Title)

A statement made by O’Hara on writing poetry: " if you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you."  Click below to read more. 

POEMS! 

From A City Winter

At night Chinamen jump
on Asia with a thump

while in our willful way
we, in secret, play 

affectionate games and bruise
our knees like China’s shoes.
 
The birds push apples through 
grass the moon turns blue,

These apples roll beneath 
our buttocks like a heath 

full of Chinese thrushes
flushed from China’s bushes. 

As we love at night 
birds sing out of sight, 

Chinese rhythms beat 
through us in our heat,

 
the apples and the birds 
move us like soft words,

 
we couple in the grace 
of that mysterious race.

Let's take a walk, you
and I in spite of the
weather if it rains hard
                     on our toes

we'll stroll like poodles
and be washed down a
gigantic scenic gutter
                     that will be

exciting! voyages are not
all like this you just put
your toes together then
                     maybe blood

will get meaning and a trick
become slight in our keeping
before we sail the open sea it's
                     possible--

And the landscape will do
us some strange favour when
we look back at each other
                     anxiously

A City Winter
1
I understand the boredom of the clerks
fatigue shifting like dunes within their eyes
a frightful nausea gumming up the works
that once was thought aggression in disguise.
Do you remember? then how lightly dead
seemed the moon when over factories
it languid slid like a barrage of lead
above the heart, the fierce inventories
of desire. Now women wander our dreams
carrying money and to our sleep's shame
our hands twitch not for swift blood-sunk triremes
nor languorous white horses nor ill fame,
but clutch the groin that clouds a pallid sky
where tow'rs are sinking in their common eye.

2
My ship is flung upon the gutter's wrist
and cries for help of storm to violate
that flesh your curiosity too late
has flushed. The stem your garter tongue would twist
has sunk upon the waveless bosom's mist,
thigh of the city, apparition, hate,
and the tower whose doves have, delicate,
fled into my blood where they are not kissed.

You have left me to the sewer's meanwhile,
and I have answered the sea's open wish
to love me as a bonfire's watchful hand
guards red the shore and guards the hairy strand,
our most elegant lascivious bile,
my ship sinking beneath the gutter's fish.

3
How can I then, my dearest winter lay,
disgorge the tasty worm that eats me up
falling onto the stem of a highway
whose ardent rainbow is the spoon's flat cup
and in the vilest of blue suited force
enamored of the heated needle's arm
finds the ministrant an own tongue's remorse
so near the blood and still so far from harm,
thus to be eaten up and gobbled down
volcanoes of speedometers, the strike
that heats the iris into flame and flow'rs
the panting chalice so a turning pike:
you are not how the gods refused to die,
and I am scarred forever neath the eye.

4
What are my eyes? if they must feed me, rank
with forgetting, in the jealous forest
of lustrous blows, so luminously blank
through smoke and in the light. All faint, at rest,
yet I am racing towards the fear that kills
them off, friends and lovers, hast'ning through tears
like alcohol high in the throat of hills
and hills of night, alluring! their black cheers
falling upon my ears like nails. And there
the bars grow thick with onanists and camps
and bivouacs of bears with clubs, are fair
with their blows, deal death beneath purple lamps
and to me! I run! closer always move,
crying my name in fields of dead I love.

5
I plunge deep within this frozen lake
whose mirrored fastnesses fill up my heart,
where tears drift from frivolity to art
all white and slobbering, and by mistake
are the sky. I'm no whale to cruise apart
in fields impassive of my stench, my sake,
my sign to crushing seas that fall like fake
pillars to crash! to sow as wake my heart

and don't be niggardly. The snow drifts low
and yet neglects to cover me, and I
dance just ahead to keep my heart in sight.
How like a queen, to seek with jealous eye
the face that flees you, hidden city, white
swan. There's no art to free me, blinded so.

From Love Poems (Tentative Title)

Having a Coke with You

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluoresent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I'm with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o'clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles 

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
                                                                                             I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it's in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven't gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn't pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
                   it seems they were all cheated of some marvellous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it

Avenue A
We hardly ever see the moon any more
                                                          so no wonder
   it's so beautiful when we look up suddenly
and there it is gliding broken-faced over the bridges
brilliantly coursing, soft, and a cool wind fans
       your hair over your forehead and your memories
              of Red Grooms' locomotive landscape
I want some bourbon/you want some oranges/I love the leather
                jacket Norman gave me
                                                and the corduroy coat David
     gave you, it is more mysterious than spring, the El Greco
heavens breaking open and then reassembling like lions
                                                 in a vast tragic veldt
     that is far from our small selves and our temporally united
passions in the cathedral of Januaries

     everything is too comprehensible
these are my delicate and caressing poems
I suppose there will be more of those others to come, as in the past
                                                  so many!
but for now the moon is revealing itself like a pearl
                                                  to my equally naked heart

Light     clarity       avocado salad in the morning
after all the terrible things I do how amazing it is
to find forgiveness and love, not even forgiveness
since what is done is done and forgiveness isn't love
and love is love nothing can ever go wrong
though things can get irritating boring and dispensable
(in the imagination) but not really for love
though a block away you feel distant the mere presence
changes everything like a chemical dropped on a paper
and all thoughts disappear in a strange quiet excitement
I am sure of nothing but this, intensified by breathing

To be continued....

• Harmonium (1923)
• Ideas of Order (1936)
• Owl's Clover (1936)
• The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937)
• Parts of a World (1942)
• Transport to Summer (1947)
• The Auroras of Autumn (1950)
• Collected Poems (1954)
• Opus Posthumous (1957)
• The Palm at the End of the Mind (1972)
• Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: The Library of America, 1997)
• Disillusionment at Ten O'Clock

Prose

• The Necessary Angel (essays) (1951)
• Letters of Wallace Stevens, edited by Holly Stevens (1966)
• Secretaries of the Moon: The Letters of Wallace Stevens & Jose Rodriguez Feo, edited by Beverly Coyle and Alan Filreis (1986)
• Sur plusieurs beaux sujects: Wallace Stevens's Commonplace Book, edited by Milton J. Bates (1989)
• The Contemplated Spouse: The Letter of Wallace Stevens to Elsie, edited by D.J. Blount (2006)

( Six Significant Landscapes )

(there will be more added within the next few days)

 e.e.Cummings

Biography:

from Poets.org

“Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 14, 1894. He began writing poems as early as 1904 and studied Latin and Greek at the Cambridge Latin High School. He received his B.A. in 1915 and his M.A. in 1916, both from Harvard.

In 1917, Cummings' first published poems appeared in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets. The same year, Cummings left the United States for France as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I. Five months after his assignment, however, he and a friend were interned in a prison camp by the French authorities on suspicion of espionage (an experience recounted in his novel, The Enormous Room) for his outspoken anti-war convictions.

During his lifetime, Cummings received a number of honors, including an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1958, and a Ford Foundation grant.

At the time of his death, September 3, 1962, he was the second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost. He is buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts.”

 Poetry:

l(a

le

af

fa

ll

s)

one

l

iness

********************

 it may not always be so; and i say

that if your lips, which i have loved, should touch

another's, and your dear strong fingers clutch

his heart, as mine in time not far away;

if on another's face your sweet hair lay

in such silence as i know, or such

great writhing words as, uttering overmuch,

stand helplessly before the spirit at bay;

if this should be, i say if this should be--

you of my heart, send me a little word;

that i may go unto him, and take his hands,

saying, Accept all happiness from me.

Then shall i turn my face and hear one bird

sing terribly afar in the lost lands

*******************************

        the rain,

                (Who feathers frightened fields

        with the superior dust-of-sleep. wields

        easily the pale club of the wind

        and swirled justly souls of flower strike

        the air in utterable coolness

        deeds of green thrilling light

                                      with thinned

        newfragile yellows

                          lurch and.press

        -in the woods

                     which

                          stutter

                                 and

                                    sing

        And the coolness of your smile is

        stirringofbirds between my arms;but

        i should rather than anything

        have(almost when hugeness will shut

        quietly)almost,

                       your kiss

**************************

gee i like to think of dead it means nearer because deeper

firmer since darker than little round water at one end of

the well     it's too cool to be crooked and it's too firm

to be hard but it's sharp and thick and it loves,    every

old thing falls in rosebugs and jackknives and kittens and

pennies they all sit there looking at each other having the

fastest time because they've never met before

dead's more even than how many ways of sitting on

your head your unnatural hair has in the morning

dead's clever too like POF goes the alarm off and the

little striker having the best time tickling away every-

body's brain so everybody just puts out their finger

and they stuff the poor thing all full of fingers

dead has a smile like the nicest man you've never met

who maybe winks at you in a streetcar and you pretend

you don't but really you do see and you are My how

glad he winked and hope he'll do it again

or if it talks about you somewhere behind your back it

makes your neck feel pleasant and stoopid       and if

dead says may i have this one and was never intro-

duced you say Yes because you know you want it to

dance with you and it wants to and it can dance and

Whocares

dead's fine like hands do you see that water flowerpots

in windows but they live higher in their house than

you so that's all you see but you don't want to

dead's happy like the way underclothes All so differ-

ently solemn and inti and sitting on one string

dead never says my dear,Time for your musiclesson

and you like music and to have somebody play who

can but you know you never can and why have to?

dead's nice like a dance where you danced simple hours

and you take all your prickley-clothes off and squeeze-

into-largeness without one word     and you lie still as

anything    in largeness and this largeness begins to

give you,the dance all over again and you,feel all again

all over the way men you liked made you feel when they

touched you(but that's not all)because largeness tells

you so you can feel what you made,men feel when,you

touched,them

dead's sorry like a thistlefluff-thing which goes land-

ing away all by himself on somebody's roof or some-

thing where who-ever-heard-of-growing and nobody

expects you to anyway

dead says come with me he says(andwhyevernot)into

the round well and see the kitten and the penny and

the jackknife and the rosebug

                              and you say Sure you

say (like that) sure i'll come with you you say for i

like kittens i do and jackknives i do and pennies i do

and rosebugs i do

********************

may i feel said he

   may i feel said he

   (i'll squeal said she

   just once said he)

   it's fun said she

   (may i touch said he

   how much said she

   a lot said he)

   why not said she

   (let's go said he

   not too far said she

   what's too far said he

   where you are said she)

   may i stay said he

   (which way said she

   like this said he

   if you kiss said she

   may i move said he

   is it love said she)

   if you're willing said he

   (but you're killing said she

   but it's life said he

   but your wife said she

   now said he)

   ow said she

   (tiptop said he

   don't stop said she

   oh no said he)

   go slow said she

   (cccome?said he

   ummm said she)

   you're divine!said he

   (you are Mine said she)

*****************

Picasso

you give us Things

which

bulge:grunting lungs pumped full of sharp thick mind

you make us shrill

presents always

shut in the sumptuous screech of

simplicity

(out of the

black unbunged

Something gushes vaguely a squeak of planes

or

between squeals of

Nothing grabbed with circular shrieking tightness

solid screams whisper.)

Lumberman of The Distinct

your brain's

axe only chops hugest inherent

Trees of Ego,from

whose living and biggest

bodies lopped

of every

prettiness

you hew form truly

Works:

Poetry

Tulips and Chimneys (1923)
& (1925)
XLI Poems (1925)
ViVa (1931)
No Thanks (1935)
Tom (1935)
1/20 (1936)
Fifty Poems (1941)
1 x 1 (1944)
Xaipe: Seventy-One Poems (1950)
Ninety-five Poems (1958)
73 Poems (1962)
Complete Poems (1991)

Prose

The Enormous Room (1922)
Eimi (1933)

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Cummings

http://www.geocities.com/soho/8454/eec.htm

http://www-scf.usc.edu/~thier/ee/

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/156

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/cummings/cummings.htm

Adrienne Rich: The Poetic/Political Convictions of a (Former) Daughter-in-Law

One task of the nineteen- or twenty-year-old poet who wrote the earliest poems here was to learn that she was neither unique nor universal, but a person in history, a woman and not a man, a white and also Jewish inheritor of a particular Western consciousness, from the making of which most women have been excluded. – from the Foreword to The Fact of a Doorframe

Art is our human birthright, our most powerful means of access to our own and another's experience and imaginative life. In continually rediscovering and recovering the humanity of human beings, art is crucial to the democratic vision. A government tending further and further away from the search for democracy will see less and less "use" in encouraging artists, will see art as obscenity or hoax. – from “Why I Refused the National Medal for the Arts”

 A portrait of the poet as a young woman.

A Bit of Biography

On May 16, 1929, Adrienne Cecile Rich was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to Helen Jones and Arnold Rich. Her Jewish father was a doctor and professor of pathology at John Hopkins Medical School, and her southern Protestant mother was a skilled pianist and “lost composer,” who had abandoned her professional aspirations to raise a family. The dynamic that existed between her parents, between the strong-willed patriarch (Rich has written, “[My father’s] investment in my intellect and talent was …tyrannical, opinionated….but he taught me, nevertheless to believe in hard work, to mistrust easy inspiration, to write and rewrite; to feel that I was a person of the book…”) and the female intellectual thwarted by the demands of heteronormative domesticity, would feature largely in her subsequent work.

In 1951, Rich graduated from Radcliffe College and published her first of many books A Change of World, which was selected by W.H. Auden (who described the work as comprised of “neatly and modestly dressed” poems that “respect their elders but are not cowed by them” in his preface) for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. Two years later, Rich traveled to Europe with a Guggenheim Fellowship, married Harvard economist Alfred H. Conrad, and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. As the decade wore on, Rich became increasingly disillusioned with the “American ideal” and the political/ideological status quo, such that by the 1960s, her work had become markedly critical of patriarchal assumptions and hegemonic constructions, as witnessed in “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” written from 1958-1960. No longer mindful of her (male) forebears as she critiqued sexism and racism and charted the social unrest spawned by the Vietnam War, Rich also transformed her poetry formally, eschewing conventional prosodic constraints in favor of free verse.

By 1973, when she published her National Book Award-winning Diving into the Wreck, Rich had separated from her husband (who committed suicide in 1970) and had become thoroughly engaged in the ongoing peace, civil rights, and feminist movements, participating in protests while teaching at both Columbia University and City College’s SEEK program for underprivileged youth. Connecting with women on both a political and deeply personal level (she had accepted her National Book Award alongside Audre Lorde and Alice Walker on behalf of all silenced women), Rich "came out" as lesbian in the mid-'70s, publishing Of Women Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution in 1976 (the same year she began living with partner Michelle Cliff) and the homoerotic “Twenty-One Love Poems” in 1977. By 1980, with the publication of the watershed essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience” in the feminist journal Signs, Rich had established herself as a vastly important voice in the realm of theory as well as in poetic domain.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Rich continued to explore in numerous collections the highly political themes of her earlier work, but the poet expanded her scope to include women’s concerns that transgress boundaries of place and time as well as prescient critiques of American imperialism and ecological mismanagement. Never one to compromise her convictions, Rich declined a National Medal for the Arts in 1997, stating, “[T]he very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration,” and that a “President cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.”

A highly prolific and heavily decorated poet (her most recent accolades, the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award for The School Among the Ruins and the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2006), Rich maintains considerable presence in contemporary poetic and political discourse, with her latest collections focusing on the experience of living day-to-day in 21^st-century America as well as on her government’s actions across the globe.

She and Cliff currently reside in Northern California.

Rich in 2006.

Rich’s Bibliography

 
Poetry
 

A Change of World (1951, which was selected by Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize)
The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems (1955)
Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law: Poems, 1954-1962 (1963; rev. ed., 1967)
Necessities of Life (1966)
Leaflets: Poems, 1965-1968 (1969)
The Will to Change: Poems, 1968-1970 (1971)
Diving into the Wreck: Poems, 1971-1972 (1973, winner of the 1974 National Book Award)
Poems: Selected and New, 1950-1974 (1974)
Twenty-One Love Poems (1977)
The Dream of a Common Language: Poems, 1974-1977 (1978)
A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems, 19 78- 1981 (1981)
Sources (1983)
The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984 (1984, rev. ed. 2005)
Your Native Land, Your Life (1986)
Time's Power: Poems, 1985-1988 (1988)
An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems, 1988-1991 (1991)
Collected Early Poems, 1950-1970 (1993)
Dark Fields of the Republic, 1991-1995 (1995)
Midnight Salvage: Poems, 1995-1998 (1999)
Fox: Poems, 1998-2000 (2003)
The School Among the Ruins: Poems, 2000-2004 (2006, winner of the National Books Critics Circle Award)
Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems, 2004-2006 (2007)

 
Prose

 
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976, rev. ed., 1986)
On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966- 1978 (1979)
Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1986 (1986)
What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993, rev. ed. 2003)
Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations (2002)
Poetry & Commitment: An Essay (2007)
 

External Links

Link to a 1999 interview with Michael Klein for The Boston Phoenix: here.

Link to Rich’s 1997 letter, refusing the National Medal for the Arts, and commentary: here.

Link to a recording of Rich reading “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” in 1985 at Cornell: here.

Link to a recording of Rich reading from “Twenty-One Love Poems”: here.

Link to recording of Prelude No. 7 in A major, Op. 28, by Frédéric Chopin (referenced in “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law”): here.

 
A Handful of Poems and a Little Prose

Aunt Jennifer's Tigers from A Change of World (1951)

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law from Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963)

Diving into the Wreck from Diving into the Wreck (1973)

Rape from Diving into the Wreck (1973)

Twenty-One Love Poems (1977)

Power from The Dream of a Common Poetry (1978)

from “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience” (1980), featured in Blood, Bread, and Poetry (1986):

            I have chosen to use the terms lesbian existence and lesbian continuum because the word lesbianism has a clinical and limiting ring. Lesbian existence suggests both the fact of the historical presence of lesbians and our continuing creation of the meaning of that existence. I mean the term lesbian continuum to include a range—through each woman’s life and throughout history—of woman-identified experience; not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman. If we expand it to embrace many more forms of primary intensity between and among women, including the sharing of a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, the giving and receiving of practical and political support; if we can also hear in it such associations as marriage resistance and the “haggard” behavior identified by Mary Daly (obsolete meanings: “intractable,” “willful,” “wanton,” and “unchaste”…“a woman reluctant to yield to wooing”)—we begin to grasp breadths of female history and psychology which have lain out of reach as a consequence of limited, mostly clinical, definitions of “lesbianism.”

…

            Woman-identification is a source of energy, a potential springhead of female power, violently curtailed and wasted under the institution of heterosexuality. The denial of reality and visibility to women’s passion for women, women’s choice of women as allies, life companions, and community; the forcing of such relationships into dissimulation and their disintegration under intense pressure have meant an incalculable loss to the power of all women to change the social relations of the sexes, to liberate ourselves and each other. The lie of compulsory female heterosexuality today afflicts not just feminist scholarship, but every profession, every reference work, every curriculum, every organizing attempt, every relationship or conversation over which it hovers. It creates, specifically, a profound falseness, hypocrisy, and hysteria in the heterosexual dialogue, for every heterosexual relationship is lived in the queasy strobelight of that lie. However we chose to identify ourselves, however we find ourselves labeled, it flickers across and distorts our lives.

Tattered Kaddish from An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991)

Miracle Ice Cream from Dark Fields of the Republic (1995)

The School Among the Ruins from The School Among the Ruins (2006)

Behind the Motel from Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth (2007)

Other poets and theorists (exhibiting a range of feminisms) to explore: Audre Lorde, Marilyn Hacker, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Muriel Rukeyser, Anne Sexton, bell hooks, Carol Ann Duffy, Mary Daly, Andrea Dworkin, Elizabeth Bishop, Betty Friedan, and Jo Shapcott.

Biography

Harryette Mullen was born in 1953 in Florence, Alabama and raised in Forth Worth Texas. She began the first of many secondary educational endeavors at the University of Texas-Austin where she graduated with degrees in English and in Literature. She continued toward a  graduate degree at the University of California-Santa Cruz. Along with her remarkable collections of poety, short story, and essays, Harryette has continues to contribute to the realm of academia as a professor of African-American Literature at Cornell University and currently, at UCLA.

Her work has been showcased in numerous journals and her honors include: the Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry ,  various artist grants, and a Rockefeller Fellowship from the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Women's Studies at the University of Rochester, too name a few.  

Much of her acclaim is a result of the perspective that she brings to contemporary poetry as a minority woman. However,  Harryette prefers to see her voice as “no less representative of humanity than any other point of view, (Recyclopedia)” not as isolated, elevated, or unuque as a result of identity politics. Content-wise, Harryette’s poetry addresses topics such as: social movements, globalization, domesticity, culture, advertising, gender, class, and race issues, and more. Structurally, she is a language poet that varies in structure but tends toward short prose and quatrains (four- 4 line stanzas).

Works/ Bibliography:

• Tree Tall Woman, 1981
• Trimmings, 1991
• S*PeRM**K*T, 1992
• Muse & Drudge, 1995
• Sleeping with the Dictionary, 2002
• Blues Baby, 2002
• Dim Lady, 2003
• Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse and Drudge, 2006

Poetry

Harryette Mullen is quite the "punny" poet. Her playfulness is not only inherent in each poem, but also spills onto the cover, as reflected in the title of the collection, “S*PeRM**K*T” (Spermkit/Supermarket). To understand the fully extent in which she exercises full author intent and language control, one must probe into the psychology her coupled collections “S*PeRM**K*T” and Trimmings. In an interview with  Farah Griffin, Michael Magee, and Kristen Gallagher in 1997, she explains:

[S*PeRM**K*T] is the word "supermarket" with some letters missing and asterisks replace the missing letters. The missing letters just happen to be U-A-R-E, so it's like "you are what you eat." This is a book about food, you know, and everything that's in the supermarket. This is…Trimmings is a kind of list poem about clothing and accessories, and each one of those poems is also about woman or the idea or representation of woman. And "Spermkit," or "Supermarket," is sort of like your shopping list when you go to the supermarket. So, each one of the aisles that you would find and the things that you would find in the supermarket, that's how this book is organized.

 A language poet are heart, her work draws inspiration from Gertude Stein. In the Preface of her three-collection book Recyclopedia, she describes her relationship with Stein as such:

“With my hard-won appreciation for Stein’s work, I was interested in her mediation on the interior lives of women and the material culture of domesticity, focusing on the inanimate objects that find their way into the home. My books Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T correspond to the “Objects” and “Food” sections of Stein’s Tender Buttons. I share her love for puns, her interest in the stuff of life, and her synthesis of innovative poetics with cultural critique. However, my own prose poems depart from her cryptic code to recycle and reconfigure language from a public sphere that includes mass media and political discourse as well as literature and folklore.”

    Essentially, Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T mimics Stein’s impressive meditative and intricate scope, however these poets converge in the lens in which the subjects of the poem are examined. Mullen’s lens is one that emphasizes public access, and which this access, public critique. 

One of Mullen’s strengths is her adeptness with language acquisition. In the interview with  Michael Magee, she mentions:

You know, what we spoke at home was basically what I would call black standard English. You'd learn the vernacular on the streets and playgrounds in order to have some friends out there. The essentializing of black English as the natural way that black people are supposed to speak is problematic for me. I enjoy using different linguistic registers and I enjoy throwing Spanish words into my poems, you know, and I think that the variety of languages and dialects makes life more interesting. Standardization for its own sake is boring. We like to taste the different flavors, and that's something delicious about literature. You know, Langston Hughes' poem "Motto": "I play it cool and dig all jive and that's the reason I'm alive. My motto as I live and learn, is to dig and be dug in return." And the more people you can talk to and understand, the richer your life and experience can be, potentially. But also we learn these languages and these dialects and these ways of presenting ourselves in an atmosphere of coercion. There's the coercion of the school and workplace telling us: "You must speak this way or you will not be employable." Then there's the coercion of the streets: "You can't hang with us if you talk too proper." And on both sides there's coercion. So that's something to bear in mind when we're talking about language, that there is violence, there is pressure, there is force involved in making people conform to a particular way of speaking, writing and so forth.

Here, Harryette address discourse; language within political context and all of its implications. Her manipulation of language is not merely a bending of words for artistic expression, but rather a manipulation and bending of culture. Ubiquitous in her work is the challenging of the confrontational nature of  class, race, and gender. Essentially, Harryette takes the coercive pressure of language and turns the proverbial coal into a diamond in many of her works. The impressive manipulation of language is reflected in her ability to sing from one end of the linguistic register to the other. For example voice of  her first book, Tree Tall Woman,  is considered to represent the traditional “authentic voice” and the persona of a black Southern community. While the content of her poetry is just as deep as her device implementation, I have chosen not to analyze each piece. Instead, search for style and look below for more examples of how varying voice, linguistic manipulation, and social commentary permeate her poetry:

The color ‘nude,’ a flesh tone. Whose flesh unfolds barely,

appealing tan. Shelf life of stacked goods. Body stalking

software inventories summer stock. Thin-skinned Godiva

with a wig on horseback, body cast in a sit calm.

Iron maidens make docile matyrs. Their bodies on the

racks stretched taut. Honing hunger to perfect, aglow in

 nimbus flash. A few lean slicks, to cover a multitude,  fix a

 feast for the eyes. They starve for all the things we crave.

        These two poems are taken from  Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T . Where do you hear Stein’s influence? If you have time, scroll down and compare some of the poems in the Stein sections with these.

 
        When Mullen wrote Muse and Drudge she imagined a chorus of women voices. Two of which were Sappho and Sapphire. Sappho is an ancient Greek lyric poet whose rhythm and poetry sounded like a woman singing the blues. Sapphire, represents the iconic black woman whose voice cannot be silenced. In the Preface to Recyclopedia, Mullen describes this project as “a crossroads where the blues intersects with the tradition of lyrics poetry.”  Enjoy the slipperiness of bluesy rhythm as it collides with tradition lyric:

    Sleeping with the Dictionary is perhaps the apex of Mullen’s word-play capabilities. In this collection, Poems start with titles that begin with “A” and ends with “Z.” The malleability, insufficiency and inconsistency of sounds, words, and meaning are exemplified in the poems below:

Forgive me, I’m no good at this. I can’t write back. I never read your letter. 

I can’t say I got your note. I haven’t had the strength to open the envelope. 

The mail stacks up by the door. Your hand’s illegible. Your postcards were 

defaced. Wash your wet hair? Any document you meant to send has yet to 

reach me. The untied parcel service never delivered. I regret to say I’m

unable to reply to your unexpressed desires. I didn’t get the book you sent. 

By the way, my computer was stolen. Now I’m unable to process words. I 

suffer from aphasia. I’ve just returned from Kenya and Korea. Didn’t you

get a card from me yet? What can I tell you? I forgot what I was going to 

say. I still can’t find a pen that works and then I broke my pencil. You know 

how scarce paper is these days. I admit I haven’t been recycling. I never 

have time to read the Times. I’m out of shopping bags to put the old news 

in. I didn’t get to the market. I meant to clip the coupons. I haven’t read 

the mail yet. I can’t get out the door to work, so I called in sick. I went to 

bed with writer’s cramp. If I couldn’t get back to writing, I thought I’d catch 

up on my reading. Then Oprah came on with a fabulous author plugging

her best selling book.

Any Lit

You are a ukulele beyond my microphone

You are a Yukon beyond my Micronesia

You are a union beyond my meiosis

You are a unicycle beyond my migration

You are a universe beyond my mitochondria

You are a Eucharist beyond my Miles Davis

You are a euphony beyond my myocardiogram

You are a unicorn beyond my Minotaur

You are a eureka beyond my maitai

You are a Yuletide beyond my minesweeper

You are a euphemism beyond my myna bird

You are a unit beyond my mileage

You are a Yugoslavia beyond my mind’s eye

You are a yoo-hoo beyond my minor key

You are a Euripides beyond my mime troupe

You are a Utah beyond my microcosm

You are a Uranus beyond my Miami

You are a youth beyond my mylar

You are a euphoria beyond my myalgia

You are a Ukrainian beyond my Maimonides

You are a Euclid beyond my miter box

You are a Univac beyond my minus sign

You are a Eurydice beyond my maestro

You are a eugenics beyond my Mayan

You are a U-boat beyond my mind control

You are a euthanasia beyond my miasma

You are a urethra beyond my Mysore

You are a Euterpe beyond my Mighty Sparrow

You are a ubiquity beyond my minority

You are a eunuch beyond my migraine

You are a Eurodollar beyond my miserliness

You are a urinal beyond my Midol

You are a uselessness beyond my myopia

    The following poem is  from her collection Blues Baby. This is just a wonderfully symbolic poem that adopts her typical universalizing affect. See how many different meanings you can draw from this metaphor:

Shedding Skin   by Harryette Mullen

Pulling out of the old scarred skin

(old rough thing I don't need now

I strip off

slip out of

leave behind)

I slough off deadscales

flick skinflakes to the ground

Shedding toughness

peeling layers down

to vulnerable stuff

And I'm blinking off old eyelids

for a new way of seeing

By the rock I rub against

I'm going to be tender again

        Harryette, indeed, represents many voices exceeding her own. Her poetry eloquently and playfully provides an example of how one's identity becomes a global identity: “It's just a gesture toward multiplicity, my small gesture toward a visionary heteroglossia, which seems appropriate to the diaspora of languages and cultures that the black world encompasses.”

Extended Bibliography

Short stories

• "Bad Girls" and "Pica," in Her Work: Short Fiction by Texas Women, 1982; "Bad Girls" was reprinted in Lone Star Literature, 2002
• "What Can't Be Measured", in South by Southwest: Contemporary Texas Fiction, 1986
• "Sugar Sandwiches", in Lighthouse Point: An Anthology of Santa Cruz Writers, 1987
• "Tenderhead", in Common Bonds: Stories By and About Modern Texas Women, 1990; reprinted in The African American West, 2000

Critical Essays

• 'Runaway Tongue: Resistant Orality in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Our Nig, and Beloved", The Culture of Sentiment, 1992
• "Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness," Diacritics, 1994; reprinted in Cultural and Literary Critiques of the Concept of 'Race', 1997
• "'A Silence Between Us Like a Language': The Untranslatability of Experience in Sandra Cisneros' Woman Hollering Creek", MELUS Journal, 1996
• "African Signs and Spirit Writing", Callaloo, 1996; reprinted in African American Literary Theory: A Reader, 2000, and The Black Studies Reader, 2004
• "'Apple Pie with Oreo Crust': Fran Ross’s Recipe for an Idiosyncratic American Novel",MELUS Journal, 2002

• "'Artistic Expression was Flowing Everywhere': Alison Mills and Ntozake Shange, Black Bohemian Feminists in the 1970s", Meridians, 2004

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harryette_Mullen

Links:

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/237

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/mullen/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harryette_Mullen

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/mullen/mullen.htm

http://www.poemhunter.com/harryette-mullen/

http://www.archive.org/details/Harryette_Mullen_lecture_on_language_June_2002_02P040

 
                                      
Lyn Hejinian

Lyn Hejinian (born May 17, 1941)

Lyn Hejinian was born in the San Francisco Bay Area and lives in Berkeley.  She received her Bachelors degree at Harvard University.  Since then, she has published poetry, essays, and translations (specifically for the Russian poet, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko).  Her most recent works include Slowly (2002), The Beginner (2001), My Life in the Nineties (2002), A Border Comedy (2001), and Happily (2000).  Her most critically acclaimed work is probably My Life (1980), an autobiographical prose poem split into sections, which she continuously works on.  The first version of My Life was published in 1980.  In 1987, Hejinian edited My Life to include 7 more lines in each section and seven more sections to the book.  In 2003, Hejinian published My Life in the Nineties as a continuation of My Life to demonstrate that life is constantly being constructed and composed.  Hejinian is affiliated with a group of writers known as the “New Sentence” or “Language” poets, specifically those located in the Bay Area.  Some of the writers she collaborates with are Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Carla Harryman, Michael Palmer, Bob Perelman, Steve Benson, Rae Armantrout, and Robert Grenier.  She is known to be an advocate of the language poets, helping to circulate, promote, and explain the work of others in the group.  Unlike some of her Language poet counterparts, Hejinian does not like to be called a non-referential writer, as she strongly believes that all words and word-parts are screaming and calling out to its neighboring words, and grabbing referents.  Hejinian has worked with various artists, poets, musicians, and filmmakers in collaborative efforts.  Hejinian believes that through a collaborative effort, they are able to establish the voice of the collaborative person, or collaborating persons which “opens up enormous possibilities for diffusion and multiplicity of points of view.”  Hejinian prefers this to a “romantic, unitary voice.”  She wants to make the reader question: “Just who is the ‘I’ here?”  There is perhaps also a political impulse behind this collaborative effort.  In an interview, Hejinian voices her trouble with nationalistic sentiments emerging around the world.  She says, “One simply doesn’t experience most events with the kind of clarity that most accounts of them imply.”  Rather, she chooses to depict experience as what she terms “person as plural condition,” a collaborative self.         

Figures who have influenced Lyn Hejinian are Gertrude Stein and William James, and she often incorporates philosophical ideology into her poetry.  Hejinian considers herself an "empiricist in the tradition of Gertrude Stein," where she refers to Stein’s interest in science and scientific method and its role in the articulation of experience through language.  Hejinian says, “My work is nearly always concerned with the question, How do you know anything?”  Similar to Stein in Tender Buttons, Hejinian is interested in the experience of the ordinary things around oneself and in social life.  Hejinian seems to experiment with words and their associations, meaning and context, and the translation of experience (as consciousness) into words.  In her poems, she often allows her lines to be in conversation with each other, or on a larger scale, her books seem to converse with each other.     

Hejinian is currently co-editor of Atelos, which publishes cross-genre collaborations between poets and other artists.  She also teaches at UC Berkeley. 

Hejinian on Experience

 
Hejinian believes in the notion of "nonclosure," the ongoingness of writing, thinking, and  living.  Her writing takes on open-endedness by demonstrating that “thoughts are always adjusting themselves, that thinking is always reinventing what’s already been thought.” 

Experience as motion, extending across time, timelessness in experience: "I am attracted to what moves, what comes into view, things have a presence because they occur in and as motion."

Ex. from Happily:

“Whatever I see in thought as life I come to coming to me in history”

Ex. from The Fatalist:

“Constant change figures the waking time we sense / passing on its effect, surpassing things we’ve known/ before making the case that memory of many things / is called experience, and that’s what we call nature without pictures.”

In the story / the cloud trembles like a pudding and grunts like a baby and tries to move / and can’t but in real life the teeth, the arms, the feet linger / in the realm of sensations.  Speed has tint, it tilts, it is admittedly / indistinguishable from the sky but do sensations stop in sleep / and merely remember? Is memory a halt? / Is the dream / not an orifice belonging to sleep?  The sun that lights the obvious / oblivion cannot stop it.  That’s what fate is: whatever’s happened – time regained.”

On Choosing a Form for Expression

Hejinian on the long poem form: “To myself, I created the paragraph as a unit representing a single moment of time, a single moment in the mind, its contents all the thoughts, thought particles, impressions, impulses – all the diverse, particular, and contradictory elements that are included in an active and emotional mind at any given instant.  For the moment, as a writer, the poem is a mind.”

Hejinian on how she uses the fractured style in her long poem: “To prevent the work from disintegrating into its separate parts – scattering sentence-rubble haphazardly on the waste heap – I used various syntactic devices to foreground or create the conjunction between ideas.  Statements become interconnected by being grammatically congruent; unlike things, made alike grammatically, become meaningful in common and jointly.

Ex. from Happily:

“Perhaps there were three things, no one of which made sense of the other two

A sandwich, a wallet, and a giraffe

Logic tends to force similarities but that’s not what we mean by ‘sharing existence.’ 

The matter is incapable of being caused, incapable of not being so, condensed into a cause – a bean, captive forever”

Ex. from The Fatalist

“No cereal manufacturer intentionally includes angels but marshmallow bits may look angelic in a bowl.  Who knows?  A poem full of ruptures could be one from which all kinds of things are flying.”

When constructing lines/sentences, Hejinian also tries to allow each sentence to stand alone. 

From The Fatalist: “To accept one’s fate one has to find each moment sufficient.  Each awful thing / is unique.  Comparisons are impossible”

On the repetition (insistence) of words, nomadic antecedents, images, and lines

Critic commentary on Hejinian’s use of repetition: “where certain phrases recur…recontextualized and with new emphasis, repetition disrupts the initial apparent meaning…The initial reading is adjusted; meaning is set in motion, emended and extended, and the rewriting that repetition becomes postpones completion of the thought indefinitely.”

Hejinian would agree with that interpretation.  She says, “Part of the reading occurs as the recovery of that information (looking behind) and the discovery of newly structured ideas (stepping forward).”

From Happily:

“If I were a fictional character thinking back she might be weeping in a hundred bedrooms tonight wanting to be good long after this depiction of wanting to have been good. 

But what is it that Plotinus says – the ‘good’ will not be something brought in from the outside?

…

Susceptible to happiness I was thinking of nothing

Thinking thing linking that to which thought goes back, the thing arrives”

From The Fatalist:

“Progress has to be made / repeatedly rather than continually.  There can’t be any plot / - it’s impossible to know why / people do the things they do”

Context, context, context

Hejinian on the self and the person and the many uses or non-uses of "I": “self- the permanent unchanging “you”; it’s very hard to locate this kernel essentially.”  Hejinian cares about the person, "which has to do with activities, our daily and nightly being in the world.  The person exists in context – or in an array of contexts enabling and/or requiring us to make choices, act on intentions, make the decisions which move us through life.  To that extent, a person is self-creating, a construct or a construction, while at the same time being that which does the constructing.  Thus an autobiography is always written not by a self but by a person.  So, yes, the book My Life is a written life.  This doesn’t mean it’s untrue or inaccurate, but the end result is as many truths as there are sentences”

From Happily:

“Having awkward heaviness ‘I’ never moves freely about unless passing and happening accompanied

Our pleasure is perplexed beyond that”

From The Fatalist:

“I take my camera out to fences / and shadows for which I don’t have a name and a sweetness / or premise except length and contrast enough to ask / not who I am but where – what / are the places in which whether face down or walking I flourish / or swim (they all so profoundly influence me!)”

LINKS

Links to Excerpts of Poems

Exerpts from My Life:
"As for 'we who love to be astonished'"
"Yet we insist that life is full of happy chance"
"One begins as a student but becomes a friend of clouds"
Excerpt from The Fatalist
Excerpt from Happily
Excerpts from Oxota: A Short Russian Novel
Excerpt from A Border Comedy (Book 1)

Resources:
A bibliographical list of her works and criticisms (a better compilation than I can muster on my own)
Sound Files (a lot of them: poetry readings, lectures, craft talks, on Gertrude Stein)
If sound files do not do it for you,
see her read from her poetry (live!) on YouTube.  Lyn Hejinian reads from The Beginner, The Fatalist, Oxota: A Short Russian Novel, and some work in progress.  
If you are still unsatiated, click here.  Interviews, praise from fellow poets, more links to poem excerpts, Hejinian's essays from The Language of Inquiry (a collection of essays she wrote on poetics), other bits of info on her. 

Hejinian, Lyn.  “The Rejection of Closure.”  Onward: Contemporary Poetry & Poetics.  ed. Peter Baker, 1984.

McCaffery, Larry.  “A Local Strangeness: An Interview with Lyn Hejinian.” Some Other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors.  Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.

Sylvia Plath: The Bell Jar and the Bee-Keeper’s Daughter

“Oh, satisfaction! I don't think I could live without it. It's like water or bread, or something absolutely essential to me. I find myself absolutely fulfilled when I have written a poem, when I'm writing one. Having written one, then you fall away very rapidly from having been a poet to becoming a sort of poet in rest, which isn't the same thing at all. But I think the actual experience of writing a poem is a magnificent one.” – Sylvia Plath, on writing poetry, in 1962.

 With Frieda and Nicholas in 1962

A Bit of Biography

Plath was born to Aurelia Schober Plath (the daughter of Austrian immigrants) and Otto Emil Plath (originally from Grabow, Germany)  on October 27, 1932, in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, a neighborhood of Boston. Twenty-one years his junior, Aurelia met her husband while attending Boston University, where Otto taught courses in German and biology. As would be referenced frequently in his daughter's poetic oeuvre, Otto Plath's specialty was apiology, the study of bees. By most accounts, he was a strict husband and father who was often very demanding in terms of what he saw as proper female behavior, and his death in 1940 from diabetes mellitus would have lasting ramifications on Plath’s later “confessional” poetry, such as “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus.”

Plath was a writer from an early age, composing her first published poem the same year her father died. After graduating from Wellesley High School, where Aurelia had moved her family after Otto’s death, Plath attended Smith College, a private women’s school in Northampton, on a full scholarship in 1950. She was an exceptional student, eventually graduating summa cum laude. However, her undergraduate was haunted by emotional turbulence. In 1953, after spending a month in New York City as guest editor of Mademoiselle, Plath attempted suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills; after awakening, she would undergo electroconvulsive therapy in the attempt to treat her depression. The experience would later provide substance for her sole novel The Bell Jar.

Upon her recovery, Plath received a Fulbright scholarship and traveled to Cambridge in September 1955, where she met poet Ted Hughes at a party soon afterwards. They would marry in the summer of 1956 after an intense, brief fiançailles. In 1957, the couple moved to the United States, where Plath taught briefly at her alma mater. However, after studying with Robert Lowell, who was just beginning to explore the deeply personal vein of poetry that would emerge in Life Studies (1959), Plath decided to abandon a career in academia and become a writer. Writing in would come to be known as the Confessional mode, inaugurated by Lowell and William De Witt Snodgrass, Plath, along with fellow Lowell-acolyte Anne Sexton, would write poems that borrowed heavily from personal experience, creating a veritable mythology of the self. As she would later explain in 1962:

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathise with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is. I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrific, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience, and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and an intelligent mind. I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn't be a kind of shut-box and mirror looking, narcissistic experience. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on.

In 1959, the couple returned to England, and Plath’s first collection The Colossus was published there, while the couple was living in a Devonshire cottage, the following year. Plagued by a feeling of loss and imbued with a smarting intellectual power, these poems—which have been largely overshadowed by the invective bite of Plath’s later work—make for a startling introduction to a wholly unique poetic sensibility and voice. It would be in Devon that Plath would also write her roman à clef The Bell Jar, which would be published under a pseudonym a month before the poet’s death.

After Plath gave birth to the couple’s two children, Frieda in 1960 and Nicholas in 1962, Ted Hughes abandoned his wife for aspiring poet and translator Assia Gutmann Wevill, with whom he had been having an affair since 1961. The following winter, after Plath had relocated along with her children to a London flat, would be a period of exceptional creativity. Working after she had put the children to bed, Plath wrote the poems that would eventually become her most highly regarded collection Ariel. Compared to the densely packed, image-heavy works of The Colossus, the Ariel poems are marked by imagistic clarity, emotional complexity, a greater degree of linguistic innovation, and often-startling use of metaphors and historical allusions, employed deliberately to jar the reader. As she worked to complete and arrange the manuscript of this collection (whose contents Hughes would controversially edit, excise, and rearrange to eliminate the most negative portrayals of the couple’s marriage after his wife’s death), Plath’s emotional and physical state continued to deteriorate. Finally, on February 11, 1963, after putting her children to bed, laying out bread and milk for them, sealing off the kitchen door, and placing her head in her oven, Plath suffocated herself, succumbing to the noxious fumes of domesticity.

For more biographical information, of course you can turn to her Wikipedia entry as well as her page at the Academy of American Poets site, but I would also recommend Steven Axelrod's entry from the Literary Encyclopedia and Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath by Paul Alexander, which is available at the library.

Plath’s Bibliography

Poetry

The Colossus (1960)
Ariel (1965)
Crossing the Water (1971, a Hughes-edited collection of Plath’s “transitional” poems written during the period between The Colossus and Ariel)
Winter Trees (1972)
The Collected Poems (1981, which won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize. Plath was the first poet to receive the award posthumously)
Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement (2004)

Prose

The Bell Jar (1963, published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas)
Letters Home (1975, to and edited by her mother)
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977, a collection of short stories)
The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)
The Magic Mirror (1989, Plath’s Smith College senior thesis)
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000, edited by Karen V. Kukil)

Plath was said to have attempted writing a sequel to The Bell Jar as well as a novel about a dissolving marriage entitled Double Exposure, which went missing under the care of Hughes, who served as his late wife’s literary executor.

Children’s Literature

The Bed Book (1976)
The It-Doesn't-Matter Suit (1996)
Collected Children's Stories (UK, 2001)
Mrs. Cherry's Kitchen (2001)

External Links

Link to a 1962 interview (in which Plath seems terribly charming) with Peter Orr: here.

 
Link to Plath’s 1962 verse play in three parts, “The Three Women,” produced for BBC radio and later included in Winter Trees: here.

 
Link to a (somewhat disturbing) YouTube creation that features Plath reading “Daddy”: here.

 
Link to a YouTube creation that features Plath reading “Ariel”: here.

 
Link to YouTube creation that features Plath reading “Fever 103°”: here.

 
Link to trailer for Sylvia, the 2003 film made about Plath’s life, starring Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath, Daniel Craig as Ted Hughes, and Blythe Danner as Aurelia Plath: here.

A Handful of Poems and a Little Prose

From The Colossus (published 1960):

The Manor Garden

Two Views of a Cadaver Room

The Colossus

The Bee-Keeper's Daughter

Other favorites from this collection: “Hardcastle Crags,” “Frog Autumn,” “The Disquieting Muses,” “Suicide Off Egg Rock,” and “The Thin People.”

From The Bell Jar, Chapter 14 (published 1963):

It was completely dark.

            I felt the darkness, but nothing else, and my head rose, feeling it, like the head of a worm. Someone was moaning. Then a great, hard weight smashed against my cheek like a stone wall and the moaning stopped.

            The silence surged back, smoothing itself as black water smooths to its old surface calm over a dropped stone.

            A cool wind rushed by. I was being transported at enormous speed down a tunnel into the earth. Then the wind stopped. There was a rumbling, as of many voices, protesting and disagreeing in the distance. Then the voices stopped.

            A chisel cracked down on my eye, and a slit of light opened, like a mouth or a wound, till the darkness clamped shut on it again. I tried to roll away from the direction of the light, but hands wrapped round my limbs like mummy hands, and I couldn’t move.

            I began to think I must be in an underground chamber, lit by blinding lights, and that the chamber was full of people who for some reason were holding me down.

            Then the chisel struck again, and the light leapt into my head, and through the thick, warm, furry dark, a voice cried.

            “Mother!”

From Ariel (published 1965, restored edition published 2004):

Morning Song

Lady Lazarus

Ariel

Daddy

Fever 103°

Wintering

Other favorites from this collection: “The Applicant,” “Sheep in Fog,” “Nick and the Candlestick,” “A Birthday Present,” “The Arrival of the Bee Box,” “Balloons,” and “Poppies in July.”

( A Light in the Moon )

( Red Faces )

( Dinner )



A portrait of Stein done by Pablo Picasso

Born in 1844 in Essex, Gerard Manley Hopkins began writing poetry in high school. He converted to Catholicism and decided to become a priest, driving him to light everything he had written beforehand ablaze, as he believed it to interfere with his chosen vocation. He ceased writing until 1875. It was the crash of a German ship that brought Hopkins back to poetic expression seven years later with "The Wreck of the Deutchland." It was at this time he developed his well-known sprung rhythm and his definitive syntax. While writing, Hopkins taught classics at Stonyhurst college, lectured in Latin and Greek in Dublin, acted as a curate in Oxford, and serves as a visiting preacher to Irish immigrants in Liverpool. He writes extensively on faith in his letters, poetry, and prose.

Hopkins’ early experiences with publishing were upsettingThe Deutchland was initially rejected, as was The Loss of the Eurydice. When this happened in 1878, he gave up the idea of publishing, but continued to write and correspond with others about his poetry, most notably Robert Bridges. It was Bridges who eventually arranged the posthumous publication of The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1918, twenty-nine years after Hopkins' passing. He died at the age of fourty-four of complications related to typhoid fever. His final sonnets were composed just two months before his death.

Hopkins is known for the aforementioned sprung rhythm,”which is “structured around feet with a variable number of syllables, generally between one and four syllables per foot, with the stress always falling on the first syllable in a foot” *. Hopkins also often used words out of the modern poet's lexical set, or would enliven common words by pairing them with hyphens. He is well-used in early poetry classes for interesting examples of alliteration, assonance, rhyme, and soundwork. Hopkins was interested in traditional forms of poetry, specifically the sonnet, and wrote a great number of letters to Bridges on poetic form. He invented the form of the curtal sonnet, of which Pied Beauty is an example.


More biography can be found here.

Some poems:

( Pied Beauty )

( ”The )
( “God’s )

( ”Inversnaid” )