Celebrating Sylvia

This month marks the 47th anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s passing, and my admiration grows more intense by the day—she is my touchstone, my first and last, my desert-island poet. I marvel at what she would’ve written had she lived longer, as each poem grows richer in chronological order.

Below: excerpts from an interview with Peter Orr, recorded in 1962, wherein Plath is wonderfully lucid and charming; candidly speaking about a poet’s life and work, the inextricability of the two. We’re extremely lucky to have access to this recording (and other brilliant videopoems!) here:

I think my poems come immediately out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have—but I must say I cannot sympathize 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 terrifying—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…

…

I feel that this development of recording poems, of speaking poems at readings, of having records of poets, I think this is a wonderful thing. I’m very excited by it. In a sense, there’s a return, isn’t there, to the old role of the poet, which was to speak to a group of people, to come across.

…

Now that I have attained, shall I say, a respectable age, and have had experiences, I feel much more interested in prose, in the novel. I feel that in a novel, for example, you can get in toothbrushes and all the paraphernalia that one finds in daily life, and I find this more difficult in poetry. Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline, you’ve got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space that you’ve just got to burn away all the peripherals.

…

As a poet, one lives a bit on air.

…

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.

further listening

Poppies in October :
Medusa :
Amnesiac :
Ariel :

Tagged as: Amnesiac, Ariel, Medusa, Peter Orr, Poetry and Poetics, Poppies in October, Sylvia Plath