Rare nude footage of Sylvia Plath

Daddy oh Daddy, oh

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 gray 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

An engine, an engine

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.

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 gipsy 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 mustache

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.

Sylvania (found poem: I must have written this sometime)

Sylvania

I have dwelled in the land of     don’t want to

Very long, and find now I can trudge sunwards

If I try real hard

(But I must try real hard)

I had the wrong heroes when I was a girl, the Joplin curse,

the Sexton disaster,

and Plath most of all. That Sylvan creature: a spirit that lives in or frequents the woods

and surely, her best bursting blackberrying poems glistened with the slippery reality of nature.

Nature?

Hers?

I always thought in terms of an Autoplatt, an Automat, some autocratic near-Nazi standing at the blackboard with glistening blue eyes. Well, what did she know about his intellect anyway? Only that his foot rotted off, had to be lopped, but it was too late,

Because Autoplatt had decided to die.

To die, to die, to die

Because Plath had decided to die.

Death ripples along, unfortunately, vibrates sympathetically like a guitar string,

While the rest of the family clutches itself and can’t breathe.

No, no, not another suicide, this one I can’t bear,

Not Assia, that bitch, we knew she was evil,

And the villagers never liked her

Surely even the weirdest witch wouldn’t take a toddler with her

What if that girl had grown up? But she didn’t.

Sylvia, she of Sylvania, vain and full of mania

Was called “Sivvy” as a child, and maybe it’s more appropriate,

Since she was something of a sieve: all affection drained away.

Hey, how does this shit happen anyway? Is it a defective switch, some faulty wiring that can be fixed with a drug, a plug, electric slug?

Does it run in the blood, worm through the spiral of DNA, scream through the genes?

The circular path is a dizzy one, and it’s easy to get lost.

And look at the cost.

Sylvia, Sylvania, creature of the night, firefly, Tinkerbell,

Enchanted woodland sprite,

We saw you in your sweaters, all angora, and that lipstick like Lana Turner,

And the cinched-in belt, and the claim of biting Ted’s cheek until it bled

As if to say: Look how sexual I am, look what an animal.

Did she ever really have an orgasm?

When famous, poets take on a robe, become the thing they are painted to be.

Vaunted.

This was just beginning to happen.

But by the time fame came, it was too late, her heart had been removed again

But this time not shoved back in upside-down.

“If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two,” she bragged in her manifesto of paternal hate: as if Ted Hughes had been rammed down her throat, as if she had no choice. She could have picked a faithful, more generous man. Could she? Would she? But she picked another poet. Was she mad, I wonder?

What is crazy? The categories bleed into each other. Plath was this, she was that. Today she’d be bipolar, because it’s the diagnosis du jour. And lithiumed, and Seroquelled, or even Lamotrigened. Purists would say this would kill her art for good.

Better to be walking around, so you can at least feed your kids grilled cheese sandwiches instead of leaving them there like some primitive beast rejecting your young?

Oh no, she had to live on her terms! But what terms? And do you call this living?

Make great art, kill yourself. Make great art, kill yourself. Then study biology and kill yourself, the same fault line cracking through the sweet little boy who knew nothing.

I hate this, I want it gone. I hate life too, I’ve tried to die, but it was sickening, embarrassing, I was no good at it. I have only spurts of joy in living, but I have them. I am happy “in” certain things. Not the rest.

Sylvia wouldn’t have it. All or nothing at all. And chose nothing.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

You have GOT to read this!

Sent to me by Matt Paust, Hemingway of the Henhouse: so I don't have to write anything today!

http://open.salon.com/blog/con_chapman/2012/03/04/the_sylvia_plath_foreclosure_sale