Alicia, I regularly teach your "Explaining an Affinity for Bats" and Martin Luther/devil triolet in my classes at NSU--I would say that the admiration is mutual, except that it is way lopsided on my end--I think that the Greek muses are still singing through you, though they have forsaken the rest of us! As to the question about Sexton's suicide and her female students, I know that I felt angry and betrayed when she died, as well as grief-stricken. She had already outlived Plath by more than a decade, and I naively believed that the voice of "The Fury of Rain Storms" ("Depression is boring, I think / and I would do better to make / some soup and light up the cave.") would continue to win out over the voice of "Sylvia's Death," in which she expressed envy of Plath's successful suicide. I was wrong, obviously. In my case, as well, I know that I thought of Sexton as a sort of "good mother," in relation to my poetry, because my own mother (while she encouraged me to write fiction) disapproved of my poems. (When I sent my mother a copy of BODY AND SOUL, in 1987, then called her on the phone a week or so later, she did not mention having received it or read it--finally I broke down and asked and she said, "You know, some of those poems are really quite vulgar." Period mark!) So Sexton's death felt like an abandonment in that regard, as well.
Susan, you make a fascinating point about the "psychic striptease" in the works of Millay, Plath, and Sexton. I wonder if sexual orientation might have something to do with it, given that those poets were chiefly heterosexual (though Sexton and Millay did have same-sex flings) and would have been quite used to men's seeing and encountering them as objects and not subjects, particularly in their time periods--while Bishop was gay and would not have had quite the same reactions to "the male gaze." There used to be a story about P. T. Barnum worrying that circus-goers were lingering too long in his crowded sideshow tent, until he hit upon the idea of putting up a sign that said "THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS." I wonder if the "psychic striptease" strategy doesn't work something like that (think of that carnival barker's voice in Plath's "Lady Lazarus"!)--lure the circus-goer's attention by dangling that performative act in front of him, to get him where one really wants him (reading the poem with focused attention, or heading out the door!).
Anne, thank you so much for your enthusiastic words! I suspect that we are two of a kind in being hopeful cynics. I recently found a quote from the painter Francis Bacon which I love and am going to use as the epigraph for my book-in-progress: "I am an optimist, but about nothing."
Susan, you are right on the mark with your observations about meter! When I went back to writing formal verse in the 1980s, I was hearing accentual meters in my head (often a four-beat line), or sometimes even loose triple meters (as in "The Accident," from BODY AND SOUL). The accentual rhythms seemed to go with the wild psychic energy being unleashed in those villanelles. (And the triple meter thing fascinates me in light of Annie Finch's theory that women poets tend to be naturally drawn toward them--which was true in my case.) Particularly when I took up writing sonnets--the more formal, controlled poems of mid-life--I turned to a more regular iambic pentameter line.
|