Tarot With Sylvia Plath

I saw a curious note online this month that a lot of about 50 items connected to poet Sylvia Plath brought in more than $1 million in London, according to auction house Sotheby’s. 

Some of the items up for sale included Sylvia's and her husband Ted Hughes’ gold wedding bands, which went for nearly $38,000. There were more than a dozen love letters from Plath to Hughes dating from early in their marriage. There was a family photo album. 

People also bid on some odd things like a set of family recipes and a rolling pin, two serving trays and a drinking cup. Those sold for a collective $43,130.

I thought the whole thing sounded rather offensive. Who had this stuff? It turns out the items were sold by Frieda Hughes, the daughter of Plath and Hughes.

I know that Sylvia Plath has an almost cultish following, so I understand the interest, but what do people do with these things?

Plath's writing is dark and often depicts mental illness and issues with the men in her life (fathers and husbands). Her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, and poems lead readers to assume they know about her inner life.

Sylvia was born in 1932 in Boston but spent much of her life in England after moving there in 1955 to attend the University of Cambridge as a Fulbright Scholar. She met poet Ted Hughes there and was married just four months later. Hughes began an affair with a family friend and the couple separated in 1962 and just seven months later, Sylvia committed suicide in the home she shared with her two children in London. 

She wrote most of the work that would make her famous in the short time between her separation from Ted and her suicide at age 30. Much of that writing was published posthumously. Ariel, her collection of poems dealing with mental illness, is the best known of her poetry. 

A more understandable item for the devotee might be a deck of French Tarot cards that belonged to Plath. That was the most expensive at $206,886. Ted introduced Sylvia to the occult and gave her the cards for her 24th birthday. The tarot did have an impact on her work. One example is her 1960 poem "The Hanging Man." 

I imagine someone with those cards tapping the deck, asking a question (to Sylvia?) and making a spread on the table and trying to feel a connection with her. 

      

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Prompt: The Moon

Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madman. - Allen Ginsberg

Fly me to the Moon,
let me play among the stars
 Let me see what spring is like

on Jupiter and Mars   
- Bart Howard

Waxing Crescent Moon

Earth's Moon is 225,745 miles away, yet we have always felt very close to it. The earliest poetry used the Moon for inspiration and its attractions has never waned.

Have you heard the phrase "waxing poetic?" As with the Moon, when we "wax" we grow, become, get, or turn. In the Moon phases, between new and full a progressively larger part of the Moon's visible surface is illuminated and it appears to increase (wax) in size.

"Waning" is the opposite - that decreasing after a full moon. We have created a number of names for these waxing and waning phases: a waxing or waning Gibbous moon when more than half of the moon is illuminated, and a waxing or waning Crescent Moon when less than half is illuminated.

Those phases of the Moon are often compared to phases and cycles of people, both mental and physical. The constant of the Moon is that it is inconstant.

O, swear not by the moon

that inconstant Moon

that monthly changes in her circled orb

lest thy love prove likewise variable.
 - Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare

The new Moon, when the Moon is essentially hidden, is also known as the Dark Moon. In the Druidic calendar, the night of the Full Moon is considered a time of rejoicing, and the night of the New Moon is a solemn occasion, calling for vigils and meditation. To the Druids, the new moon represents total feminine energy and an absence of masculine energy.

Everyone is a moon and has a dark side
which he never shows to anybody.  -  Mark Twain Pudd'nhead Wilson

Moon lore comes in many forms. There are the beliefs/superstitions, such as thinking that good luck will come your way if you first see the New Moon outside and over your right shoulder. To see the crescent Moon over the right shoulder was considered lucky, but seeing it over the left shoulder was unlucky.

To get rid of warts, take a slice of apple and while looking at the New Moon, rub the flesh of the apple against the wart and say: "What I see is growing, What I rub is going."  Bury the piece of apple. As it rots, the wart will disappear.

The moon for all her light and grace
has never learned to know her place.  - Robert Frost

The Moon lent its name to other names. In medieval Europe and England, “Moon’s men” were thieves and highwaymen who plied their trade by night. The more current term, “moonlighting,” is similar, originally meaning to hold down an additional night job.

And we have given the Full Moons many names. This month the Full Moon is on May 18 and it can be called the Flower Moon, Corn Planting Moon, Grass Moon, Milk Moon, Planting Moon, the Medieval Hare Moon, Buddha Full Moon , Moon When Frogs Return and many other names based on cultures and geography.

Most people know that it was once believed that the Moon (especially  Full Moon) could cause madness. In German, mondsüchtig, which can be translated as "lunatic," is literally “addicted to the moon.”

There is no shortage of Moon poems. Some are traditional in their approach.

To the Moon by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth, —
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?

But some poems use the Moon in other ways.

“The Moon and the Yew Tree” by Sylvia Plath is one of a group of poems that was published in The New Yorker in August 1963, six months after her death.

The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.

If the moon smiles, she would resemble you. 

You leave the same impression 

of something beautiful, but annihilating.
-  Sylvia Plath, "The Rival"

Folklore about the Moon is interesting, but so are facts about the Moon. The footprints left by the Apollo astronauts will not erode as they would on Earth since there is no wind or water on the Moon and should last at least 10 million years. If you weigh 140 pounds on earth, you would weigh 23.240 lbs on the moon.The moon is 225,745 miles from earth.

Our prompt this month - as the May Full Moon approaches this weekend - is to write a poem about the Moon, but try to use it in a new way.

Submission Deadline: May 31, 2019

The Moon lives in the lining of your skin.  - Pablo Neruda

Writers as Diarists and the Diamonds of the Dustheap

Do you keep a diary or journal? Many writers do.

People seem to use the terms "diary" and journal" interchangeably, but I have always thought of them as different forms. I think of a diary as something done daily and more likely to record events of the day. I myself started writing one when I was in high school and I did try to write every day for awhile. Over the years (I have 12 bound blank-book volumes) it has become more periodic - weekly or even monthly summaries of what has happened in my life and thoughts about those events.

The Brain Pickings blog posted recently about famous writers on keeping a diary and it got me thinking about this practice which I have done for almost fifty years.

Sylvia Plath started writing in a diary at age eleven. Her ten volumes were posthumously edited and published as The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath and she saw her diary as a tool to “warm up” her formal writing.

“You want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you,” Madeleine L’Engle counseled in her advice to aspiring writers.

W.H. Auden once described his journal as “a discipline for [his] laziness and lack of observation.”

Virginia Woolf says in A Writer’s Diary that the value of journaling is in granting us unfiltered access to the rough gems of our own minds, ordinarily dismissed by the self-censorship of “formal” writing. Although she thinks that "The habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles." I appreciate that she also notes that "this diary writing does not count as writing, since I have just re-read my year’s diary and am much struck by the rapid haphazard gallop at which it swings along, sometimes indeed jerking almost intolerably over the cobbles."

I think that some writers take their diary too seriously. The want it to sound polished, as if it will be read by their biographers one day. Reading my journals from high school, I was definitely writing with the idea of a future reader - a wife, my children? I included explanations for things that I didn't need explanations of (though those may come in handy in old age!).

The journals written after I had children became much more personal. they would probably read to others as being written in a a kind of code in parts. No explanations.

Should it be written quickly and without the self-censorship of overthinking? Woolf would probably not like my slower journaling. She says that "if it were not written rather faster than the fastest type-writing, if I stopped and took thought, it would never be written at all; and the advantage of the method is that it sweeps up accidentally several stray matters which I should exclude if I hesitated, but which are the diamonds of the dustheap."

I do scribble the thoughts quickly (and my handwriting suffers). I don't revise. I never use material from my journals for poems or other more formal writing.

Plath's 'Ariel' at 50

Ecstasy (1894), a painting by Władysław Podkowiński, depicting a ride similar to that described in "Ariel"
www.culture.pl, Public Domain


Listening to a recent program from the Poetry Off the Shelf podcast, I am reminded that Ariel, Sylvia Plath's posthumous collection, is 50 years old.

Ariel was the second book of Sylvia Plath's poetry to be published, and was originally published in 1965, two years after her death by suicide.

Plath is credited with being a pioneer of the 20th-century style of writing called confessional poetry. Her poem "Daddy" is one of the best-known examples of this genre.

The poems in the 1965 edition of Ariel are filled with frightening psychic landscapes, and were very different from her first collection, Colossus.

In 1963, Plath's semi-autobiographic novel The Bell Jar was published under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" (and reissued in 1966 under her own name).

In the collection's title poem, a woman is riding her horse in the country at dawn. I recall reading the poem in a college class and the professor telling us that there were three Ariels to consider.

One was Sylvia Plath's own horse, which she loved to ride. Second, was that androgynous sprite from Shakespeare's The Tempest which I had read that same semester and quite loved. The third allusion, if she intended it, was to Jerusalem, which was also called Ariel in the Old Testament.

I don't know that I have even now completely understood her poetic "Ariel."

In the 1965 edition of Ariel, her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, had changed Plath's chosen selection and arrangement by dropping twelve poems and adding twelve others.

He also asked the poet Robert Lowell to write an introduction because Plath cited Lowell's book Life Studies as having had a profound influence over the poetry she was writing at the time.

Another influence was Anne Sexton who was similarly exploring some of the same dark and personal subjects that Plath was using in Ariel.

In 2004 a new edition of Ariel was published which for the first time restored the selection and arrangement of the poems as Plath had left them.

This edition has a foreword by her daughter Frieda Hughes.

Sample several of the poems:
Ariel
Fever 103°
Morning Song

More about Sylvia Plath.

Last Letter to Sylvia Plath From Ted Hughes

Hughes and Plath 1957

"Last Letter" is a previously unknown poem by Ted Hughes, about the night his estranged wife Sylvia Plath killed herself.

Hughes published 88 poems years ago in Birthday Letters, but said that some of the poems were “too personal to publish.”

Last month, Hughes’ papers including letters and unpublished poems were acquired by the British Library.

One poem was “Last Letter” to Sylvia. It deals with the story of her death, including her “Last Letter” to him. That was actually a suicide note that was mailed too early and caused him to go to her. She ended up going through with the suicide later anyway.

"What happened that night, inside your hours
Is as unknown as if it never happened....

And I had started to write when the telephone
Jerked awake, in a jabbering alarm,
Remembering everything. It recovered in my hand.
Then a voice like a selected weapon
Or a measured injection,
Coolly delivered its four words
Deep into my ear: 'Your wife is dead.'"

Hughes was appointed the UK's poet laureate in 1984.

There are a number of articles online about the poems including one from the http://www.newstatesman.com and in this video report you can hear a portion of the poem read.

Parenting: Dark and Warm

After our May prompt mixing the mundane and erotic in a prose poem scared the poetry world into silence, we decided to normalize for June.

With Mother's Day and Father's Day past, the William Stafford poem "With Kit, Age 7, At The Beach" set us thinking about parenting.

That's a big topic and there are so many poems that could go into that anthology. From the poetic children we have poems that are as dark as "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath. There are also the poetic parents writing about their own parenting in poems as warm as "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps" by Galway Kinnell.

We also recommend William Stafford's poems and his many books on writing like Writing the Australian Crawl and You Must Revise Your Life.