The Dying Will Be Episodic

Though I'm still busy with my third of four Bishop papers, the class moved on to Plath today. My prof was noticeably less confident, less possessed of the thousands of biographical and critical details she threw around with Moore and Bishop. And after a half hour gloss lecture on Confessionalism (during which she mistakenly placed with Sexton and Plath in Lowell's BU class Snodgrass instead of Starbuck--I may not know much literary theory or history but I know my drinkers and old Snodgrass was never with them at the Ritz bar after class), we began with a poem that I'm pretty sure she misread. I'm not a Plath fan and it's been many years since I've read her seriously, but I'm fairly confident that the poem was about the agony of wanting and waiting for the writing to come. The prof sent the class off on tangents about erotic love and God and some other junk about Poe and Stevens. But I'd bet a body part (one of mine, even) that Plath was really talking about the terror over not knowing where the next poem will come from and of having to stay open in the face of that terror, to flay yourself open and ready for some external detail that will strike hard enough for something to melt inside and throb toward articulation. Hearing the class and the prof talk about this particular poem, I couldn't help feeling desperate and angry (though anger isn't fair, I suppose). They seem to have no idea of how a writer writes, of what a writer must feel to get anywhere. And so they want to slap on Plath's background of madness. There's nothing mad in this poem; it's just how a poet feels all the fucking time. It's just that painful.