Week 4

This week we read a biography and selection of poems by Sylvia Plath. We also read the first 15 pages of The Plath Cabinet by Catherine Bowman. We followed up the Plath assignment by writing a poem that began with one of the three 1st lines from the readings and the Bowman assignment by annotating one of the poems then writing a poem in the same style. In class we watched some video about the life of Sylvia Plath, discussed the importance of 1st lines, and did a brain storming exercise with small random items from every day life.

The Sylvia Plath poems were, to me, the best poems we've read so far for this class. They were bold, honest, and full of raw emotion. More than that though Plath seems to have a mastery of creating vivid images with only a few words. She is inspired. Her biography was shocking and sad, a bit like her poems. After understanding the pace at which she was writing in her final year, it seems as if she were tapped into a higher stream of consciousness, possessed by language. I found it extremely difficult to write a poem using the first line of a Plath poem. I felt pressure to create something as good as what came before, it seemed pathetic to do less. Annotating the Bowman poem was enjoyable enough, although it is difficult to find meaning sometimes in a collection of independent phrases on the same topic, pulled together to create a poem. Here I struggled too to write a poem in the same style. It felt like plagiarism this time. The poem was so specific and simple that I felt I had no choice but to follow the original very closely.

I am learning quite a bit about the artistic process when writing poetry. I began the class by just sitting down and writing a poem, line by line, pulled directly from my head. I did not jot down words or images that associated with the main theme of what I was trying to write, I just went for it. Writing in that manner I often found myself wandering from my theme and not knowing how to get back to where I wanted the poem to be. To write the last homework assignment I sat down and made word lists from a theme, using the annotated poem we were imitating for style. Doing this it was much easier to stick to my theme as my ideas were already clear there in front of me. Like everything else in life successful poetry seems to need structure going in, a well laid plan.