Goddess Lit Crit

Goddess Lit Crit

“Critics somehow seem to have ignored
the remarkable fact that, at the peaks and
turning points of American poetry, at least
since the death of Whitman, there has
usually stood a woman.”
—Kenneth Rexroth, Foreword,
The Pillow Book of Carol Tinker

Sylvia Plath was one such woman. She published Ariel at the peak and turning point at a crucial time of American poetry. The new unabridged version of Ariel caught everybody by surprise—transgressing and subverting the Plath canon head over heels. Tongues are still clucking over what this means for lit crit and feminist studies.

But there have been many crucial peaks and turning points in American poetry since Plath. Thanks to Laurie, I have Carol Tinker’s Pillow Book—as well as Four Young Women: Poems by Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn, Alice Karle, Barbara Szerlip and Carol Tinker. Each volume has a Foreword / Introduction by Kenneth Rexroth.

I agree with Rexroth that “at the peaks and turning points of American poetry…there has usually stood a woman.” Not only a Plath or Anne Sexton—but a Tinker, Hagedorn, Karl and Szerlip too. Goddess poetry has come a long way since Rexroth as well as Hughes at Cambridge and Plath with Ariel.

For example, I’ve already mentioned Diane Middlebrook’s “Creative Partnership—The Rabbit Catcher,” The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath, Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, Press, 2007, 254-268. Which is just the tip of the continuing Plath scholarship iceberg—now that the new unabridged version of Ariel, Letters, Journals are finally seeing the light.

Amazing isn’t it—how Ted Hughes’ male chauvinism and a grasping Hughes estate could stifle the Art of Poetry for 50 years? How the publishing and academic "Suicide Cult" version of the first Ariel—tainted the pure blood-jet of Plath’s poetic project for so long? No wonder so many scholars and Feminists felt betrayed—by the Rabbit Killer who became Poet Laureate.

But Hughes had plenty of help; ever read Dido Merwin's trashy rant in the back of Anne Stevenson's Bitter Fame? You know, by now, how much I love down-in-the-gutter bitch fights. Most men do; but they won't admit it. They'll lurk and ogle though; they're weak sisters and closet-cases when it comes to a nice down-and-dirty bitch fight. You should see all the hits I get with StatCounter in Snarke for bitch-fight posts about Dido Merwin's face lift. You go girls!!! Tighten your seatbelts, honey; Dido's dish in the back of Bitter Fame is one intense bitchy hair-yanking screaming get-her-girl bitch fight after another. All because Plath dared criticize Dido's crummy face lift. With a poem entitled "Face Lift." Read it and see. Talk about a couple of vindictive vixens. But then you never hear about the real dirt in poetry and American Lit do you? That's what makes Dido Merwin's bead-reading so shocking and entertaining. It takes a bitch to know one. Dontchaknow?

http://www.snarke.com/2009/04/dishing-dido.html

Versioning Sylvia Plath’s poetry along less closeted lines foreshadowed by her “Lesbos” and “Gigolo”—is not just fertile grounds for astute Academic Archival Research. But it also offers poets the opportunity to “echo” the newly indeterminate Plath and Hughes canons in new interesting ways. Just as Hughes echoed Plath’s “The Rabbit Catcher” in his Birthday Letters (1998). I’ve done the same with my version of “The Rabbit Catcher” here in my literary blog Snarke.

http://www.snarke.com/2009/04/ted-hughes-and-sylvia-plath.html

I’ve also done the same thing with “Nick and the Candlestick”—versioning what Middlebrook says in prose into verse-speak.

http://www.snarke.com/2009/04/nick-hughes.html

Pick up any fairly new anthology—like the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry. The list of post-Plathian women poets is long: Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer, Wanda Coleman, Rae Armantrout, Denise Levertov, Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Diane Wakoski, Kathleen Fraser, Rosmarie Waldrop, Diane Di Prima, Barbara Guest.

Along the lines of contemporary Lesbos Goddess Lit—there’s Adrienne Rich, Maureen Duffy, Judy Grahn, Sharon Barba, Fran Winant, Rita Mae Brown, Ellen Marie Bissert, Alice Bloch, Kath Fraser, Olga Broumas, Paula Jennings, Caroline Gilfillan in The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse—along with me, Denise Kelly, sandwiched in between Sharon Barba and Frank Winant. Lucky me, lucky you.

Does that make me a Feminist Fag—or just a Fag that happens to be Feminist? Yawn. Wake me up, when it's over. I’ll leave that up to Laurie, Desdemona, the Dove and my other fond admirers. I shan’t quibble Plathian Lesbos Lit too much—at least not until I post my own troublesome rapscallion versions of “Lesbos” and “Gigolo.” Plath broke the glass ceiling of American sexual politics back in the Sixties—scandalizing many straight literary American and British critics, embarrassing her husband about the "bad moments," getting into a bitch-fight with Jacqueline Rose in the Times Literary Supplement about her lesbian version of “The Rabbit Catcher” plus other post-structuralist shocking tidbits in The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. Juicy stuff—for literary voyeurs, my dears. Why else are we here?

Poetry is shorthand for me. I summarized Middlebrook with my version of "The Rabbit Catcher." Likewise I shortcut to Middlebrook's version of the Sylvia Plath-Nick Hughes mother-son poem “Jack and the Candlestick” with my own version also here in Snarke. Many versions exist—the BBC version, the Collected Poetry version, the Ariel version—all of them in a state of flux since Plath resisted closure. A very postmodernist stance at the time.

Indeterminacy trumps trash...in the bitchy Plathian universe. Archivists are even resorting to hypertext now to show all the simultaneous versions of Rabbit and Nick that Plath held in her revisionist mind. She hesitates during one of her BBC readings; one can sense her editing stanzas in her mind on tape for the British listening audience. I'll try to post Middlebrook's essay online. She writes so precisely and clearly. I was so pleased she chose "The Rabbit Catcher" to explicate.