These first two weeks I wanted to look at arguably the two most famous female names associated with confessional poetry. Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton are each known for their documented mental health struggles and their poetic work that encompasses this. Too often, this overlap of the poetry and introspection is written off as an indulgence, yet it is the poems’ honesty and firm grounding in the personal lives of the poet that creates such a powerful impact on the reader. Each poem of the confessional genre plays to something deep in the heart of human consciousness – the allure of voyeurism – of looking into someone else’s life with nothing left out.
When that life incorporates a very real sense of mental illness the reader is granted a inimitable perspective from the sufferer – no medical jargon or case studies, leaflet facts or trite assumptions – but the very real anguish, described with the fullness and uniqueness that is afforded by poetry.
For this reason, my research began with Sylvia Plath, my first contact with mental health on the page. Like every other teenager, I read The Bell Jar and had that teenage awakening of ‘I am. I am. I am.’ It was the poetry that spoke to me more though. Reading the Ariel collection, listening to Plath perform ‘Daddy’ in her heavy, emotional tone, bridging the gap between our connections – Plath, daughter of German immigrants; me, granddaughter of the same. And each struggling – figuring out the world in these connections and their weight in the world.
There is a wealth of works on Plath that focus on her mental health struggles and suicide with a degree of assumed possession that speaks very little to understanding. Many biographers have taken ownership of her struggle from an outsider’s view and spoken over her own words – The Bell Jar, and published poetry. Their background is not without interest, but my focus for research this week was her poetry, and her own words.
I chose Ariel as the main collection of interest due to its acknowledgement as some of her finest work, a unique voice that embraced and considered death with wry humour and telling strength. For my research I also looked into her two other published collections, The Colossus and the posthumous Crossing the Water. Each were invaluable in understanding Plath’s voice and the story of herself she wove throughout her poetry.
Some of Plath’s most celebrated works deal with death as a uniquely approachable yet distant eventuality. I wanted to consider this in my own poetry. My objective for my poetry this week was held in the idea of producing my struggle in my words, but with a mind to the strength and vitality of Plath’s work. To do this I tried to analyse for myself the most important aspects of Plath’s poetry, to my own mind.
My objective notes therefore looked like this:
Write…
Poems that are visceral, from the gut. Hurt and honesty. Assonance, attention to the sound of the poem itself. Conversational yet distant – from the self? Or distant from the reader? Life and physical reality. Contained yet fierce expression. The physicality of mental illness, self-harming, self-destructive behaviours. The idea of familial impact and relationships – drawn from accurate reasoning or depressive thinking? Ideas surrounding suicide, the urge of emptiness.
Well, writing the objective was easier than writing the poetry. My experiences with mental health are… y’know, mine. Writing and sharing it makes it yours. I think Plath might have had the same struggle, trying to distance herself from the strength of the emotions she was able to utilise – most interviews were staunchly concerned with ‘the speaker’ rather than herself as the writer.
My writing contains much people might not consider about me. I’ve hidden plenty and learned just how unhelpful that is. The look on a parent’s face when they realise a struggle they haven’t seen for months is maybe too much for a poem. Some works do not deal with pleasant memories, but they are very much real, and part of my history.
I think what this week has made me realise most is that mental health isn’t something you walk away from and forget. Plath’s mental health loomed large throughout her life and shaped her poetries with an understanding of life borne from death, and her inability to condone herself to any one explanation of her thoughts. Plath’s work is multi-faceted and evolving because she understood the potential of change; the quickly-shifting whims of life and death and health and sicknesses. What the world sometimes forgets is that before Plath died, she lived – as best she could, and formed her struggle into art that spoke beyond her life.
For these reasons the five poems I have drafted discuss suicide, self-harm and the innate physicality of life with depression – the drag and the weight, as well as the emotional anguish of drifting from your idea of self.
The poems ‘Learning to swim’, ‘Dismantling’, ‘Hymn sheet’, ‘McPhee folk’ and ‘Speeding’ go today to my supervisor, Dr Ian Blyth (hi Ian!), along with this blog, for week 1 of the scholarship. I don’t think I realised just how tough this would be, or how draining, but I am relishing the challenge and looking forward to researching Anne Sexton next week.