Workshop: Response to Sylvia Plath

Reposted from my old Easyjournal. Assignment for poetry workshop: response to a student presentation, a packet on a particular poet:


I hadn’t read Sylvia Plath since I was in high school, and that was for a creative writing class, and my perception at the time was that I did not like Sylvia Plath. (All right, I liked “Daddy”: “Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I’m through.”) Her persistent Nazi imagery creeped me out, and the teacher gave the impression that it was totally alien to Plath’s ethnicity or upbringing—the Jewish victim was an identity she, a Cambridge-educated WASP, had wholly co-opted. My overall impression was that she was the spoiled priestess of adolescent depression, the ultimate poseur.

This was not a very good English teacher. ( Dying is an art, like everything else )

ETA: See the Sylvia trailer at Trailer Park.