37. Sappho der 60er Jahre

Mit Sylvia Plath hatten wir eine 60er-Jahre-Sappho, die gerade vom Lefkadischen Felsen gesprungen war, schreibt Erica Jong in der Sunday ´s Book Review der New York Times vom 12.12.

IN The New Yorker of Aug. 3, 1963, a remarkable sequence of poems appeared, by a dead poet whose name was not yet familiar but whose voice sounded like no other. Under these poems was the attribution: Sylvia Plath (1932-1963). Since Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker carried no contributors‘ notes, readers had no idea who wrote these astonishing poems; but the ominous double dates confirmed that she had gone like Alcestis to the land of the dead.

The sequence began with “Two Campers in Cloud Country“ and ended with “The Moon and the Yew Tree“:

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God. . . .
I simply cannot see where there is to get to

…

WE can see in this new edition what a careful constructor of poems Plath was. She weighed her commas and semicolons. She cared about what Denise Levertov and Allen Ginsberg used to call “breath units.“ She must have read her poems aloud to hear them in the air.

It is touching that they were mostly written at four in the morning — “that still, blue, almost eternal hour before cockcrow, before the baby’s cry, before the glassy music of the milkman, settling his bottles,“ as Plath put it for the BBC two months before she died for a program that was never broadcast. “If they have anything else in common, perhaps it is that they are written for the ear, not the eye: They are poems written out loud.“ I adopted this habit too, when my daughter was an infant. I love that sky blue-pink hour, do my best writing then and read what I’m writing aloud to myself, especially poetry.

So “Ariel: The Restored Edition“ is illuminating. I only wish Frieda Hughes and HarperCollins had included a recording of Plath’s last reading for the BBC, in 1962.

/ ERICA JONG, NYT *) 12.12. 2004

ARIEL: The Restored Edition, HarperCollins, $24.95

Featured Author*) Sylvia Plath (enthält Besprechungen und Artikel 1966 – 1998 sowie 3 Tonaufnahmen der Autorin)