I was my daddy’s curly headed child
Although he died I recollect his voice
I threw great tantrums and became real wild

He ignored me till my beauty him beguiled
He loved me  then from will power not choice
I was my daddy’s curly headed child

My mother made me dresses  of quiet style
And I was a success with tiny  boys
I threw fewer tantrums and became less wild

He did not live to walk me down the aisle
I  make him live by singing, what a ploy!
I was my daddy’s curly headed child

Now I must  have come a million miles
Without my daddy whom I loved, annoyed
I throw no tantrum though I miss his smile

I loved Daddy, I believe he died
I have no proof but would Mother tell lies?
I was my daddy’s curly headed child
I threw great tantrums, played with toys and wailed.

As I lie alone in my large bed
Occasionally graced by a big cat
I recall  the habits of the long gone dead

For there is an article I  just read
How  entire families used to lay down and might chat
As I sing along in my large bed

I wonder what my husband would have said
Had I asked the neighbours  to do that
I recall  the habits of the friendly dead

I know my bed is smaller than a shed
The surface seems unsteady and not flat
As I lie and tell the truth in my large bed

I feel ashamed; my  high boned cheeks are red
Is that strange noise a tiger or a rat?
I cry,I’m  missing  all my friends who’re dead

If   our innings comes, we each must bat
For life does not award an aegrotat
As I lie in reverie in my  bed
I  float into a dream  redeeming  dread.

Extract

Twelve years ago, I began work on a long poem about a subject I’d tried dealing with in several novels, my experience while working in a welfare building in San Francisco in 1969. I decided to combine this idea with new material about a pogrom in Poland in which 1,600 Jewish men, women and children were murdered. The many narratives and characters required balancing techniques I’d learned in writing all those failed novels.

Winning the Pulitzer Prize had ended the rivalry, I thought. The poet in me was triumphant. I was never meant to be a novelist. But when I finally finished the book in the spring of 2013, my editor suggested calling this long poem “a novel in verse.” I protested somewhat but finally gave in; both my identities were too exhausted to continue the struggle.

It’s hard not to smile when I hear myself explaining to people that “The Wherewithal” is a poem that uses some novelistic techniques. The novelist seems to be taking all this in his stride. He knows that the poet got the book published and that the lines are broken into stanzas, not paragraphs. He’s even being, well, something of a gentleman about it. Forty-two years is a long time to struggle to do anything. And the poet is more than willing to share credit if credit is due. In fact, we are on our best behaviour. Maybe, after all these years, we’re finally learning to cooperate, or at least live like brothers.

http://hekint.org/sylvia-plath-the-tortured-artist-2/

Extract

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people’s eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.

Here we experience Plath’s love affair with shadow, suggesting yet another dichotomy: shadow and light. The two coexist, although Plath doesn’t allude to shadow’s counterpart; she writes about it as a single entity, existing in the most ordinary things, giving them depth and beauty. In noting the shadow at the “back of people’s eyes and smiles,” Plath seems to underscore the importance of human relationships and subtext—a critical theme in Plath’s poetry and a possible explanation for why she connects so well, so broadly, and so richly to so many people. In isolation, Plath could not achieve this “social nirvana” that not only embraces the shadows that characterize her existence, but elevates them. This duality creates a vivid picture of Plath’s interpretation of happiness: seeing shadows as a thing of beauty, whereas most people perhaps only appreciate the light. This perception of shadow through a different, brighter lens comes from Plath’s ability to connect with the people around her. This is something she achieves intermittently in life, as does her protagonist in The Bell Jar.

The most telling example of this achievement, and one that truly captures Plath’s ability to discern beauty in a dark, troublesome reality, is this line: “I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, ‘This is what it is to be happy.’” There is no equivocating in this simple statement, made during a free-spirited rush down a skiing hill, which ended in a broken leg (Plath broke her leg skiing as a senior in college). First, Plath describes the components of the world: air. Mountains. Trees. People. This evokes a simple scene from Plath’s life but a crucial one: she has managed to escape the claustrophobia of her pressure-filled life through a trip to the mountains, which in some sense capture the same vast, beautiful possibility of the open sea. Here, too, there are people. There must be for Plath to achieve true happiness. The last line confirms it: “This is what it is to be happy.” There is no comparison here, no softening of terms with a simile or metaphor; this is Sylvia Plath’s definition of happiness.

Since the Holocaust very few people if any in Europe can speak Yiddish as they were all killed.I wonder of that is partly why Europe has gone even further down hill

Last year I was a moron at this test
Even though I aimed to do my best
Should I have a brain implant right now?
I’d love to be an imbecile, and how!

I’m stunned  that I write English like a man
Even though my name is Mary Anne
Do they mean homo , or is it vir?
Anyway, I feel a little queer.

I managed to  do mathematics  very well
That I was a moron, none could tell
But should I manage to reinvent a metal wheel
I hope that proves I am an imbecile

I even gave long lectures on Pascal
The heart has got its reason.I can tell
So though on IQ tests my brain is weak
It is from my heart I truly speak

I enchanted men while also gave them pain
For beauty made them blind to my strange brain
As for my heart it’s hidden in my breast
And therefore cannot take an EQ Test

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rondeau_(forme_fixe)

[This is a slightly altered rondeau form]

My heart, my mind, my soul are very sad
Yet summer comes and I must pick the flowers
I gain my comfort from the love we had.
My heart, my mind, my soul are very sad
The price is paid for all that made us glad
The love that seemed eternal was not ours
My heart, my mind, my soul are quietly clad.
Summer comes; I  lie amidst the flowers

In winter darkness, all  the garden’s hid
Tormented by the cold of winter showers.
For our fresh air we make a sudden bid
In winter darkness, all  the garden’s hid
Forgetful of the love making we did
The sullen heart in dying seems to glower
In winter darkness, all  the  world is clad
In ice and snow are hidden what was ours.

Not even a Greek Tragedy but Soap
With music from the Workers Playtime gagged
The Government is ruling us like dopes

The intellectuals eye the scene and mope
Their notebooks plugged, the files then dropped and dragged
Not even a Greek Tragedy but Soap.

For playwrights, there may be an ample scope;
But like the water pipes, they’re  surely lagged.
The Government is ruling us like dopes

They’ll charge the  foolish suicides for rope
Their bodies  to recycle in bin bags
Not even a Greek Tragedy but Soap.

I glare from rooftops with my telescope
Listening to the songs of Billy Bragg
The Government is ruling us like dopes

Well, pass the brandy, light me a new fag
Stand beside the Union Jack and gag.
Not even a Greek Tragedy but Soap
The Government is ruling us like dopes

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/10/why-poetry-misses-the-mark/497504/

” Poetry is linked, in his vision, to the possibility of a total redemption of human society, of the kind Marxism used to call “the revolution.” In particular, his fusion of aesthetic, political, and spiritual messianism brings to mind the work of Walter Benjamin, the 20th-century German Jewish theorist. Lerner’s previous book, the novel 10:04, was saturated in the Benjaminian concept of redemption: the idea that the world as we know it carries within itself the possibility for transformation. Key to this vision is the idea that salvation will come from within, from a rearrangement of the world, rather than through an external power or a god.”

Art by Mike Flemming

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2012/04/the-purpose-of-poetry

” I believe the personal is also political.  I remember a time about 10 years ago when I audited a poetry writing class at the University of Chicago as an “older adult.”  (I was 36, but easily the oldest student in the class!).  When it was my turn to submit a poem to the workshop, I offered a piece about my two kids fighting over a doughnut in the back seat of our mini-van.  I’ll never forget the first comment from one of my classmates:  “Your poem is so real.  It’s really about something.”  He meant the words as a compliment.  Even if my poem was not about anything particularly enormous, it was grounded in everyday reality unlike any of the poems my classmates had offered before me.   And Smith’s memoir Just Kids is artful, I’d argue, because of its personal observations.

I don’t mean to be making any grand distinctions here. But, speaking crudely, I think we are living in an age of artistic abstraction. The purpose of poetry,” Sir Philip Sidney famously pronounced, “is to instruct and to delight.”  The order of those two points seems pointed.  Delight, to him, is a secondary concern.  While Sidney’s epigram might hold just as powerfully today, I don’t think the order of points would remain the same. In contemporary poetry I believe there has been a turn toward abstraction and a turning away (however slight) from poetry of everyday reality and the poetry of social conscience.”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2012/04/the-purpose-of-poetry

https://www.reference.com/art-literature/people-write-poetry-7355b6227245bd3d#

“QUICK ANSWER

Rhymes can be memorized easily, so poetry was originally an oral means of transmitting laws, stories, history and other ideas that cultures wanted to preserve. ”

I went to the doctor.He said I’d pre-flu..
I said, “My dear doctor what shall I do?”
Next time I went, he said “It’s pre- shock.”
And then I had pre measles, pre mumps and pre-pox
I ran to the doctor ,he said ” You’re pre-well”
I said, “Are you sure it’s not just a pre-quel?”
Next time I turned up, he’d gone out for a walk
It’s hard for a doctor who wants to pre-talk.
I went to the optician, who said I’m pre-blind
I thanked him for being so intensely unkind.
I went back to the doctor, and these words I said
“I’m pre -blind, pre-deaf,pre-ill and pre-dead!

The small black cat is sitting on my chair
Two cushions warm with sun provide a nest
Its little face is happy, its plate bare.

This is easier than a love affair
This is sweet , it is a needed rest
The small black cat is sitting on my chair

I don’t think in my grief that I can bear
A man whose love might put me to the test
The cat is happy and its plate is bare.

Could I start again to cook and care
For anyone with hairs upon their chest?
The small black cat is lounging on my chair,

Yet cats can’t run their hands through my fair hair
Nor hold me in their arms when feeling blessed
The cat is happy and its plate quite bare.

And if I mention Wittgenstein’s great flair
That will be the end of the affair
The small black cat is sitting on my chair
Its little face is happy,  why want more?

Why I’m not buying the new ‘learn self-control’ mantra

“But if we take a wider view we see that people exhibit extraordinary self-control in a whole range of ways in many different areas of their lives. It’s just that these different modes of self-control are not equally valued or celebrated by society. And society expects different people to exert different types of self-control. Gender is an obvious example, with women often expected to be particularly self-controlled in how they express their sexuality, how they control their weight, and how they suppress anger and assertiveness. You only need to look at media coverage of the drinking habits of young New Zealanders to see a highly gendered idea of self-control at play. Inevitably the media uses images of rowdy, out of control young women as the symbol of our youths’ “drinking problems”, even though their behaviour is similar to that of young men.

Some people perform jobs that require immense resolve and patience in handling challenging scenarios and pressures. Flight attendants, nurses, teacher aids for kids with behavioral challenges, to name a few. These professions must practice self-control, perseverance, and self-discipline in often testing situations. But they are rarely deemed worthy of an inspirational article about self-control. Watch carefully the work these people do. It’s often a masterclass in self composure and restraint.””

The images we carry in our minds
Created by us in  our early years
To new realities may make us blind

For early happenings get us into a strong bind
Visual, kinesthetic, blend with care
Into the images within our adult minds

Even if our parents appear kind
Some  babies are unhappy with their fare
To new realities, they make us blind

And if I cut my cloth to my design
To change what I take in to vision fair
I fix the image in my  latent mind

But we can change with friendship and sight hind
These ancient pictures into ones with lesser glare
Then to  reality become less blind

From a new perspective, we compare
Our prejudice to what is present here
The images we carry in our minds
To new realities may make us blind

http://www.positivityblog.com/how-to-stop-overthinking/

1. Put things into a wider perspective.

It is very easy to fall into the trap of overthinking minor things in life.

So when you are thinking and thinking about something ask yourself:

Will this matter in 5 years? Or even in 5 weeks?

I have found that widening the perspective by using this simple question can snap me quickly out of overthinking and help me to let that situation go and focus my time and energy on something that actually does matter to me.

2. Set short time-limits for decisions.

https://www.britishcouncil.org/cubed/science-breakthroughs/poetry-brain

A LIFETIME’S WORTH OF QUESTIONS

They also discovered a clear difference in how people responded while reading a favourite passage versus reading any of the other texts, in that it activated a section of the brain associated with recognition and recollection. ‘If you are reading a favourite poem you more or less know it by heart,’ explains Professor Zeman, ‘so you’re not going to need very many cues from what’s written on the page and most of what’s happening is going to come from within.’ There was a strong correlation between emotionality and favourite passages.

There were other more tentative findings that Professor Rylance was curious about. ‘When we compared poetry with prose we got more information in some regions that are linked in a network that is called the Default Network,’ explains Professor Zeman, ‘a network of regions in the brain that is particularly active if you just rest. These areas seem to be associated with things we do with our minds when we are resting, like thinking about what’s happened to us recently, thinking about what’s going to happen in the near future, about other people, and that network seems to be more strongly associated with poetry than with prose. I think to be sure about that finding you would want to do a better-controlled study than ours. It was an interesting indication as far as it went.’

http://www.famousliteraryworks.com/carroll_jabberwocky_funny.htm

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49001/ariel

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/laying-blame-legacy-sylvia-plath

“In Plath’s original version of Ariel, we see the creation of a persona that is at once ferocious, accusatory, and self-negating. The speakers in the poems (they are, of course, multiple) are capable of rendering both stark beauty and also of tossing out ugly racial and ethnic slurs. The voices are sometimes humorous and sly, often utterly unlikeable. Of course, the larger persona of the Ariel poet is an artistic creation, a part of the self and nothing like the self at all. When Ted Hughes altered Plath’s original manuscript, that persona was eroded, and a new figure began to take its place. That figure is not Plath the young poet, a person with an aesthetic and artistic vision that found form in poems, but Plath the suicidal destroyer. Frieda Hughes attempted to go back in time to restore and repair, but like similar efforts by characters in Shakespeare’s late romances, that restoration, though enacted, cannot recover all that has been undone.

It is, these fifty years later, nearly impossible to extract Plath’s poems and fiction from the life she lived, nor can we blot out what we have gleaned from the biographies that have mushroomed up from her grave. Reading and understanding poems is more difficult and requires a greater investment of time and intellectual generosity than does the consumption of a salacious biography. In the class I taught on Plath, my stated goal was to see if we could hold the work at some distance from the biography and see what the poems were made of. I think we succeeded, through care and attention, if only for a short while.”