Dr. Heather Clark discusses her new Sylvia Plath biography

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  • เผยแพร่เมื่อ 24 ธ.ค. 2024

ความคิดเห็น • 40

  • @cartermckenzie2535
    @cartermckenzie2535 2 ปีที่แล้ว +2

    Muriel Rukeyser - ‘The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.’ So grateful for the work of Heather Clark.

  • @chopin65
    @chopin65 2 ปีที่แล้ว +8

    Plath was original. That places her accomplishments in the realm of Dickinson, America's greatest poet. Truly, it is a superhuman accomplishment.

    • @brian_nirvana
      @brian_nirvana 2 ปีที่แล้ว +1

      I agree David, Unfortunately, when a great artist dies prematurely, the survivors write the history.

    • @chopin65
      @chopin65 2 ปีที่แล้ว +1

      @@brian_nirvana Perhaps. But that is politics, not poetry.

    • @brian_nirvana
      @brian_nirvana 2 ปีที่แล้ว

      @@chopin65 I think it's akin to any labor, but it's magical.

    • @chopin65
      @chopin65 2 ปีที่แล้ว

      @@brian_nirvana What is magical?

    • @brian_nirvana
      @brian_nirvana 2 ปีที่แล้ว +2

      @@chopin65 great art or poetry for instance is magical. It is transcending. it's enlightening, it's beyond the self. anyway, Plath was the perfect post war anywoman. the artist and the 1960 wife and mother. She is what all women longed to do in the 1950s-60s. Express themselves. And Sylvia did that. If you wanted to show an stranger what the 1960s anywomen thought, you could the 'em to read Plath. And that is trancending enlightening powerful a time capsual, magical.

  • @islesofshoals
    @islesofshoals ปีที่แล้ว

    The Poor, Beautiful, Genius, Brave, Motherly, wounded BIRD. In the end, her babies ... by her ... swaddled in eider down.
    So wonderful you wrote RED COMET. Thank you.

  • @RadhakrishnanCVR
    @RadhakrishnanCVR 9 หลายเดือนก่อน

    Reading the digital edition of the book. Great to listen to this talk in this context.

  • @Times77
    @Times77 ปีที่แล้ว +1

    Dr Clark I Have Just Read Your Mighty Book - Re : Sylvia - It is Magisterial, well researched & surely Definitive -
    A Fabulous Achievement & a Tortuous Tale : IT Dazzled, Informed & SHOOK Me - Thanks For Writing It - A MAJOR & Important Work -

  • @cosilvia7
    @cosilvia7 2 ปีที่แล้ว +2

    What a wonderful conversation! Thanks for bringing it to us!

  • @susancarolalbert6191
    @susancarolalbert6191 2 ปีที่แล้ว +1

    Thanks for such a wonderful presentation and talk, very grateful.

  • @janiemorgan9813
    @janiemorgan9813 3 ปีที่แล้ว +1

    Ah... Thank you, thank you, Dr. Clark! 💞

  • @brian_nirvana
    @brian_nirvana 2 ปีที่แล้ว +5

    great video just got the book.
    here's one I wrote about Sylvia
    15
    Sylvia
    A wooden box, with bird's eye maple stars,
    a grid to fan the flames of the Carib fire,
    to devour the meat of the demur,
    a single skilled translation of her song,
    permits me to recapture the decade
    and send the pyroclastic flow,
    persistent in her poems, to the valley below.
    Her headquarters is the private thoughts
    of a woman, scorned by a copy of Byron-
    dog-eared for the scraps of her misery,
    woven together with native hemp thread.
    We succumb to the Carib Isle,
    where the facemasks of Haitian natives,
    were taken down by bone white men,
    whose search for the original script,
    exists in a fire in the middle,
    she is with folded hands,
    the flesh eater awaits the native linen-
    Oracles have prepared the desert glass,
    and the scarabs begin and the mantra goes:
    If successful,
    we will speed to Sirius!
    All of us will adore paradise!

    • @chopin65
      @chopin65 2 ปีที่แล้ว +3

      This is a beautiful poem! I enjoyed it.

    • @brian_nirvana
      @brian_nirvana 2 ปีที่แล้ว

      @@chopin65 ty :)

    • @brian_nirvana
      @brian_nirvana 2 ปีที่แล้ว

      @@chopin65 her's another one about Sylvia
      Sylvia
      I'm not, said a woman, impossibly perfect;
      the Crowd sense a tune for a female, a woman,
      a brillig firework, this dimple coiled seraphim.
      So long ago, an impossibly perfect woman,
      with potential, had a nervous breakdown.
      Her lovely psychiatrist read sonnets,
      while Iron-Handed Pig Machinery
      insisted she was hysterical,
      and the Peanut-crunching
      Contemporary Critics agreed.
      -long thereafter,
      academies delivered posthumous awards,
      recorded it for posterities sake,
      but for heaven's sake, did not expect it
      to appeal to another Generation.
      That impulsive little blue_flame;
      and her deepest pacifism
      distributed noxious gases,
      engineered the camp's crematorium,
      and the fume hood ventilated her opus.

  • @amyc5913
    @amyc5913 2 ปีที่แล้ว +2

    I'm sure sex and good conversations are very inspiring. I don't know that all too well since I have neither and my writing suffers but someday I'll get where I want to be.

  • @osip7315
    @osip7315 3 ปีที่แล้ว +1

    a doomed star
    the writers lot
    it pays generations later
    the flare as it falls

    • @brian_nirvana
      @brian_nirvana 2 ปีที่แล้ว

      Is it the writers lot to be cursed? possibly but it doesnt have to result in suicide or alcoholism or drug addiction. We all make choices.

  • @cookiestar2702
    @cookiestar2702 2 ปีที่แล้ว +1

    the lip smacking or sucking is terribly annoying.

  • @Juliet_Tobin
    @Juliet_Tobin 2 ปีที่แล้ว

    Geez, this woman has flogged her biography everywhere. I love Plath but this biographer rubs me the wrong way.

  • @johnryskamp7755
    @johnryskamp7755 3 ปีที่แล้ว +1

    Plate must have known my BU professor, Bob Sproat, but there's no documentation of that. Anyway, Bob was instrumental in bringing confessional poetry into academia. He was the fair-haired boy of F.O. Mathhiessen, who wrote the first book on Eliot.
    I saw Plath's address book--it was a brick. She was too ambitious for her own good.
    Too bad she just wasn't that good a poet, and her reputation has collapsed. I wonder how well this biography sold.

    • @brian_nirvana
      @brian_nirvana 2 ปีที่แล้ว +2

      without ambition none of us would get out of bed in the morning.

    • @johnryskamp7755
      @johnryskamp7755 2 ปีที่แล้ว +1

      @@brian_nirvana With too much ambition, and not enough talent, you bounce out of bed right into the oven. This reminds me of another over-ambitious undertalented poet, Anne Sexton. I was going to take her class and needed her to sign my schedule. I waited in her office, and finally asked, "Is she coming in today?" Reply: "She killed herself over the weekend." Warning to the over-ambitious (and undertalented).

    • @brian_nirvana
      @brian_nirvana 2 ปีที่แล้ว

      @@johnryskamp7755 there was this old farmer who was quite reclusive. When he died at 93, the farm was sold by the county. I imagine he awoke each day and wrote. Crafting his sheets of paper into homemade books. His tractor was sold, they sold his chair. But no one even noticed the bookshelf with hundreds of books. They raised the farm house that night, books and all. He was not ambitious enough.

    • @johnryskamp7755
      @johnryskamp7755 2 ปีที่แล้ว

      @@brian_nirvana But I'll bet he was ambitious enough to know it's spelled razed, not raised. Try again, fool.

    • @brian_nirvana
      @brian_nirvana 2 ปีที่แล้ว +1

      @@johnryskamp7755 jeez, why would you call me a fool. I dont even know you.. If I somehow offended you, I am sorry. seriously.

  • @HoratioTalbot771_a
    @HoratioTalbot771_a ปีที่แล้ว +1

    Ted Hughes said everyone hated Sylvia and that she was quite confrontational .

    • @MsBabyChips
      @MsBabyChips ปีที่แล้ว

      I think he meant his sister and Dido Merwin, who had the hots for Ted, and his mistress Assia Wevill. It is hard for me to get a clear picture of her through Ted because he was a cheater and poor Sylvia had to find that out the hard way. Plath seemed to have many friends she wrote to, but I think she must have been intense at times, she was very passionate poet.

    • @HoratioTalbot771_a
      @HoratioTalbot771_a ปีที่แล้ว

      Sylvia was passionate in an odd way . She was looking for better models for her poetry. Anne sexton thrilled her in a way and perhaps she saw Anne as a substitute sister or fascinating muse mother figure. Its hard to know . She was a republican .
      @@MsBabyChips