Writing Prompt: Today's Prompt is inspired by, what would have been, Sylvia Plath's 80th birthday! Read the quote or listen to Sylvia Plath read "A Birthday Present" and respond. What do you think of the quote? The poem? Both?
“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath Reads "A Birthday Present"
Read the excerpt below from Open Culture's tribute to Sylvia Plath on, what would have been, her 80th Birthday:
[Joyce Carol] Oates called Plath 'our acknowledged Queen of Sorrows, the spokeswoman for our most private, most helpless nightmares.' The poem above, “A Birthday Present,” is one of the private and nightmarish poems collected in Ariel. Plath wrote it just over half a century ago as she was contemplating the approach of her 30th birthday, and something darker. The recording is from a BBC broadcast in December of 1962, only two months before Plath’s death. (You can read the text as you listen.) In his 1966 forward to the first U.S. edition of Ariel, the poet Robert Lowell made the following assessment of Plath: 'Suicide, father-hatred, self-loathing–nothing is too much for the macabre gaiety of her control. Yet it is too much; her art’s immortality is life’s disintegration. The surprise, the shimmering, unwrapped birthday present, the transcendence “into the red eye, the cauldron of morning,” and the lover, who are always waiting for her, are Death, her own abrupt and defiant death.'"
Start Scribbling!
Have a Creative Weekend!
Believe In Truth, Beauty, Freedom, Love, and the Power of the Written Word!
No comments:
Post a Comment