Pop Culture Mulcher

Time out for a Serious Post.

This is most of my Sylvia Plath collection, though there are many essays in storage and several more books currently on the way from Amazon. Plath is like a pimple I can’t stop picking at; it’s cliche, it’s irritating, and I can’t just ignore it. I put these on the bottom shelf in a corner because I do not want to be known as That Sad Plath Fan: Jesus Woman, She Wasn’t Even That Good.

Notably, the only works there by Plath herself are Ariel, her opus, and The Bell Jar because it’s semi-autobiographical. The Colossus and Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams aren’t present because I don’t care for them. I didn’t like most of her work, really. Even much of Ariel is mediocre. Where she was most powerful as a writer was when she was collapsing personally like a dying star; the poems from the very end are the very best. Instead, I collect Plath-adjacent writing. I went to the dirtiest bookstore on Earth and had to listen to a guy who wore one inch ear gauges and skinny jeans that gave him man camel toe pontificate on Anne Sexton for half an hour while I dug around stacks until I found Ariel Ascending. Trust me when I say that Ariel Ascending is not worth that, even though it contains Ted Hughes’ most passive aggressive Plath-related bitchery writing ever other than maybe Birthday Letters. I can’t bring myself to buy Letters Home, even though I probably should, because Aurelia Plath was so adamant that Her Sylvia was a Good Girl, and it’s heartbreaking. 

Love him or hate him, it was ultimately Ted Hughes who gave us Sylvia Plath the famous poet (and as her daughter put it in her own angry poem) “suicide doll.” His infidelity was her final undoing (which was bound to happen anyway) and triggered her best writing, his editing polished and sharpened her presentation, and his fame was what got Arielpublished. Plath rode Hughes’ coattails even as a corpse. 

I love-hate Sylvia Plath because she was, by all accounts and even her own (boring as fuck) journals, a very difficult human being. It seems as though her entire life was lived as one giant challenge to humanity: how shitty can I be and still be loved? She was demanding, a perfectionist, dramatic, and prone to hissy fits. She also clearly suffered from bipolar disorder — the world was, by turns, something she held in the palm of her hand and something that crushed her. Everything I read about her makes me feel as though Sylvia managed to (moderately) succeed in spite of herself and her horribleness. Every good move was sabotaged by a horrible one, every opportunity was shit all over with her terrible temperament. Her own grandiose sense of self, the one that propelled her through her fantastic education and many failed publishing attempts, was off-putting.

The ripples she made were confounding. A few good poems and a cheating husband do not a literary giant make. How is it possible to romanticize someone who died with her head in the Totino’s pizza rolls machine?

She did, however, leave us with so many fantastic quotes.