I have a great and immediate fondness for Sylvia Plath, who sort of gets snowed under by her biography. There is a lot more to poems than their biographical contexts, which is kind of the point of writing in the first place. Writing is a way to allow oneâs reality to become richer and more expansive and connective, however excruciating it may be to do soâa way to make more of what often feels impossible. To go beyond the impossible.
The blurb by Ted Hughes on the back of my Collected Poems illuminates for me a bit more of why I feel moved enough to have to make cocoa on a 75-degree day to cope with the fullness of the experience in Plathâs poems:
ââŠshe brought every piece she worked on to some final form acceptable to her⊠if she couldnât get a table out of the material, she was quite happy to get a chair, or even a toy. The end product for her was not so much a successful poem, as something that had temporarily exhausted her ingenuity.â
Just look at that: âtemporarily exhausted her ingenuity.â Inside that one word, temporarily, is embedded an entire point of view, a way of being and seeing that is so powerful because it recognizes the primacy of motion, of how every moment is different from the one before it, yet also allows for the realness of what we find and can keep with us for a while along the way, despite ourselves and our collections being subject, as all things, to this continuous process of change. Thereâs great wisdom in this way of being and making. âTemporarilyâ implies that there is always, beyond what we can perceive or are currently capable of, more.
You can feel the enormity of this potentialâof potential itselfâfolded into her odd, lithe, coiled poems, which in a given moment could take flight in any direction, or all directions. They have almost radioactive specificity, and yet they use that very feature, of their intense particularity, not to fashion a fixed identity, but to create or allow its exact oppositeâ a kind of exponential variousness and depth. Bigness through smallness, grandeur and expanse through humble attentivenessâthe bread and butter of poetry.
Here ends my preamble, and we dive in. As I did for the last LitCafeđ„, Iâll include the full poem below, and here in link form, and then I will try to provide small chunks as I go so that you donât have to scroll or click too much. Iâll also record myself reading this so that if, like mine, most of your reading can only occur in audio format while you race through chores or sit in traffic, you have the option to choose my slight lisp, stutters, and coughs over the creepy AI voice offered by the platform.
The Night Dances
A smile fell in the grass.
Irretrievable!
And how will your night dances
Lose themselves. In mathematics?
Such pure leaps and spirals ââ
Surely they travel
The world forever, I shall not entirely
Sit emptied of beauties, the gift
Of your small breath, the drenched grass
Smell of your sleeps, lilies, lilies.
Their flesh bears no relation.
Cold folds of ego, the calla,
And the tiger, embellishing itself ââ
Spots, and a spread of hot petals.
The comets
Have such a space to cross,
Such coldness, forgetfulness.
So your gestures flake off ââ
Warm and human, then their pink light
Bleeding and peeling
Through the black amnesias of heaven.
Why am I given
These lamps, these planets
Falling like blessings, like flakes
Six sided, white
On my eyes, my lips, my hair
Touching and melting.
Nowhere.
Part I: âI canât get over the first two lines, so we very well may die hereâ
âA smile fell in the grass.â I am a puddle already. She begins with a smile! And its sweetness is both localized (we necessarily see the image, receive the image, as coming from a single face) and universal (itâs an anonymous one, so could be anyoneâs, may as well be everyoneâs).
And what does the smile do? It Falls. Or, rather, it âfell,â with the past tense making it more melancholic and tender. Why should I think of a falling smile as tender? Thatâs the way my body feels it, in no small part because the word âfellâ is rubbing up against the word âsmile,â as a kind of sound-cousin. There is a familiarity, a touchingness, between these two words. The close-quarters, quick, back-to-back slant-rhyme, moving from âsmileâ to âfell,â embodies a little tumble forward in the sound, like one of those Jacobâs ladder toysâ which almost creates the experience or sensation of a smile falling. We didnât know that experience was even possible, and yet now itâs in our jaws, our mouths, our throats. (Poets enter your body without a warrant, or a key, and leave no trace of break-in. )
The smile falls, of course, âin the grassâ: a humble, plain scene, a lowly place, yet lush and soft. âGrassâ may iterate both as individual blades and a collective entityâ there she goes again, the small and the big all in one. By choosing a medium that is both individual and collective, upon which for her smile to fall, she is doing some piece of the work of giving us all our more expansive, complex, permissive âhomeâ: one that invites/allows us both inside our individual, discrete body-blades and inside our collective swath of greening existence.
The fact that the smile falls feels both sad and lovely to me: the smiler is necessarily parting with the smile in some form as it falls onto the grass, but in that falling, in any falling, there is also a form of release or relinquishment, and a something-else receiving what has been let go. I think itâs worth saying that it matters less which state is more desirable (having the smile or letting it fall upon the grass) and matters more that both are possible: the contrast between the two states is what makes each come into being. So really, I feel neither gain nor loss, but a fullness of being in the fallen smile.
At which point Plath makes a curiously abrupt assertion: âIrretrievable!â The ejaculatory nature of the exclamation point contains both power and vulnerability: there is a strength to the utteranceâ itâs really on its way somewhereâ but it also opens the speakerâs emotional truth up to us, in that the falling of the smile is clearly felt, experienced, as a loss. And yet⊠there canât help but be something energizing, vivifying, about the exclamation point; an exclamation point can never be home to just dismay, because its very volume is an assertion, a proof, of liveliness, which intercuts dismay and despair, threads through them in a playfully disruptive way.
Speed it all back up, to the natural pace at which we encounter it, and âA smile fell in the grass. / Irretrievable!â feels, as a single gesture or packet of meaning, almost like the work of a comedian: it both delights and bamboozles, and we feel a little tender around the edges, a little implicated in the strange and slightly brooding scene, as we, ourselves, maybe also smile a little.
The last thing Iâll say about these almost torturously rich, though apparently slim and simple opening line is that by the end of the first stanza the poet is already up to her eyeballs in the rapids. Sheâs fully committed now, whether she likes it or not. To assert that something is irretrievable, using a medium intended specifically in order make things retrievable (language), is to evoke the understanding and experience that everything is contained within its opposite. (Gain is present in loss and loss in gain; scarcity in plenty and plenty in scarcityâ you canât, for example see a kernel of corn without feeling the shadow of the cob, nor the empty cob without feeling its former kernels called forth, etc.) This coincidence-of-opposites point of view is a stance from which one does not recover, since it canât be un-seen, un-felt, or un-known once revealed.
But the good news, as with all truths, is that although whatever you gain is now also something you must lose, whatever you must part with also gifts you something new.