I SURRENDER: a #feralprofessor reading of Plath's "The Night Dances"

LitCafe🔥 #2

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 one’s reality to become richer and more expansive and connective, however excruciating it may be to do so—a 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 Plath’s poems:

“…she brought every piece she worked on to some final form acceptable to her… if she couldn’t 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.”

Just look at that: “temporarily exhausted her ingenuity.” 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. There’s great wisdom in this way of being and making. “Temporarily” implies that there is always, beyond what we can perceive or are currently capable of, more.

You can feel the enormity of this potential—of potential itself—folded 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 opposite— a kind of exponential variousness and depth. Bigness through smallness, grandeur and expanse through humble attentiveness—the bread and butter of poetry.

Here ends my preamble, and we dive in. As I did for the last LitCafe🔥, I’ll 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 don’t have to scroll or click too much. I’ll 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 ——
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 ——
Spots, and a spread of hot petals.

The comets
Have such a space to cross,

Such coldness, forgetfulness.
So your gestures flake off ——

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: “I can’t get over the first two lines, so we very well may die here”

“A smile fell in the grass.” 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 (it’s an anonymous one, so could be anyone’s, may as well be everyone’s).

And what does the smile do? It Falls. Or, rather, it “fell,” with the past tense making it more melancholic and tender. Why should I think of a falling smile as tender? That’s the way my body feels it, in no small part because the word “fell” is rubbing up against the word “smile,” 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 “smile” to “fell,” embodies a little tumble forward in the sound, like one of those Jacob’s ladder toys— which almost creates the experience or sensation of a smile falling. We didn’t know that experience was even possible, and yet now it’s 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, “in the grass”: a humble, plain scene, a lowly place, yet lush and soft. “Grass” may iterate both as individual blades and a collective entity— 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 “home”: 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 it’s 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: “Irretrievable!” The ejaculatory nature of the exclamation point contains both power and vulnerability: there is a strength to the utterance— it’s really on its way somewhere— but it also opens the speaker’s emotional truth up to us, in that the falling of the smile is clearly felt, experienced, as a loss. And yet… there can’t 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 “A smile fell in the grass. / Irretrievable!” 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 I’ll 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. She’s 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 scarcity— you can’t, 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 can’t 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.

Part II: “You glorious little weirdo”