Poetry Workshops - News

My next Paris Lit Up writing workshop is on Sunday 2 June in the library at Shakespeare and Company when we will be Taking a Word for a Walk. Come and see what you can create from just one word.

On Sunday 7 June I will be leading a workshop at the Reading Poetry Festival in the UK from 10am-12pm at the Museum of English Rural Life.

Ekphrasis with Sylvia Plath

This month's close read takes on Plath's poem The Disquieting Muses*. If you are interested in making art from art, as Plath does here, come to my next Paris Lit Up writing workshop on 7 April at 12h30 in the library at Shakespeare and Company. If you can't wait until then, there is a writing prompt for you to try at the end of this post.

Plath uses the idea of and rewrites the Sleeping Beauty fairytale in this poem addressed to her mother. Instead of asking why the wicked fairy was not invited to her christening she wants to know which family member was not invited and chose to send 'three ladies in her stead/with heads like darning needles'. The second stanza expands this imagery into other children's stories and fairytales with its reference to Hanzel and Gretel, to ask whether her mother's words from these sources dispelled the ladies 'nodding at night around my bed'.

The ladies represent the ultimate childhood nightmare for Plath. As she says idiomatically in the third stanza, they even broke her father's study window panes where a hurricane did not and in the fourth and fifth stanza prevented her from enjoying the delights of childhood like dancing, 'singing the glowworm song' and playing the piano. The nightmare continues into adulthood as the muses are the travelling companions she must face as they 'stand their vigil in gowns of stone/Faces as blank as the day I was born/Their shadows long in the setting sun'.

Plath continues to lay the finger of blame for her state of mind, and here we might read-in some biography and her depressive episodes, on her mother. The repetition of the words mother, mother lays emphasis on this at the opening of the poem, in the final stanza and at several places in between.

The poem ends with a puzzle that she will not betray the company of the muses. What does this mean? That they are far from nightmare and by now familiar comfort, artistic guides even, or that to oppose her mother she must alley herself with what terrifies herself most? Perhaps both. This poem is often read as the young woman wrestling older female figures who are trying to smother her**, but I think this is a simplifcation.

Of course, all of this is without even knowing that Plath had in mind a particular painting, executed during World War I by Italian metaphysical painter Giorgio di Chirico, when she wrote this. Once you see the painting (left), the description of the figures and their precise position around the crib is apparent, and somehow for me less nightmarish. Unfortunately, now you know this, you can never read the poem in isolation, as you are almost bound to want to navigate between the two to see which elements Plath used and which she ignored.

That is an added dimension to the game of ekphrasis and specifically what is crucial for the writer, I now think, is to be skilled enough to make a completely self-contained poem that does not need to be informed by knowledge of its source. Often I find it tedious to have such imposed on me as reader, as it requires work on my part to go elsewhere (and I am inherently lazy), instead of just enjoying the poem, although guilty as charged on previous occasions!

And now for the writing...Find yourself a scary painting. There are plenty to choose from (Bosch, Fuseli, Munch come readily to mind). Use its images as description for something scary from your childhood. It does not have to be a gothic nightmare, just something that frightened you (and perhaps still does). Just remember to cut it loose from its moorings and don't make the piece dependent on knowing the painting, avoid references to the actual artist, although you might want to throw the reader a clue, as Plath does, in the title or in one of the lines. Have fun. Boo!

 * The poem can be found in the Faber Collected Plath (1982) pg. 74
** See Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath (2008) pg.42 and further cites. 

Poetry News - Reading Poetry Festival

My old alma mater is running a Poetry Festival between 5 and 9 June this year at which I will be running a workshop. In advance, there is a special exhibition of poetry books in Reading University library, wherein you will find The Wall Menders - lovely! Go visit if you are in the vicinity.

Mirror Mirror on the Wall

The object speaks in Sylvia Plath’s Mirror[1][2] 

Most readers spend a lot of time stating the obvious about this poem. Yes, it’s about a woman coming to terms with or not coming to terms with the inevitable process of ageing. But we don’t get to that until the last few lines and that wonderfully startling final image of her face rising ‘like a terrible fish’.

For now I am much more interested in who’s doing the talking[3]. The mirror not the woman is the ‘I’ of this poem and that’s interesting. In the first nine lines of this eighteen line poem i.e. half of it (the whole of the first stanza), it explains itself – silver, exact, without preconceptions, truthful – and how it exists ‘Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall’. All of this, even it metaphorically turning into a lake, is before the woman appears. And the mirror carries on talking. Why? Why give voice to an inanimate object?

I suppose much of the answer lies in the project of poetry to say things in interesting, unusual and surprising ways. It would be a dull poem if all it was about was a woman looking in a mirror and saying to herself something like “oh dear I am getting old, as in old trout” (if you’ll pardon the pun and reductio ad absurdum). Plath finds another way of doing this and makes the exchange between woman and mirror something active as the mirror has a voice and personality and knows its importance to the woman, even if it mourns its position of neglect.

Granted it is not the knowing mirror of Snow White, but it does reflect faithfully and does not predict. It is not cruel and has no prejudices. It does not produce flattering light like the lying candle and moon, but it does have a sense of grandeur and power (‘a little god’). Nor is it passive as the exchange involves the mirror actively swallowing and drowning the younger woman and being rewarded by her tears and ‘agitation of hands’.

The technique of voicing allows Plath to think about the mirror-iness of mirrors, to explore what they are in essence, how they function and what they represent in our lives; a kind of meditation if you will. It’s a way of getting below the surface of things and thinking more deeply about them; a self-reflection.

You can try this for yourself and it’s an oft-used workshop exercise. Find an object of significance, it can be anything, and ask yourself what it wants to say, what’s its story, character, attitude, interaction with you? Now give it voice and write in the first person. It sounds bonkers, but actually it’s a lot of fun and if done really well, might even rival Plath’s great poem. Good Luck.

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[1] Written 1961. Published in Crossing the Water, 1971.

[2] As the poem seems to be widely available everywhere on the internet, please search it out or better still buy a book with it in it as the poem itself is not reproduced in this article.

[3] There are lots of different critical approaches one might take with this poem from the feminist to the psycho-analytical, but they are not my focus here.

Paris Lit Up Writing Workshop

A drop-in workshop led by Kate Noakes on the first Sunday of every month at 12h30 - 14h30 in the Library at Shakespeare and Company. It is open to everyone, beginner to prize winner, and is designed to get you writing prose and poetry. Kate provides ideas and writing prompts on a theme each month. It is not a feedback workshop.

The first workshop for 2013 will be on 6 January.

Kate has an MPhil in Creative Writing from the University of Glamorgan, has published three books of poetry and has taught creative writing for Oxford University. She is presently working on a novel.  The workshop cost is 10 Euros. All you need to do is bring is writing equipment and something to lean on.

parislitup.com