Moonlight Musings

Lust and Rage

'What else have I to spur me into song?' asked Yeats. He had a point.

I've been in a writer's block for several weeks – a rare occurrence for me, but even so I couldn't be philosophical about it. I need to be making poems or I get a bit cranky. Usually I can find something to help me get out of it. I've shared some of these tricks with you before. But this time they didn't work. I could still write prose, but for me that doesn't really count.

Those who dip into our Poetry Pantry know that I've recently tried some found poems – 'found micropoetry' to be exact – in the hope that that would get me writing again. It didn't. I enjoyed the exercise, but words of my own still didn't happen.

Then, today in VoW Writers (the 'Village of Women' writers' group which I mentor) Maryanne said she wanted to try and write a song, adding that she was inspired by a Ryan Adams song about his fantasies of Sylvia Plath. She played it for us, and also I Googled the lyrics (they are here). The song hadn't even finished playing before I burst out, 'I hate it! In fact it offends me. It's so not Plath.'

MaryAnne tried to explain it wasn't meant to be about Sylvia, but about the song-writer himself. I expostulated further that even as a fantasy it was a travesty of who and what Plath was, adding that I considered her the greatest poet of the 20th Century.

'I love it when Rosemary expresses an opinion she feels strongly about. She's so clear and definite, you're left in no doubt of her feelings,' Cathy, the social worker who started our Village of Women, said with a laugh (perhaps trying to be diplomatic).

Bronny asked how I knew that the song was 'so not Plath', adding that she herself didn't know anything about Plath, and wasn't taking issue with me: she was just curious. I told them that (a) I'd been a huge Plath fan for decades and (b) there's a lot of material out there in the public record, not only her own poetry but biographies and critical studies.

Then I told Maryanne that despite my forcefully-expressed opinion, she was of course free to write whatever she liked. She suggested the prompt: 'a fantastic idea'. As always, people wrote a variety of responses to this. Maryanne herself wrote something beautiful and soaring, nothing like the Adams song.

I read mine last. It was a piece of rhyming doggerel, three verses long, going on some more about the ridiculousness of even trying to write about or like Plath, who was such a unique genius. (Actually I have written about her in the past, but I took poetic licence to ignore that inconvenient fact.)

No, I'm not going to show you, but I did read it to the group.

'Yay, she's back!' yelled Cathy. And I suddenly realised – my outrage at Ryan Adams had broken my writer's block. I'd been so caught up in the emotion, I hadn't even registered that!

'Now you know what to do,' said Bronny.

I said thank you to Maryanne, and admitted I should probably be thanking Mr Adams too.

Now that I've had the breakthrough, I see that I should have realised. I am always telling students that it's much easier to write from emotions like anger and grief than from happiness and calm.

So I abandoned what I had had in mind for this post and thought I would find a Plath poem to regale you with. Plath, after all, was a master of the fantastic idea. Take for instance Lady Lazarus. (Now, that poem mentions ash, but very, very differently from the kind of ash Ryan Adams ascribes to her in his fantasy.) You could take pretty much any one of her wondrous poems, and encounter fantastic ideas. You can read a lot of them at Poem Hunter if you don't own a copy of Plath.

But when I looked for one to share with you, I found that – beautiful, startling and musical as they are – they are nearly all very bleak. Sylvia was sad, there's no denying it. At present, for half the world winter is coming; there have been shootings, stabbings, and natural and other disasters all over the place; and there was that American election, which will have pleased some to some extent but others not at all. It didn't seem like good timing to share something sad or angry, no matter how extraordinary the writing.

Also, I hate to confess that reading through so much of Plath all at once has changed my perception ... along with the passage of time, I suppose.  Yes, she was incredibly gifted, and we also know she worked tirelessly at her craft – but I'm not so sure after all that she was the greatest poet of the 20th Century.

It's hard to assess any artist during their own time. Even the most  acclaimed don't always maintain their reputations – though of course some do. Maybe she doesn't tower over Yeats and Eliot after all. And maybe all poets are better appreciated in small doses than by a frantic search through their whole oeuvre in a short space of time.

So where does the lust of my heading come in? I suppose Ryan Adams meant his song to be titillating, but I think Yeats had in mind something much fiercer and realer. And yes, we all know that countless poems and songs have been written from that spur. For sure, that too could be a way out of writer's block. But not so much for me any more, as a 79-year-old widow. Yeats said that both lust and rage danced attendance on his old age, but I think he counted himself as aged when he was actually much younger than I am now. For me rage will have to do.

Of course, now that the block has broken, I hope I won't need to keep summoning up anger.

Maryanne suggested that listening to music is a good way into writing, whatever the mood; and I recall that my second husband Bill, a fiction writer, used to find that Dvorak's New World Symphony did the job for him.

[Who is mentoring whom in the Vow Writers group, you might wonder. Yes, often it's my students who teach me.]

Please feel free to share your thoughts.

Material shared in ‘Moonlight Musings’ is presented for study and review. Poems, photos and other writings remain the property of the copyright owners, usually their authors.

This photo of Plath is by Giovanni Giovannetti/Grazia Neri and is now out of copyright and in the Public Domain.