What My Mother Gave Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

therapy, not to be picked apart or— studied . Not to be considered in relation to history or literary convention. Not to be, you know, judged in any way, except by how it made the reader feel . And if the purpose of reading other people’s was to feel what they were feeling when they wrote it, well, I was a little too busy with what I was feeling for that sort of thing.
    At the same time, I didn’t allow the fact of my being poorly read to keep me off the Harvard poetry circuit. I remember arriving late to a reading by Allen Ginsberg, where the only available floor space was next to a man with a long gray ponytail, who, I would learn, was Ginsberg’s lover, Peter Orlovsky. When he began rubbing some strong smelling unguent on his palms, rocking back and forth, and chanting along with the poet, I understood why everyone had given him a wide berth.
    Orlovsky certainly seemed to be feeling what Ginsberg was feeling. He chimed his agreement like a congregation of one, grunting and rocking to the poet’s homoerotic declarations (still just a tiny bit shocking to my twenty-year-old sel f ) and his complaints about convention, while I leaned away from him in extreme discomfort.
    Clearly, I was not bound for disembodied poetics; I was far too uptight to turn on, and too ambitious to drop out. When it came to my own poetic allegiances, Ginsberg (and Orlovsky) could probably have taken one look at me and pegged me exactly. I was adolescent (still), poetic, moody, feminist, and—it went without saying—misunderstood. It was only a matter of time before I fell beneath the sway of a certain strain of lyrical intensity, a white-hot declaration of brilliance and femaleness and power. Th e verse, in other words, was already on the wall.
    In the dollar bin of a Harvard Square bookstore I found a paperback edition of Sylvia Plath’s Letters Home: Correspondence 1950 – 1963 . Th ose letters—I swallowed them whole: the brave soldier in her scholarship-girl dormitory, working far more diligently than I ever had (she would not have had the slightest difficulty in my Freud seminar); the breathless correspondent from the land of WASP affluence (her description of William F. Buckley Jr.’s sister’s coming-out party is an astounding document of the times); the American abroad, voracious for life experiences.
    Th e sheer force of Sylvia Plath overwhelmed me. Just imagining the energy required for her to be good at so many things made me exhausted. Her studiousness, the hours hunched over the thesaurus to produce her poetry, draft after draft of each poem, the magazine articles, the stories, even the letters themselves—often typed and running pages long—not to mention the rumored, unpublished journals. Where did she find the time? Th e energy? I could barely do my schoolwork and dash off a poem now and then.
    Well, that semester I found the energy to read Plath. After the letters, I read her poems. I read her stories in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, and Th e Bell Jar. I read the first—and probably the worst—of the many inadequate biographies to come (Edward Butscher’s Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness ). I began to assemble an idea of Plath, a composite of her art, the memories of others, and the letters, which (in that time before her journals were published) seemed to me the best available insights into her private thoughts.
    I wanted very much to know what those thoughts had been.
    Most likely I already knew that I wasn’t alone in my fixation. I’d caught glimpses of what Anne Sexton famously called “her kind” as I went my poetic way, immersing myself in Plath’s life and work. She was hardly obscure, and I was hardly the only young, sensitive, and, for that matter, angry young woman to fall beneath her spell. And though I loved her, and though my reverence for what she had accomplished was—and indeed remains—well nigh limitless, I had