Why I Decided to Write: Puberty, Poetry, and Sylvia Plath

Taking a cue from my dear friend Josh's rumination on what drew him to writing poetry as a teenager, I've been thinking of my own coming to letters in my adolescence. I have to thank my 11th grade English teacher, Bonnie Reid. In her junior American lit class, students were assigned to choose an American poet and do a research project on that poet, including a report on his or her biography, an explication of a major poem, and a creative component--an artistic rendering of a poem, a book of our own creative work inspired by the poem, or, in my case, a food-related project. I wound up stuck (begrudgingly) doing my project on Carl Sandburg, so of course the poem I explicated was "Chicago," the one that begins "Hog butcher of the world." I made sugar cookie pigs iced with pink strawberry frosting. They weren't that cute.

I bet you're thinking that my project on Sandburg made me want to write, that good ol' Midwesterner Carl's work changed my young life. Well, not exactly. The truth is, I wanted to do my project on Sylvia Plath--because of the suicide mythos--but she was snatched up by a girl in my class before I could get my hands on her. I was resentful for a minute, and I decided I'd research Plath, too, so I could grill my classmate when she presented her Plath project.

What I found in my reading is that Plath spoke to me. I felt like the "terrible fish," and though my father and I always have gotten along, I, too, understood on some fundamental level the struggle to love a daddy you wanted to hate. "Dying is an art, like everything else," and Sylvia and I were in cahoots on that topic. I toyed with being stylishly depressed to the point of writing a few too many suicide poems when I was a teenager, probably because I was more inspired by Plath than I should have been.

Regardless of my emotionally over-wrought youth, I'm glad I spent significant time with Plath. In a time when I was sure I'd go to hell because of my sexual identity, when I wasn't sure if my parents would be able to love me anymore because of my recent coming out, when I felt alone in a world of people who would never understand me (show me a 17-year-old who doesn't feel that way), Plath's poetry spoke to me on a very fundamental level. I felt her struggle, because in a lot of ways, it was my struggle, too. I just wanted love, validation, legitimacy for an identity I didn't think then could ever be acceptable. Plath became a kindred spirit for me when no one understood me, and because of the time I spent with her work (I especially loved "Cut"), I decided I'd give poetry a shot, too.

So, I went to college and took a slough of creative writing classes, decided I enjoyed writing, and kept on doing it. That, as they say, was that.

Sure, I wrote before I found Plath--I've kept journals since I was about 12. And I toyed with writing poems the whole time. But Plath gave me a stake in the world of letters; she made me realize poems could be edgy, confessional, personal. She made it okay to be confused and sad, especially sad when I didn't know why I was. Though I'm not as into Plath now (nor am I nearly as emotionally over-wrought, thank God), I'm glad for those confusing, scary teen years and stumbling into Plath, because those experiences helped me stumble into being a writer. A serious writer. At least, that's what I'm trying to be.

So, thanks, Ms. Plath.

Recommended Reading

I know a lot of y'all out there might think that mostly what someone in grad school for literature and writing does all day is read and write. You're probably right in that assumption, though we do more, so much more: teach, grade, chat, argue, daze off into space, whine, whimper, and start all over again. But the majority of my time at least is spent reading and writing, which are good things--my favorite things short of fluttering my social butterfly wings at happy hours around town.

As someone whose business is reading and writing, I feel like I have a certain ethos when it comes to recommending books. I'm pretty well read, at least moreso than you're average 23-year-old yuppie, though I'm not going to touch on the discrepancy between my "deep understanding of people and the world around me" and her fat paychecks. Instead, I'm going to recommend some books for your summer reading pleasure, ones that I've thoroughly enjoyed this semester, I hope, too, that you'll recommend some of your favorites to me.

Novels

Wolf Whistle by Lewis Nordan-- a stunning little novel dealing with racial guilt and "white trash" identity in a community of poor white people in fictional Arrowcatcher, Mississippi, after one of their own murders a fourteen-year-old black boy for allegedly "wolf whistling" at a white woman, a la Emmett Till.

Fun Home by Allison Bechdel--a memoir in the graphic novel form about a young woman who deals with coming out to her family and discovering that the father she never could connect with was secretly gay her entire life. By reliving the past and rummaging through his papers and letters after his untimely and possibly intentional death, Bechdel must deal with her assumptions about her father and her own identity in light of discoveries that draw her closer to him in a lot of ways.

Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison--most of you have read this story of a little girl from Greenville, S.C., who faces physical and sexual abuse, poverty, and every bad thing imaginable to understand who she is and what she will become after being labeled "trash" her whole life. But read it again. God, it's a great book.

Poetry

Time and Materials by Robert Hass-- just won the Pulitzer! It's worth giving a gander to see how Hass's subject matter, which as the title suggest is just about everything, gets woven into a cohesive collection that is smart, political, and thought-provoking for modern readers and poets working to find new things to do in their work. Particularly see "Futures in Lilacs," "The Destruction of Happiness," and "Time and Materials."

The School Among the Ruins by Adrienne Rich--politically motivated, interested in giving voices to those at the margins, and deeply feminist in the ways it uses text on the page (no phallogocentrism here!), this collection is worth a look for the title poem and the prose poems/mini essays in the second section called "USonian Journals" for the ways they help you get clear understanding of Rich's political and poetic project.

The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson--Now, I've disagreed with one of my dearest grad school friends about Anne Carson. He thinks she's gimmicky, and I think she's poignantly insightful. You be the judge with this collection, which she calls "a fictional essay in 29 tangos" in which each movement is prefaced and inspired by excerpts from Keats exploring the idea that beauty is truth. The story/poetry collection deals with the rise and fall of a marriage, and it's oh-so-wonderful. But, then, now I'm just leading you towards by opinion.

Drama (because who ever thinks to read plays in her free time?)

August: Osage County by Tracy Letts--READ THIS PLAY! SEE IT IF YOU GET THE CHANCE! 2008 Pulitzer Prize winning drama about a family of three daughters who must return to their childhood home in Oklahoma to help care for their mother after their poet-professor father commits suicide and the abuse, violence, and perverted family history that surfaces.

Angels in America by Tony Kushner--both parts, "Millennium Approaches" and "Perestroika," though "MA" is the best. Hands down one of the best plays written in the 20th century, Kushner's drama deals with AIDS, sexual identity, Reaganomics, friendship, love, and crisis utilizing the most intelligent, humorous characters I've come across in nearly any work in any literary genre. If you don't like this play, you have no soul nor personality. (Again, leading your interpretation).

A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams--It's just one of those lightbulb texts, one of those things I've read and the lights went on and I realized, "yes, this is why I am an English major!" Blache duBois is unbeatable, and you never know if you love or hate that over-grown boy Stanley, this classic play is definitely worth a read or re-read this summer. Then watch the 1950s film version. Marlon Brando's Stanley will make you tingle in all the right places.

Okay, there are my selections. Now, if you'd be so kind, share with me some of your recent favorites so I can add them to my summer list. And then we can discuss!

Millennium Reproaches: On Alien Abudction, National Tragedy, and Why I Should Have Been a Teenager in the Mid-Nineties

I like to pretend how much more exciting and dangerously self-destructive my life would be had I been a young adult in the mid-nineties. I fantasize about how after I'd graduated from high school in '96, I'd have dropped out of college to follow the Lilith Faire tour around the country, wound up working in a vegan bakery in Portland after that was over, spending my free time writing and sipping mushroom tea in the rain. I'd have had a string of male and female lovers, a failed engagement, and a sleeve of tattoos covering my left arm. Oh, how interesting I'd be--maybe even interesting or at least fucked up enough to be on The Real World. But, then, if I'd only been 18 in '96, I'd have still been too young for the first few seasons of the show, back when it was much more interesting that it was the few years pre- and post-millennium.

So maybe I should have been an 18-year-old in '92, in which cases I'd have worn my hair long and greasy, sported flannel and combat boots, and probably died in a mosh pit at a Pearl Jam concert in Milwaukee.

I think my quibble with coming of age when I did has less to do with nostalgia for the grunge era and more with the intensively anxious cultural climate of the late 90s and early 00s that have henceforth irrevocably altered my perceptions of the world. I spent my first few teenage years afraid for my life in the late 90s. The last two years of the 20th century were particularly anxious for a teenager, especially a gay one--what with the Matthew Shepard murder in 1998, then the spree of school shootings: Jonesboro, Arkansas (just an hour from where I grew up), Columbine in '99, and all the copy cats.

Dear God, then there was Y2K, which happened my first year of high school. I remember my English teacher, Mrs. Scott, gravely telling us goodbye at Christmas break, a bit teary-eyed (either out of fear or relief) because she really thought the world was going to explode after the ball dropped in Times Square that New Year's Eve. Everyone did. Mrs. Scott even made us write Letters to the Future, which she placed in a Tupperware bowl "time capsule" and buried in the school yard for the aliens to discover later. And I won't even touch on the cultural fear of alien abduction in the late 90s except to say this: I blame The X-Files for many a night's sleep interrupted by dreams of little green men poking, prodding, and implanting computer chips in my body.

After the turn of the century, when we all realized Y2K was a Y2joke, my coming of age was punctuated by tragedies on the national scale: 9/11 in '01, the war in Iraq in '03, and Hurricane Katrina in '05. I remember feeling like I'd never be so scared in my life again on September 11th, 2001, when I was junior in high school with big plans to work on the Homecoming float after school. But then Bush declared war on Iraq the year I graduated from high school, and I got nervous about going away to college, afraid something awful would happen and I'd never see my family again. Then Katrina when I was a junior in college, whose affects on me I've already discussed on this blog.

Please don't misconstrue my rumination for woe-is-me-ism. I don't want pity. I don't think my generation is the only one to have been socialized in an age of anxiety. Hell, compared to youth in other countries in the latter part of the 20th century, we had it made: no genocides, ethnic cleansing, civil wars. I had a happy, safe, productive youth. Still, though, I think all the cultural fear I grew up in has made me less of a risk taker than I'd like to be. When you live in a time when at any minute everything can and will go completely wrong in the world, it's sometimes hard (for me at least) to justify bumming around the West Coast or taking a year to find myself through writing and recreational drug use after college because I know what's at stake if I don't do something with my life now. So, it's a good thing I'm as motivated as I am, though, to be perfectly honest, I have no clue what I'll be doing after my MA program is over next year. Hopefully, Moulder and Sculley won't have to investigate my sudden disappearance.

Academic Man(nequin) on the Move

In true Timothy fashion, when I'm swamped with work, I keep finding more and more excuses not to do it (resulting in less and less time to actually do it). This week's no different. I'm taking off tomorrow to give a paper at the 2nd Annual Graduate Conference on Drama at UCA Thursday and Friday. That's right, adoring fans in the Central Arkansas area. I'll be in your neck of the woods for a little over 24 hours at the end of the week. Come watch as I attempt to dazzle the crowd with my feminist interpretation of the witches in Macbeth, wherein I even create my own word/concept: "witchspace." My idea is that since Shakespeare always locates the witches outside and in groups in his play, there is something to their marginalized, uncontainable (and uncontrollable) identities that allows them a social arena to 1.) trick Macbeth into pursuing his own selfish desires for kingship, 2.) thereby unleashing chaos on the patriarchal state. With relish.

Now, I'm not a Renaissance scholar, nor do I know a whole lot about the history of witchcraft in Jacobean England. But I do know a thing or two about powerful women, and these Weird Sisters have got some crazy subversive tricks up their sleeves. C'mon: they deal in the body parts of dead foreigners, non-Christians, and, my absolute favorite, murdered babies "ditch delivered by a drab."

drab: noun. slang for prostitute in Early Modern England

I might wear my black graduation robe, smear green makeup on my face, and dance around menacingly singing "double, double, toil and trouble" midway through the presentation. That way I can pass myself off as a crazy or an academic. They seem to be one in the same, don't they?

Wish me luck!

Summering: A Manifesto

After a week of gray skies and constant rain, the clouds rolled back and the waters parted today in Knoxville, and I was bitten by the summer bug. I tried to stave her off for most of the afternoon so I could get some work done on the papers, presentations, and poetry collections I have coming due, but my defenses were depleted by 5 o'clock, at which point I went on a mini shopping spree for summer clothes (gotta love 40% off sales at Old Navy) and spent an hour or so on the wonderful nature trail behind my apartment complex. It was warm but not hot, sunny but not scorching, a bit warmer than spring--a taste of summer. Now I've got full-blown summer syndrome, and I question how I'll make it through four more weeks of school. Maybe making a manifesto well help.

Therefore, let it be known, that from May to August in the year of our Lord 2008, I will live in moderate excess, a condition of my own creating, and experience to its fullest summer as a young adult in a bona fide college town with wonderful friends to share my experiences with.

I plan to drink a little too much wine, sing a little too loudly and more-than-off key to pop rock songs on front porches with disillusioned young adults as we discuss or experiences teaching disillusioned teenagers. I will take a few too many pictures and stay out a little too late a few too many nights and love every minute of it.

I will keep track of my summer by making lots of mix c.d.'s, and then I'll give my mix c.d.'s to friends who will have shared the summer with me so they can always have the memories of long nights and hot days.

I will read, read like it's going out of style. Everything I can: my dear friend Carlini and I will have an MA reading list read off and get together every week to talk about what we've learned, and I'll read all the books on my shelf that I've bought and haven't had a chance to get through yet. Toni Morrison, you're oeuvre I will consume. Then I'll read things again, just so I can check on my fictional friends and see how they are doing.

I will write, so much my hand aches from scribbling and my wrists will burn from the vast amount of lines I'll type up and send out and be okay with their rejection when I start getting the slips. I'll write about everything--write outside my normal genre. I'll write the next great American novel, or at least I'll give myself permission to if I want to. And if I don't, at least I'll know I could have.

I will dance a little too close with, gaze a little too long at, cling a little too passionately to all the ones dear to me. I will shower the people I love with love.

I will be silly and let myself fall for a summer romance, if the opportunity so presents itself, and we will ride bicycles and have picnics at dusk.

I will camp and swim and hike and go days without showering because I'll want the dirt-musk smells to linger, for the memories to linger.

I will not take myself so seriously, and I'll play and love and be young and interesting.

Who's with me?