Monday, April 6, 2009

Poem of the week

Sylvia Plath reads "Daddy" (written October 12, 1962)



You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time--
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You--

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.


I read this poem for the first time ten years ago during my Abitur English mock exam. I thought, I immediately understood everything and wrote a beautiful 2000something word essay. Today, after reading so much more about Plath, I know, I got only 50% of it, but still, it earned me an A and I fell in love with Sylvia...

Sunday, April 5, 2009

Hide your baseball bats!

Konichiwa Bs!

After these sad news from yesterday, I've got something hilarious for you... and it's soooo damn true... ;)

DSDS Videos: alle Castings, Recalls und Mottoshows bei Clipfish.de

Always yours, A.

Saturday, April 4, 2009

And the nightmare never ends...

Konichiwa Bs!

This is a crazy coincidence... while I spent the last weeks reading about Sylvia Plath and finished her biography just a few hours ago, I totally by accident stumbled upon this tragic headline...

Photobucket

Sylvia with Nicholas in 1962

"Nicholas Hughes, Sylvia Plath’s son commits suicide"

Nicholas Farrar Hughes, the son of the poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, killed himself on March 16 at his home in Alaska, four decades after his mother and father’s lover took their own lives. He was 47.

His sister, Frieda Hughes, announced his death, by hanging, over the weekend. Friends and family said he had long struggled with depression.

Mr. Hughes was a fisheries biologist who studied stream fish and spent much of his time trekking across Alaska on field studies. Shielded from stories about his mother’s suicide until he was a teenager, Mr. Hughes had lived an academic life largely outside the public eye.

source: New York Times

Photobucket
Frieda and Nicholas at the unveiling of the Blue Plaque, Chalcot Square, London on July 28, 2000


Sylvia Plath commited suicide in Feburary 11, 1963, follwed 6 years later by her rival and Hughes' lover Assia Wevill in March 23, 1969, who killed herself in the same way along with her and Hughes' daughter Shura. Hughes died in October 28, 1998 of a heart attack, while undergoing treatment for colon cancer.

On April 3, Linda Gray Sexton, the daughter of the confessional poet Anne Sexton who also killed herself, contributed a very interesting Op-Ed A Tortured Inheritance in the New York Times.

Photobucket
An undated photograph of the teenage Nick


This is sad. I'm not sure, if Hughes' suicide is really a result of his mother's death in 1963, like the The First Post claims in this stupid article Sylvia Plath and the child she killed, but what scares me a lot is the fact that apparently depression runs or can run in the family (in Paul Alexander's "The Rought Magic. A Biography oF Sylvia Plath" it reads that in the Plath family, Sylvia's grandmother, and two aunts suffered from depression) and can become so unbearable that two people in one family can commit suicide to escape it.

It's really strange how some nightmares can become even worse... Let's hope all the best for Frieda's future.

Photobucket
Nicholas with Frieda and their stepmother attending Ted Hughes's funeral in 1998


To learn more about Dr. Nicholas Hughes, vistit the School of Fishieries & Ocean Sciences website.

Always yours, A.