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Elisa Gabbert on Sylvia Plath ("Lady Lazarus")
2.8k Plays11 months ago
What a searching, stimulating conversation this was. Elisa Gabbert joins the podcast to talk about a poem she and I have both long loved, Sylvia Plath's "Lady Lazarus."
Elisa is a poet, critic, and essayist—and the author of several books. Her recent titles include Normal Distance (Soft Skull, 2022), The Unreality of Memory (FSG Originals, 2020), and The Word Pretty (Black Ocean, 2018). She has a new book of essays coming out next year: Any Person Is the Only Self (FSG, 2024). Elisa writes the "On Poetry" column for The New York Times, and she regularly reviews new books of poetry there and elsewhere. You can follow Elisa on Twitter.
Please follow, rate, review, and share the podcast if you like what you hear. And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get occasional updates about the podcast and other news about my work.
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Transcript
Introduction and Poem Context
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and it's my great pleasure today to see on my computer screen my friend, Elisa Gabbard, who is gonna be our guest today. Elisa has chosen a poem that, when she chose this poem, I was like, oh man, are you sure? Are we ready for this? It's a poem that I'm sure many of you
00:00:27
Speaker
know already and have your feelings about. The poem is Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath.
00:00:35
Speaker
And I should say just before we get into this conversation for people who don't know the poem at all or don't know much of anything about Sylvia Plath, I just wanted to give a bit of a content warning here that the poem will raise issues like suicide and self-harm and includes some violent imagery drawn
00:01:05
Speaker
I'm thinking from the legacy of World War II, so just want people to be aware of that before we dive into the conversation. Let me tell you more about our guest.
Elisa Gabbard's Background and Writing
00:01:20
Speaker
Elisa Gabbard is the author of six collections of poetry, essays, and criticism, with a seventh coming out soon. Let me tell you about a couple of the recent books. So her most recent book is a book of poems called Normal Distance, which was published by Soft Skull in 2022. Before that, Elisa's book, The Unreality of Memory and Other Essays,
00:01:48
Speaker
came out from FSG Originals in Atlantic UK in 2020 when it seemed, I think to many readers, like an uncanny publication to have appearing in the early days of the pandemic. Because in sort of uncanny ways, many of the essays addressed the experience we were all collectively having.
00:02:08
Speaker
And then a book that I'm particularly fond of preceded that. Another collection of essays called The Word Pretty. I almost said the world's pretty, but The Word Pretty, which came out from Black Ocean in 2018. I remember reading
00:02:24
Speaker
that book, hiding it in my academic regalia and reading it during a commencement ceremony at my university and being so charmed by it and transported by it and stimulated by it. And at that point, I didn't know Elisa as anyone, but
00:02:44
Speaker
and author on the page. She writes the On Poetry column for the New York Times where you may have seen her work and her work has also appeared in places like Harper's, The New Yorker, The Believer, New York Times Magazine, and Book Review, the New York Review of Books, London Review of Books. I could keep listing these places. She's amazingly productive and
00:03:05
Speaker
and just a wonderful critic and essayist and poet. Her next book, which is a collection of nonfiction called Any Person is the Only Self, is due out in 2024 from FSG. So as I was thinking about having this conversation, I was trying to put into some kind of words what it is that I admire so much about Elisa as a writer.
00:03:31
Speaker
And I think she's a writer who's interested in things. She's curious about things. She's interested in the phenomena and the epiphenomena of ordinary lives, and of extraordinary lives too, but what it's like.
00:03:49
Speaker
to be alive and what it's like to think about being alive. She's interested in making familiar things strange, as in an essay from The Word Pretty in which it's an essay about crying. And she writes the following very simple sentence in that essay, I've never seen most people I know cry.
00:04:13
Speaker
I read that sentence, and I was like, how has no one ever said this before? It's such a profound observation. As soon as she says it, you think, well, that's true. It's so strange and wonderful.
Gabbard's Reflections on Poetry and Plath
00:04:25
Speaker
By the end of that essay, that interest of hers bends around into these kinds of detached and revelatory self
00:04:36
Speaker
appraisals, she notes that a good way to stop crying is to look in the mirror, which means, if that's true for you as it is for her and as I think is for me, I mean, this is after she's written about the kind of narcissism that we probably all have indulged in at some moment in our lives when, while crying, we look in the mirror to see what we look like. That tends to stop us now.
00:05:06
Speaker
Which means that we know not how we look while we're crying, but how we look just after we've been crying.
00:05:14
Speaker
And I think I take that as a kind of emblematic moment of curiosity about the just afters of intense experience. And it's brought to poems too in Alyssa's writing. So, you know, some of you may know her as the author of a marvelous sort of recurring feature, which I hope never ends, a kind of year end appraisal of the poetry that Alyssa has read that year, which always contains surprises. She does the hard work of
00:05:44
Speaker
looking not just to the usual big presses, but to smaller presses, to poets that in many cases I have not heard of before and that I suddenly want to read. Or you may know her as the, I don't know what the right word would be, but the principal author on that beautiful interactive feature that appeared on the New York Times website on W.H. Auden's poem, Musee de Beaux-Arts,
00:06:14
Speaker
And today we'll have that perspective of Alyssa's in real time, and I'm so happy to do it. So Alyssa Gabbard, welcome to Close Readings. How are you feeling today? Oh, well, after that, I feel like
00:06:31
Speaker
I have butterflies. I feel like I can't live up to that wonderful introduction. That was so kind. But I'm really excited, really excited to get to talk to you again.
00:06:46
Speaker
for, I don't know if listeners would care about this trivia, but we met for the first time in real life at Fred Loaf this summer. And for a week we got to chit chat every single night and it was so fun. What a dream. That was great. So yeah, I'm just very happy and grateful to be able to talk to you again and to get to talk about a poem that yeah, that means a lot to me.
00:07:12
Speaker
Me too, I mean, I had no idea what you would choose when we, so we talked about it a little bit this summer when we were getting to chit-chat for a week or so. And, you know, of course, at that point, I knew and had been admiring your work and, you know, the writing you do about, I mean, the Auden thing notwithstanding, the writing that you do about poetry is mostly about contemporary poetry, sort of reviewing new books and that kind of thing.
00:07:38
Speaker
in part, I guess, just because, as I know as well as you do, that's what there is a market for as somebody who produces essays about poetry. People want book reviews. But of course, in this podcast, I sort of say, pick a poem, any poem.
00:07:55
Speaker
That makes it sound like a card trick. And I wasn't sure what you would choose. And, you know, it made sense to me in a way when you chose Plath. I mean, I love Sylvia Plath. This is a poem I care a lot about. And so I'm really happy to get to talk about it.
00:08:13
Speaker
period. But when I say it made sense, it made sense to me sort of getting to know your mind as I have gotten to know it, that this poem would interest you. But I wonder if, maybe just by way of sort of situating things for our listeners, if you could say something about
00:08:33
Speaker
like the place Sylvia Plath holds in your mind. And I don't know why, but with Plath in particular, I find myself wanting to ask, like, do you remember how old you were when you first read a poem by Sylvia Plath? Or do you remember what that first reading experience was like? And if you do, or I guess even if you don't, sort of like, has the place she holds in your mind sort of changed over the years?
00:09:02
Speaker
Yes, I was anticipating this question as a listener of your podcast. And I was thinking, Plath is probably the poet that I have the longest kind of serious relationship with.
00:09:20
Speaker
I do remember when I first read her work and it's like fact checkable because my parents gave me a copy of her collected poems for Christmas one year and they signed it, the inscription with a date and it was, you know, Merry Christmas, Mom and Dad, 1994. And so I would have been 15.
00:09:43
Speaker
And that may not have been the first time I'd ever encountered a Plath poem. I could have easily seen one in one of my English textbooks in high school. I can't think how else I would have run across one because I wouldn't have had the internet yet. Or it would have been very early, very early internet days.
00:10:05
Speaker
And yeah, so I'm not sure... 15 seems like a really poignant and perfect age to encounter this poet. Yeah. Yes. So I was definitely like a budding poet, but what I can't remember is if I had expressed some interest in this book, like have I asked my parents for it or if they just
00:10:27
Speaker
somehow intuited, like, oh, whatever, you know, teenage girl. They like plath, right? But as it happens, like,
00:10:38
Speaker
Because you were already interested in poetry, you said? Yes. Yeah, I was certainly interested in writing poetry. I probably wasn't reading all that much of it, if I'm honest. Surprisingly or not, that is the usual progression of things, I think. Right. But yeah, I do remember trying to dip my toes in the water. I didn't grow up in a town with great
00:11:05
Speaker
bookstores. So, you know, when I went and like browse books, it was like Barnes and Noble. But I do remember finding, you know, the books that you still see in like the Barnes and Noble poetry section. It was like Sylvia Plath. I know I got an Anne Sexton book right around the same time. I'm not sure which came first.
00:11:23
Speaker
I know I had some Bukowski. I was not overly fond of it, but that is what they carried at Barnes and Noble. So what impression did she make on you when you got that book? Do you remember? Yeah, I really remember doing a lot of poking around and just trying, trying to understand it.
00:11:51
Speaker
It was actually a little bit difficult for me. I do remember particular poems that felt like, oh, I have a way in here. I really remember Death and Co. was one of the ones that I felt like I got at that age.
00:12:10
Speaker
But I know that I spent a lot of time with it. And I know there were a lot of poems that I would just kind of skip because they looked really like long and dense, like in plaster or whatever. I was sort of like maybe next year. But I definitely did like a lot of looking at the pages and the titles and like a lot of things about it were just sort of slowly seeping into my consciousness.
00:12:36
Speaker
And the main thing I know is that this copy has moved around with me my entire life. It's the same book. And it's like I've just kept going back to it and getting smarter and wiser over the years and learning the things that I need to understand the poems. And so it keeps opening up to me.
00:13:02
Speaker
And, you know, I remember of course a phase where like, you know, the really kind of famous path poems hit me as like, oh, right, like these are the ones I'm supposed to be reading.
00:13:15
Speaker
including the one we're talking about today. Exactly, exactly. And they certainly made an impression, but I have just felt that like every single time I kind of forget about class, don't think about her very much for a few years, and then come back to her, she's like way better than I remembered. I've never had the experience where I've felt like, oh yeah, that's just something I like to love as a kid. She's kind of a rated. I've never felt like that. I've always felt like richer, better, if anything underrated.
00:13:45
Speaker
Right. Well, part of what I admire about your writing is that you seem open to writing about and discussing the, I don't mean to put Plath in this category necessarily, but like the
00:14:02
Speaker
kind of pleasures of adolescent reading maybe too. So like I know you write somewhere about the catcher in the rye in a way that I found really like charming and like meaningful to me as someone who had a very definite Salinger phase myself. But I think part of what you're saying, and we could like let's set that to one side, part of what you're saying here is that
00:14:22
Speaker
As you revisit Plath, it doesn't seem to you like a kind of adolescent thing that you're returning to. If anything, it seems like you are having a fuller and fuller experience of these poems as you go. Yes, yes. Or also, I'm now older than Plath ever.
00:14:44
Speaker
got to be. And I think as I've aged, I sort of understood the stages of her career in a way that I couldn't possibly have when I first encountered her work. So I remember noticing that there was that juvenile section in the back of her collected poems and being kind of interested in those probably because on some level I was like, that's what I write, juvenile.
00:15:09
Speaker
because I'm a child. That's so funny. Nobody thinks they're writing juvenilea when they're writing juvenilea, but you do. You did. Right. Well, I think maybe I was sort of projecting forward fantasizing like, I wonder if my juvenilea will ever be saved or archived. But yeah, I did have some kind of interaction to those poems because I knew that she wrote them when she was young.
00:15:38
Speaker
Did any of the facts of her biography seem meaningful to you? I mean, because it's a sort of famous life too, you know? Yeah. I didn't know very much about her. Like I don't think that I spent a lot of time at that age reading even just like the sort of front and back matter in that book. I never read any biographies of her at that age. I knew that she had committed suicide because that's very inescapable knowledge.
00:16:06
Speaker
Do you remember if you'd read The Bell Jar, which is her novel for people who don't know it? And it's sort of an autobiographical novel that was published just before she died, pseudonymously, and then in her own name, only posthumously. Yeah, sorry, go on.
00:16:21
Speaker
I definitely got it from the library. Like I had every intention and aspiration to read it. And I had formed like a false memory that I did read it, but I, and then like maybe five, six years ago, I intended to reread it and I realized like, I don't think I ever read this. Like I was either lying to myself, kidding myself, or just wrong. Like I didn't remember anything about it. It was nothing. It was like nothing like what I remembered. And to such a degree, I'm like, there's no way I read this.
00:16:52
Speaker
That's so fascinating. Because I reread Catcher and the Rye recently too, and I remembered everything about that, and nothing about the Bell Jar. So I don't know why I thought that I had read it, but I loved the Bell Jar as an adult. That also was way better than I was expecting it to be.
00:17:09
Speaker
Yeah, let me tell you listeners, if you've avoided it or have just not had the experience, the bell jar holds up. It's so good. It's so good. My line about it, which I truly believe is that it's funny in a way that people don't know. It's so funny. It's so funny. It will make you laugh about that. It's meta-fiction. It's like... It is, yeah.
00:17:30
Speaker
It's not really fair to call it like auto fiction. It's more just like autobiographical kind of romantic clef, but it's totally meta. It's so meta. I feel like it really is kind of
00:17:46
Speaker
a precursor, a predecessor to a lot of the kind of auto-fictiony poets novels that are coming out of the 21st century. Right. This is this whole other subject, but I have this kind of, I mean, but of course I do, so I have to interrogate this, believe it or ask myself whether it's legitimate or it's just because it's what I see and it's like if all you have is a hammer kind of problem or it's like
Plath's Contemporary Relevance and Style
00:18:08
Speaker
an ale. I think like, oh, what auto-fiction is, it is the poets novel or it's like a, it's the lyric novel.
00:18:16
Speaker
But we can talk about that some other time. I have one other sort of context setting question for you, Elisa, which I hadn't actually planned to ask, but as we've been talking, it has occurred to me.
00:18:32
Speaker
which is that you spend so much of your writing life or your work as a practicing literary critic, thinking about contemporary poetry, reading contemporary poetry, reading, as I said, really widely in contemporary poetry. Do you have a feeling about not just what Plath means to you, but of something like what the
00:19:00
Speaker
I mean I don't mean this as a question about like well what has Plath's influence been necessarily because that's um a kind of literary historical question or a biographical question about a whole bunch of other poets but I mean more in a sense of like
00:19:16
Speaker
How contemporary does Plath feel to you as a poet? Is your reading of the landscape of—even you are reading only a sliver of what's out there globally, obviously, but in the poetry that you're most familiar with—
00:19:38
Speaker
Does a Plath-like poetics still feel pretty present to you? And do you mind thinking about that out loud for a minute or two? Yeah, it's present, but it's present but still rare. I think that Plath has such sort of a particular signature, and I think it's probably because it really is just
00:20:04
Speaker
you know, sort of a very finite set of poems that she's most known for. And they tend to be the ones produced at the end of her life, right? Yeah, I mean, I think with good reason because they are just so much more earth-shaking than a lot of her early work. And that kind of platy signature, like,
00:20:32
Speaker
every now and then I'm like, ooh, like this person is like, very consciously, very consciously trying to kind of, you know, wear their plath influence quite openly. And like, that's happened when I've been reading like an A. E. Stallings poem, for example, I just remembered
00:20:53
Speaker
Megan Fernandez has a poem in her most recent book that is like, you know, it's very, very, very plathy. But it was just like that one poem, you know, it's like, somebody like, it's like almost someone has to sit down and consciously contend with the spirit to do it. So I do run across them. Yeah, I just I do see them. But I don't feel like
00:21:18
Speaker
it's pervasive. I don't feel like I'm reading poems all the time that feel like they have that path influence. What about you? I think the examples you've cited resonate with me too.
00:21:41
Speaker
depending on who you're talking to, what it would even mean for something to be plath like, you know, people have different plaths in mind, right? So, you know, one thing people might want to sort of think of her as or the kind of category that they might want to put her in is of the kind of confessional poet.
00:21:59
Speaker
I mean, this gets into the stuff I've written about in my more kind of academic writing. And so that's a kind of a funny category. And I think people sometimes misunderstand what that category is actually designating. I think it's a meaningful category, but it's a misunderstood one in some ways. We should pick this back up because I have like continuously felt like I don't
00:22:26
Speaker
truly understand what the category means. There's very different poets who get shoved into it. For sure. For people who don't know, the first generation of poets that are most typically grouped under that umbrella are people like Robert Lowell and
00:22:49
Speaker
Sylvia Plath and Ansexton and John Berryman. These are poets of slightly different generations. So very famously, Robert Lowell taught a poetry workshop at Boston University. Two of the students in that workshop were Sylvia Plath and Ansexton. So there are all these sort of interesting webs of affiliation. Another poet who's not as well remembered but was crucial to the early days of that movement was W.D. Snodgrass.
00:23:18
Speaker
who had also been Lowell's student, but at the Iowa Writers Workshop at a slightly earlier moment. What do these poets have in common?
00:23:29
Speaker
I think certain things, but they're writing about their lives. That's the easiest thing to say, or the poems seem rooted in autobiography in some way. But actually, I think that the thing that is compelling about the group is that each of the poets differently, I think, has a way of making the autobiography that they're writing seem like it's not an autobiography at all, but like they're writing about someone else.
00:23:59
Speaker
like there's something very estranged about the form of self regard that those confessional poets, those poets that we call confessional. So it doesn't really feel like confession to me. Right, it's like the label is sort of...
00:24:15
Speaker
I mean you see it in a poet like you know Barryman who you know in the dream songs he sort of. He he would always claim it these pumps aren't this isn't me this is Henry and Henry sleeping you know he's dreaming.
00:24:31
Speaker
Plath has her own way of doing that kind of a, like, we'll talk about it in a minute when we, especially when we listen to her voice and so on. So yeah, I mean, I guess what I wanted to know from you before you tricked me into sharing my own thoughts here was when you talk about what like, oh, sometimes I get the Plath signature, you know, I get it for maybe a poem and say, you know, Megan Fernandez's book or something.
00:24:56
Speaker
For people who don't have your ear or know what you mean, what is the plath signature? Maybe that's too hard a question. Oh, wow. No, I like it. That's a very hard question. How would you know? To answer on the spot. Yeah, I know. But it's funny though.
00:25:18
Speaker
It does have to be, it's sort of like diagnosing lupus or whatever. You need like a certain number of symptoms. They all have to learn about the cluster. It can't just be one. If you have five of the following 15 features, you might be a platform. Exactly. So like, I think, you know, just the sort of like formal look and shape of the poem makes a difference. So like, and she wrote in tar sets a lot. So if somebody has, I mean, this poem, like if somebody's writing in tar sets with sort of like,
00:25:46
Speaker
and a regular line length, some short lines, some long lines, that already feels like, all right, okay, that's one. And then, yeah, there's like an intensity and a theatricality.
00:26:02
Speaker
But then there's other things that just, I just always feel like there's a winkiness. There's certain words that feel like plath words, just like very specific plath words. And so it's like if you use the word brute, that's just the first one that comes to mind. But there's other ones, there's other ones.
00:26:22
Speaker
like confetti. I don't know. There's just certain words that I so specifically associate with Plath. If you're doing the other Plath things and then you also use one of those words, I'm like, okay, you're sending me
00:26:37
Speaker
like strong messages.
Analysis of 'Lady Lazarus' Theatrical Elements
00:26:42
Speaker
And yeah, it's like a really like a tendency to make a really strong kind of like I statement, for example, something really kind of now I feel like I'm just talking about Lady Lazarus without talking about Lady Lazarus. Well, we should maybe we should actually talk about Lady Lazarus. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, those are those are some of the things
00:27:03
Speaker
that. That helps and I mean I knew I would get an interesting answer from you and in part because you didn't say like oh if somebody's writing about their their experience of depression or something right that's not oh yeah that wasn't one of the hallmark you know what I mean that's more like all poetry yeah
00:27:20
Speaker
Yeah, I think there is this real sort of like hypercharged intensity, but it can feel so tightly controlled too. Yes. That's sort of gem-like or something. Okay. Control we should come back to because I just think that's one of the most interesting kind of like levers and plots work.
00:27:46
Speaker
Oh, wonderful. Okay, so there's a series of very famous recordings. Well, you'll know why once you hear them. They're kind of hypnotic that Plath made very near the end of her life of Lady Lazarus. We'll listen to that and talk about it. I'll provide a link for people who would like to look at the poem as they listen.
00:28:12
Speaker
You'll notice that in one, I think just in one place, the performance she, the reading she gives here includes a line that isn't in the published poem, so listen for that. Because it's an interest, it's a really interesting moment and a, you know, as the kids say, problematic moment too, maybe. So there's a lot of that, there's a lot of that in Plath.
00:28:40
Speaker
The poem was published posthumously in her book, Ariel, which her estranged husband, Ted Hughes, saw through to publication after she died and then has been reissued by more recently
00:29:02
Speaker
under the supervision of her daughter, Frida Hughes, in a quote-unquote restored edition. So the poems had a really interesting life. But let's listen to Sylvia Plath read and then we'll talk about it. Here she is. Lady Lazarus. I have done it again.
00:29:27
Speaker
One year in every ten I manage it. A sort of walking miracle. My skin bright as a Nazi lampshade. My right foot a paperweight. My face a featureless fine due linen. Peel off the napkin, O my enemy. Do I terrify? Yes, yes, here, Professor, it is I. Can you deny the nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
00:29:53
Speaker
The sour breath will vanish in a day. Soon, soon, the flesh, the grave cave, eight, will be at home on me, and I a smiling woman. I am only thirty, and like the cat, I have nine times to die. This is number three. What a trash to annihilate each decade. What a million filaments.
00:30:16
Speaker
Peanut-crunching crowd shoves in to see them unwrap me hand and foot. The big strip tease. Gentlemen, ladies, these are my hands, my knees. I may be skin and bone. I may be Japanese. Nevertheless, I am the same identical woman. The first time it happened, I was ten. It was an accident.
00:30:40
Speaker
The second time I meant to last it out and not come back at all. I rocked shut to the seashell. They had to call and call and pick the worms off me like sticky pearls. Dying is an art like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I have a call.
00:31:08
Speaker
It's easy enough to do it in a cell. It's easy enough to do it and stay put. It's the theatrical comeback in broad day to the same place, the same face, the same brute, amused shout, a miracle that knocks me out. There is a charge for the eyeing of my scars. There is a charge for the hearing of my heart. It really goes. And there is a charge, a very large charge,
00:31:37
Speaker
for a word or a touch or a bit of blood or a piece of my hair or my clothes. So, so, hair doctor. So, hair enemy. I am your opus. I am your valuable. The pure gold baby that melts to a shriek.
00:31:57
Speaker
I turn and burn. Do not think I underestimate your great concern. Ash, ash, you poke and stir, flesh, bone. There is nothing there, a cake of soap, a wedding ring, a gold filling. Hear God, hear Lucifer, beware, beware. Out of the ash I rise with my red hair, and I eat men like air.
00:32:30
Speaker
The last line always makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Incendiary. Yeah, quite literally. Elisa, so like another version of the what did it feel like to first read Plath? Do you remember what it felt like the first time you heard her voice or what do you find yourself thinking about and experiencing as you listen to a recording of Plath reading the poem?
00:32:59
Speaker
I didn't hear these BBC recordings until I was in my 30s. So I had already had
00:33:12
Speaker
you know, 15, 20 year relationship with Plath that was like in a voice in my head. I don't know where it came from. I guess it was just my, my mental reading voice. Um, I don't know that I like, you know, consciously imagined what she might sound like at all, but I do know that I didn't think she would sound like that. And yeah, I, I heard that these recordings existed. I listened to them and,
00:33:44
Speaker
I mean, it just totally changed my conception of her, I feel. I mean, it's one of those things that just like, oh, there's always like more depth to a person who's sort of like a pop icon. They get very flattened. And yeah, there's so much that's fascinating about it. I mean, of course, like we can't
00:34:07
Speaker
We can't not mention this weird fake Med Atlantic accent she developed to try to fit in when she moved to England. But what's so riveting to me is how in control she is of the theatrical performance.
00:34:36
Speaker
I mean, it just feels like a monologue delivered by a great actress. There's no timidity at all. Yeah. And do you think, that's lovely. I mean, I find that when I've taught Plath, and it's been a little while since I've done so, but when I've taught Plath to students and I played some of these recordings, whether it's of this poem or of Daddy, there's a similar sounding kind of performance.
00:35:05
Speaker
Students are shocked, and many of them don't like it. You know, they find it off-putting or it's not even, you know, even or especially if they liked the poem on the page first. It's not what they expected to hear.
00:35:20
Speaker
And I guess I wanna like press a little bit on, you said, I don't know what I expected, but it wasn't this. And then at the end you said, well, there's no timidity here. Do you think you expected timidity maybe? I mean, even if only erroneously, obviously. Well, I think a lot of past poems, even the aerial poems are,
00:35:47
Speaker
very quiet. And like if you're kind of reading them all together, like I can imagine reading this in sort of a very quiet like, I've done it again one year and every 10 I manage it like sort of a serious voice like that. And it very much changes the poem. But I mean, I think, I think Plath is leaning into something that is really important
00:36:15
Speaker
this poem and daddy to me are basically like sister poems. There are ways that they, like I confuse them sometimes at points. And I actually, I might argue that Plath kind of confused them at points. Like, well, I mean, like, like they both have the word brute, like the whole Nazi lampshade thing. It's like, wait, who's,
00:36:45
Speaker
Who's the figure in this poem? Is it Lazarus or not? And in that recording, she was trying to throw a lot of metaphors, and the poem come with Stan that. I am glad she cut the Japanese line. But both of those poems to me are just at the far, far end of the scale of
00:37:16
Speaker
contemptuous as she allowed her tone to get, but it's very much hidden behind a theatrical persona, I think. There's no way to actually make this or a daddy line up truly with her autobiography. Clearly, she was using real life experience and feelings to feed the poem, but it's this persona that's completely larger than life and over the top.
00:37:46
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I love what you say about how, you know, the poems, the aerial poems can sound, might seem to be kind of quiet or that there is, maybe we could just say it that way, like there is, maybe you did say it this way, there is something quiet about them, even if that's not exactly how she reads them. You know, part of, for me, part of the kind of mythology of these poems
00:38:14
Speaker
She gave, you know, she read the poems for the BBC. She also prepared a sort of like series of introductions for the poems, which I'm sure you know, Alisa, but maybe our listeners don't. And one thing she said about all of the poems, which I can read to you,
00:38:32
Speaker
So about poems that included Lady Lazarus, she said, these new poems of mine have one thing in common. They were all written at about four in the morning. That still blew almost eternal hour before a cock crow, before the babies cry, before the glassy music of the milkman settling his bottles. If they have anything else in common, perhaps it is that they are written for the ear, not the eye. They are poems written out loud.
00:39:00
Speaker
And that 4 a.m. kind of just before... I don't know, like what is implied by 4 a.m.? It's fascinating and it attaches itself to the poems for me. Yeah, somewhere she wrote that she felt like she was writing from a train tunnel or God's intestine.
00:39:26
Speaker
That's amazing, yeah. Yeah. And she was in the middle of this, well, first of all, of a really difficult period of life in that her husband had left, she had these two small children, she was alone and overwhelmed, but also it's this period of remarkable and incandescent kind of productivity and creativity. She's writing
00:39:56
Speaker
all of these poems, I mean, I once like counted it up and it's like she was writing a poem a day, sometimes more than one a day. And they're not, I mean, they're all like, many of them anywhere, these poems that I think will be remembered for as, you know, many, many decades. I don't know what I can say beyond that. So there's something remarkable about the kind of, something sort of heroic about the,
00:40:24
Speaker
the kind of act of creativity, even as in that little image she gives us, it's like very kind of quiet and domestic and modest, you know, so funny kind of paradox in that, I think. Let's talk about the opening of the poem.
00:40:41
Speaker
Yeah. Maybe the first line, even the title in the first line. So the poem, you know, she gives us the, you know, I find that that's an interesting thing, you know, often, maybe not always, some poems do it in more pronounced ways than others. There's a kind of like, you know, to read the first line, you have to read it in relation to the title or something like that. But so if Lady Lazarus and then the first line, one line, a complete sentence, I have done it again.
00:41:06
Speaker
What does that sort of tell you about who's speaking and what kind of speech this is you're hearing like right from the first line? Yeah, again, I'm like trying to go back and try to remember like how I read it as a kid because I don't think I really knew very much about this sort of Lazarus myth.
00:41:35
Speaker
because I wasn't raised, I didn't go to Bible school or whatever. It was just very much sort of, I think I vaguely sort of know what that is. So I definitely had to read this. So for other people who didn't go to Bible school, people, Lazarus, risen from the dead. Good. Right. So yeah, it was one of, I think, Jesus's last miracles, kind of a foreshadowing of his own resurrection, this figure.
00:42:04
Speaker
had been dead, I think, for three days. He goes, rolls the rock off the tomb, pulls him out, unwraps him. So you see that imagery here and the peel off the napkin, which I find that very, like, there's such a cruel irony, like such a mean irony in this poem. But yeah, she's basically like, all right, I'm going to use Lazarus.
00:42:34
Speaker
to say something that I want to say, which is the kind of strange magic of the persona poem, right? You can hide behind a historical figure, or if you're a Louise Glick, maybe a flower.
00:42:53
Speaker
And there's plausible deniability. Nobody can ever quite pinpoint what's the poet and what is the persona or the historical figure or the mythical figure or what have you. Clearly, that's what she's doing. But another thing I want to talk about around beginnings, if you'll allow me to just ramble a little. I love how this poem seems to begin more than once.
00:43:21
Speaker
Have you ever felt like this? There's at least two other parts where it kind of seems to me like, oh, that could easily be the beginning. But the really strong one to me is dying as an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I could easily see that being the beginning of the poem. There's just something so
00:43:43
Speaker
it's the opposite of final, it's anti-final. It's like, this is where we start. And I have done it again, has that feeling too. Yeah, no, that's fascinating. I don't want to interrupt your rambling, but I mean, I have thoughts. Did you have more that you wanted to say about this? No, let's pause before I, like you interrupt me so I don't ramble for 10 minutes. No, I mean, it's good. People don't want to hear from me. They want to hear from you.
00:44:14
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, if the kind of miracle of the poem is the sort of refusal of death, it seems like it would make sense in a way that the
00:44:28
Speaker
that the technique that accomplishes that is this, like a refusal of ending is a kind of constant reprisal of beginning. I like that idea. And I also, I like the idea of
00:44:47
Speaker
You know, it's like repetition is asserted in the first line before we even know what, I mean, except in as much as it's implied by the title, right? If you just had the first line, you wouldn't know what the it was in reference to. And it's not
00:45:09
Speaker
even necessary I mean is the it dying or is the it being reborn or is it like the whole enchilada as it were of like dying and being reborn um so that's interesting to me I I've also I mean you've talked a couple of times and it's laced throughout the poem so it's a it seems like a particularly apt place to do it now I'm rambling for a minute so you please cut me off but um
00:45:37
Speaker
You've talked about the theatricality of the poem, right? And there's something about what constitutes theatricality as such that is sort of dependent on or premised on, replicability. If you think about stage acting in particular, it's like the performance, what makes the performance the performance is that it is
00:46:02
Speaker
It happens again. We're here all week. It happens every night. And it happens every night as though for the first time, that that's kind of the trick of it, which is in a way kind of like a resurrection. These characters in a play or something, they
00:46:23
Speaker
They sort of exist for the duration of the play, and then you might think naively like, well, now they're dead, but you come back the next night and there they are again, back from the dead. There are theories of people who work in the field of performance studies. I'm thinking of a scholar called Richard Schechner.
00:46:45
Speaker
And a teacher of mine, a former teacher of mine, Joe Roach, who introduced me to this idea that what performance means is like never for the first time. Performance is always repetition with a difference. Even if it's opening night, it's as though the thing has been performed before and what you're seeing is a kind of repetition of something that's happened before. And every time it's different. So I've done it again. What it like announces to me is like we're in the realm of performance.
00:47:17
Speaker
That's some of what I'm thinking about there. But then almost immediately, Alisa, we get into this language of the Nazi lampshade and so on.
00:47:29
Speaker
One year and every time I manage it, a sort of walking miracle, my skin bright as a Nazi lampshade, my right foot a paperweight, my face a featureless fine julienne. And I should say that these are some of the lines and gestures that Plath has that make certain readers just like not want to have anything to do with her.
Controversial Imagery in 'Lady Lazarus'
00:47:46
Speaker
And one can understand like why
00:47:49
Speaker
I made the joke earlier about problematic plath, but we should take it seriously. This is some of the hardest stuff in the poem. I don't mean hard in the, what is she talking about, but hard to know how you feel about it. Do you want to talk about these images or this kind of language or what she's doing with it that's interesting to you?
00:48:13
Speaker
I do. So that's another way that this is so similar to Daddy. They are both so over the top in these metaphors that they're reaching for. Because regardless of the persona, the pose, you can't help but think like, oh, the poet is comparing
00:48:39
Speaker
herself to a persecuted Jew in a concentration camp. I should say Plath was not Jewish though. Not Jewish. Yeah. So it's understandable, I think. And this one thing I think is worth pointing out,
00:49:04
Speaker
to just avoid too much presentism. I think today's readers might think, oh, this is so offensive to the contemporary reader. How did she get away with it? I just want to be really clear that this was considered very offensive at the time. These poems were not published until after her death, and they were difficult to
00:49:33
Speaker
have to be published. She wasn't famous yet. Sorry, you were going to say something about that? Oh, no. I was just going to say that.
00:49:42
Speaker
I mean, if anything, you could imagine, well, the Holocaust was a more recent memory in 1962 and 1963, then of course it is even for us. I mean, of course, we've developed different ways of understanding and talking about, you know, the sort of meaning of that historical event, that sort of period in our history and ways of thinking about things like appropriation of
00:50:10
Speaker
sort of identities and identities that have been victimized historically and to do so from the position of whiteness and security and certain kinds of privilege, a word that we'd use that
00:50:32
Speaker
you know, wouldn't have been used in the same way in her time, but nevertheless, like there it is. So she's doing some version of that, right? Like the idea is that she's comparing herself to this sort of, she's occupying this position, even if only theatrically or something.
00:50:47
Speaker
Right. So yeah, that's happening. And readers have always kind of been shocked and appalled by it. So what I think we should resist doing is just sort of saying, oh, this is shocking. This is offensive, as though that's sort of like an end point. I'm much more interested in kind of moving past that. Because I think clearly, even though I do think
00:51:18
Speaker
To some extent, Plath was out of her mind during this period of time. Certainly, there's an argument that her judgment was questionable.
00:51:30
Speaker
Regardless, I think the shock value is intentional. She's trying to shock the reader, and you can hear that in her voice when she reads it. It's a sort of in-your-face kind of performance, right? Right. Yeah. I say this sort of, I think, neutrally and just describing what's happening. Obviously, I like this poem.
00:51:54
Speaker
It's not really a question of whether I approve of that move or would recommend it. I think that she's channeling. She's just channeling rage. These were preoccupations for Plath throughout her life. I know that she wrote in her journals a lot about the atomic bombs, for example.
00:52:24
Speaker
And right or wrong, she just in this moment felt like, oh, these atrocities that have preoccupied me are available to me while I'm writing about sort of my own rage. So I think I'm just
00:52:50
Speaker
I make allowances for being comfortable with being offended and seeing what might come from that aesthetically.
00:53:00
Speaker
I think that's an inviting way to take the poem on, which is not to ignore those things, but maybe to set aside the question of how it makes us feel about the choices made or the person who was Sylvia Plath, but to look at the poem she's made here and to think about what it's doing. I liked what you said about
00:53:26
Speaker
those moments, especially, you know, in a way being put so upfront in the poem at the top of it, are meant to shock a listener. And the poem seems, you know, just sort of looking a little more broadly over its kind of opening movements, I think, you know, again, maybe even before I like, I really liked what you said earlier about how it seems to have a second opening maybe at the dying as an art line. So
00:53:53
Speaker
if we think of the sort of section of the poem between, I have done it again, and up to, but just before dying is an art. So the last line then would be, and pick the worms off me like sticky pearls, the sort of that section of tercets. And again, sorry, I keep digressing, but for people who aren't looking, Alyssa's referred to Plath's sort of tendency to write in tercets. A tercet is just a three line stanza, hers,
00:54:22
Speaker
tend to be pretty short lines and they rhyme often but kind of irregularly and the lengths of the lines are somewhat irregular too. There's other kinds of shock or
00:54:36
Speaker
things that are kind of allied with shock in my mind happening in that opening movement of the poem, like the whole strip tease kind of section of the poem. Gentlemen, ladies, these are my hands by, you know, the big strip tease, she calls it, right? So, you know, talk about, I mean, if the line sort of comparing herself, you know, to a victim of the Holocaust are meant to shock,
00:55:06
Speaker
What impression or what effect do you think the gentlemen ladies, these are my hands, my knees lines are meant to do to the reader? What are those meant to do? Or to the listener? Yeah, I find there to be like a fascinating, just thick, thick irony there.
00:55:34
Speaker
When you think about the Lazarus myth or story or whatever you want to call it,
00:55:44
Speaker
Which, you know, it's funny, I was just flipping like randomly through her journals a couple of days ago. And I swear I just opened to a page where, you know, it was from like the early fifties, but she mentioned Lazarus and she's like, Oh, like, I don't know why that story like holds such fascination for me. So it was another thing that she clearly like thought about a lot in her life. Um,
00:56:10
Speaker
But it's like she's very consciously cheapening this serious biblical figure, making it sound cheap, like a striptease, the circus. Am I imagining that there's popcorn?
00:56:31
Speaker
No, I think there's a peanut crunching crowd. Peanuts. Yes, peanuts. No, I like that because it's a really fine distinction to be making because you could imagine a poem in which the poet is sort of playing at the language of taking her clothes off for you to look at and that doesn't really settle with the tone of that is. I mean, that could be a really like erotically charged and
00:56:58
Speaker
Hot moment it could be you know a kind of deeply erotic kind of moment and here you know the tone of it seems to be to like Tawdry and cheap or something you know sort of intentionally so yeah Which which is nice yeah
00:57:19
Speaker
I don't recall offhand the moment. I don't remember the context, so this may not be right of the moment that you talked about in her journals in which she talks about Lazarus.
00:57:39
Speaker
But I guess it bears saying that Plath had attempted suicide herself at an earlier moment in her life. It's the moment that's fictionalized in the bell jar.
00:57:58
Speaker
And that experience involved her sort of falling asleep and sort of in a
Interweaving Myth and Autobiography in Plath's Work
00:58:08
Speaker
kind of crypt-like space or a tomb-like space and being woken up and, as it were, kind of raised from the dead. I can imagine why in very sort of literal ways the Lazarus myth would have
00:58:20
Speaker
presented itself to her even before this moment, very near the end of her life in the early 60s. Oh, go on, please. Oh, sorry. I was just going to say it. I mean, Elizabeth Hardwick has this great essay about Salute Plath, where she says it's basically impossible not to think about Plath's biography when you're reading her poems, which I find to be true. And it was partly that we just
00:58:50
Speaker
We know a lot about her. But it's just really in there. It's just really interwoven. And so with this poem in particular, it's funny. I'm always kind of trying to map. I think it's impossible. I'm always trying to map the sort of like, I've done it again the first time I was 10 to something and plus real life. What happened when she was 10? Right. Yeah.
00:59:19
Speaker
I know quite a bit about her life. I don't think that she attempted suicide when she was 10. But there's also that, again, the confusion between this and Daddy, I believe there's a line in Daddy where she says, you died when I was 10 or something like that. Yeah, I was gonna say her father died. Right, but I think that she was eight at the time. So it's already like,
00:59:44
Speaker
this kind of second mythology that these poems are a part of, that's different from her real life. And I find that to be just sort of an interesting connection. But yeah, I think, you know. Well, 10 is a more mythologizing number than eight. Exactly. And it also rhymes with again. Yes, it's perfect. So that is where the formal control overtakes biography. And she did the time that she committed suicide, or sorry, she attempted to commit suicide.
01:00:14
Speaker
not successfully. She was 20 and then she died by suicide when she was 30. And so of course it was not like perfect symmetry if she rounds up to 10.
01:00:26
Speaker
I was going to say also, I think similar to the striptease is that line, the grave cave. As you mentioned, she overdosed on sleeping pills when she was 20 and then hid in her mother's cross face in the basement. She went so far as to, I believe, move
01:00:47
Speaker
like a pile of logs and then like hide behind that. So it's, it's really just sort of incredible that she was found. She was there for, I think like 48 hours or more. Um, right. They're like newspaper articles, people searching for her. Yes. Um, but they're searching out, you know, in the woods, they're not cause they, um, because she was sort of so hidden. And so to reference that, um, like obliquely,
01:01:12
Speaker
as the grave cave, which, of course, Lazarus was in the cave, Jesus' cave. But also, she almost died in this cave. I just think there's something shockingly humorous about that little two-word rhyme, grave cave, that she somehow was able to assume this mindset where she could make a joke out of her own near death, essentially. And that tells you how
01:01:46
Speaker
just how removed I guess the voice of this poem is from
01:01:55
Speaker
from just sort of the voice of a normal person talking about their own life, you know what I mean? Like a confession. A normal life, right, yes, that's right, that's right. Sort of with that in mind, I wanna bring us to the lines that you've pointed to as a kind of second beginning of the poem.
01:02:20
Speaker
I mean, and I should I should just say, like, feel free, even if we've moved along, if you want to bring us back somewhere, please, please just do it. But the the so I'm about to read six lines. The first line is one word long.
01:02:37
Speaker
Dying is an art like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I have a call. So, you know, the line dying and then, you know, what follows it is an art like everything else. And then four lines in a row that start with the first person pronoun I. And that are doing really interesting things with sound.
01:03:08
Speaker
to what are you noticing at this moment? I mean, you said earlier, it sounds like another beginning. I mean, if it's interesting, you just say more about like what that means, like how does it sound like a beginning or what makes it sound that way? Or just like what is the kind of force and effect of this repetition of the first person pronoun at that place? I'm really interested in those lines and I'm curious about what you think of them, Melissa.
01:03:35
Speaker
I'm really interested in these lines too and why certain lines sound like beginnings and others don't apart from just being enjammed or what have you. It's one of those mysterious intuitive things which
01:04:00
Speaker
Like as a poet, I don't always understand, but it's just like, you know, some poems, some lines sound like first lines and others don't.
01:04:15
Speaker
I'm just staring at the poem right now. It's so interesting too because there's one of those quite long lines for the poem and pick the worms off me, like sticky pearls. Maybe the longest line in the whole poem. So it's up there anyway. And then dying. There's something about that. It's like the breath being sucked in or something. Yeah, that pause and then dying. It's like,
01:04:44
Speaker
It's like when an actress kind of stops and takes a breath and gathers her composure again to, okay, now let me start over. That's sort of what it feels like. Like, oh, I've been wrapped up in this sort of anecdote almost.
01:05:04
Speaker
about the second time. And now, let's return to generalizations. But also, everything about that first sentence, that generalization is weird. Like, dying is an art is surprising, but then it's also surprising to say, like, everything else. Did anyone know that everything else was an art? I mean, it's surprising enough to say that dying is an art, you know? Because, you know, well, just for the obvious reason, you'd think, well, it's a thing you don't
01:05:32
Speaker
except I suppose in the case of suicide, it's not a thing that you intend to do, it's a thing that happens to you. And that is the end of your heading. I do think generalizations make good openings, actually. The autumn poem begins with the generalization, actually. Right, about suffering, they were never wrong. Yeah, right. But I also thought about that like everything else for a while.
01:06:02
Speaker
And that feels very like, um, that's very like a Plath worldview. Like, you know, she, she loved food. She like, she just like loved life oddly for somebody who was so kind of macabre. Well, I think of her thinking of everything as an art.
01:06:21
Speaker
Well, she's also like a kind of a high achiever, right? So I do it exceptionally well. You know, sounds like a woman who did very well at Smith College, you know, like she did, right? But then also that's the sort of progression of the lines after that. I do it so it feels like hell.
01:06:42
Speaker
I do it so it feels real. It's just surprise after surprise. So it feels like, I don't know, it feels to me like that feels like a very, I don't know if it's American actually, or if I'm just saying that because I'm American. Or is it, do the English say that in the same way? So it feels like hell. What does it mean? It's a strange phrase. And I'm just imagining someone who didn't know English very well and who
01:07:08
Speaker
would misunderstand maybe what it means to say something feels like hell. Or maybe not, I don't know. What's sort of in that phrase for you? And then even weirder, so it feels real. It is real, isn't it? But, you know. Anyway, say more. Yeah. Yeah, I love how many ways you can read. I do it so it feels like hell.
01:07:40
Speaker
Like you can read it as like, you know, it hurts like hell. It feels like hell. The feeling, the feeling is a lot like that kind of like, like hell is just an intensifier. Um, like you're, you're doing it for the pain or for the feeling. Um, but that also sort of introduces this kind of like image of hell fire. Um,
01:08:06
Speaker
It feels like hell, yeah. Every time she does these perfect, neat little masculine rhymes, especially end rhymes like that, it just feels like the humor gets mean. I feel like she's taunting me as the reader, like, is this what you want? Oh, that's so great.
01:08:30
Speaker
Well, also, OK, so I have to I have to do the pedantic thing of explaining for a minute what a masculine rhyme is. So so, you know, you know, rhyme is like the end sound being the same as the other as the previous one.
01:08:43
Speaker
There is this tradition of referring to rhyming sounds that are accented syllables in English as being a masculine rhyme and a rhyming sound. So like a feminine rhyme would be something like reigning and complaining.
01:09:06
Speaker
right? Because of that final unaccented syllable of the ING. But, you know, well, hell is a masculine rhyme. And of course, you know, a thing that we haven't really talked about yet in this poem, and I don't know, I mean, this is a kind of funny, punning segue into it, are like the gendered politics of the poem, right?
01:09:30
Speaker
which are present in the title. She's not Lazarus. She's Lady Lazarus. Almost like it makes me think of those like, you know, like the college basketball team sort of thing of like the late volunteers of the University of Tennessee. It's like a really weird kind of thing. I mean, it feels very dated to me in a way, but yeah.
01:09:53
Speaker
So she's Lady Lazarus and then of course in the whole like sort of stripped but also a little bit like Lady Macbeth or something like a monologue.
01:10:02
Speaker
Yes, good. Lady Macbeth is a great, isn't she? Yeah, that's a perfect note. But of course, also in the striptease, it's highly, I mean, even though it's gentlemen ladies, you know, look at me, it's a striptease. She's the sort of woman who wants you to look at her, you know, who's sort of encouraging this kind of leering gaze, this kind of, you know, rubbernecking kind of
01:10:31
Speaker
um fascination that we should have with her that feels totally gendered to me but but and that comes back for sure at the end of the poem right that um but before we get there i mean even here what you were saying a moment ago Elise is like these moments of these rhymes that are like insistent and masculine rhymes and
01:10:52
Speaker
even if she doesn't care or have some idea about those labels for rhymes, it makes sense that we call them that because they're kind of like punchy and dumb in the way men are. She's sort of occupying that position.
01:11:14
Speaker
It's like there's this whole kind of play of victimization in Plath's poems, but she also victimizes the reader, I think you're saying, right? Yeah, don't you feel like she's beating us up a little bit? Totally, yeah. I think that about Daddy too.
01:11:30
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Yeah. You do not do. You do not do. You know, it's she's she's making fun of you, you know, as a writer. Yes. Yes. And like and I so I think this this also like obviously we'll we'll get there in the end. But there's this real like
01:11:47
Speaker
sense of triumph, which again is not in the biblical story as much. I don't feel like Lazarus goes around gloating the way that the Lady Lazarus of this poem does. Triumph, where was I going with that? I was going somewhere with that.
01:12:10
Speaker
Mm-hmm. You said we'd come around to it in the end, but maybe you wanted to say something about it before we get to the end even. Oh, yeah, no, I got it. I got it. Yeah, I came back. I was going to say, I do think she's also in some kind of indirect way, like sort of making fun of herself slash triumphing over herself because... Oh, right.
01:12:38
Speaker
to bring back that idea of control we brought up earlier. I think that that was one of her career long battles. Sadly, a short career, but she did write from a very young age until her death.
01:12:53
Speaker
she was constantly writing in her journals about like, Oh, like my palms are like too neat and to like this kind of like neat control freak. Like my palms are so tidy. Um, and you know, when she met like Ted Hughes and his crowd, she thought like, Oh God, these are like wild men. I want to be more like that. Right. Um, and so when she, when she does this very like controlled knowing seemingly, um, ironic, like,
01:13:21
Speaker
I do it so it feels like hell, I do it so it feels real. It feels like she's triumphing over that neat version of herself that needs things to be perfect and tidy in a way.
01:13:34
Speaker
Oh, I love that. So she's triumphing over it in the sense that she's not being tidy. She's doing something that feels like hell and feels real. It doesn't feel like schoolgirl something. I don't know. Sorry, pardon me. But it's also...
01:13:58
Speaker
It's like triumphing over that tightness of control in a way, not by like running away from it, but by like going through it and like into it, you know? Yes. And like, yes, doing it with like clear intention, like a real like sharpness and meanness of intention as opposed to just like, oh, this is just like, you know, my
01:14:22
Speaker
She's not just like growing her hair out and sort of like relaxing. She's like, you know, it's like the opposite of, you know, I always think of that kind of scene in a movie where the, um, where like the librarian who has her hair up and the glasses on or whatever, like takes off her glasses and lets her hair down and you're like meant to be like, Oh, she's beautiful.
01:14:43
Speaker
The plath, it's more like, I mean, hair comes up at the end of the poem too, but it's more like she sort of tightens the screws, and that's what gives the poem the power in a way. Right. It's like she gets control over her control, whereas previously she had felt like she didn't have control over her control. She was controlled by it. Yeah, right.
01:15:05
Speaker
She says in the note that she'd written for the BBC about this poem, I mean, as good as time as I need to read it, but she says, this poem is called Lady Lazarus. The speaker is a woman who has the great and terrible gift of being reborn. The only trouble is she has to die first. She is the phoenix, the libertarian spirit, what you will. She's also just a good, plain, very resourceful woman.
01:15:32
Speaker
So, you know, this kind of mixture of like the mythical and the ordinary, you know? Right, right. There too. And a very kind of undecided quality, I think, in the poem itself around like, what is this character or this persona's goal? Is it to finally die or is it to keep returning? That's a little bit unsettled.
01:16:00
Speaker
Yeah, earlier she says, like the cat I have nine times and this is number three. I guess it's impossible to read the poem without thinking like, well, this was number nine or something. I want to get a little further into the poem and I've also always been fascinated by the lines.
01:16:25
Speaker
There's a charge for the eyeing of my scars. There's a charge for the hearing of my heart. It really goes. And there's a charge, a very large charge for a word or a touch or a bit of blood or a piece of hair of my clothes. That word charge, it keeps getting repeated, is I think a pretty like multivalent, interesting word. That would be good for your list of like plath words. You know, you may be writing a plath poem if you include that word.
01:16:56
Speaker
And of course, hearing it in her performance, you really hear that kind of mid-Atlantic. That's her sounding most New Englandy to me too, because she's saying like, charge. Anyway, what do you think of that word or that moment in the poem?
01:17:15
Speaker
Do you have thoughts there? Oh, yeah. I mean, this this is a really one of the really electrical parts of the poem. I intended. Yeah, very much intended. I think, you know, again, large charge is like hilarious to me, like grave cave, large charge. Like these are very funny choices. But I think more importantly, I didn't. This is one of those things that I doubt.
01:17:44
Speaker
I don't think I realized until one of my later in life reads of this poem that clearly charged the double meaning with her electroshock therapy.
01:18:10
Speaker
I guess I'll use the word preoccupied again with the images of electrocution. That's the way the bell jar starts, that famous first sentence. It was the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs. It was a queer culture summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs. Yeah. Exactly.
01:18:27
Speaker
It's interesting enough in and of itself actually without even needing to think about that double meaning, just the repetition of charge instead of cost because the lines would make sense if it was we wouldn't have the rhyme of the eyeing of my scars, there was a cost.
01:18:48
Speaker
There is a fee. I'm trying to think of possibilities. It all sounds terrible. But yeah, like, so like a charge is, is just like sort of a weird.
01:19:03
Speaker
It's that carnival language. She's the sideshow. But also, of course, there's the electric double meaning. But that, to me, somehow in the poem, this poem is so embodied. I want to believe that that's one of those things that was not overly determined. That her 4am mind, that's the first word that came to mind.
01:19:31
Speaker
like all the sort of polysemy and lovely echoes throughout all of her other whole body of work. Like we're not something that she like sat down and decided to do consciously at that moment so much as it just like zapped and happened. Right. Right. That feels right to me. I mean, because it, you know, it also, so right. So,
01:19:56
Speaker
All right, when when Plath had her, you know, what in I think her own words, she would have referred to as a breakdown or her kind of depressive and suicide attempts in in late adolescence, or as a 20 year old, whatever she part of the treatment included electroshock therapy, and it's, you know, sort of infamously memorialized in the bell jar as well.
01:20:25
Speaker
I think you're exactly right to say that that kind of history is kind of undergirding the use of the word here and the kind of image of electricity.
01:20:37
Speaker
Charge also refers to the economic transaction that performance requires or elicits or initiates or something like, yeah, look at me, but you're going to have to pay to look at me. But also, I don't want to lose in there to this idea of
01:21:03
Speaker
the feeling that the poet is tapping into a kind of power in a literal way, like it's running through her fingertips, she's electrified or something, which makes her dangerous also to touch. And yeah, the word, because of course the first time we get it,
01:21:31
Speaker
there's a charge, it comes, that's a line break, it's also a stanza break, it's a really enjammed moment, and you don't know whether, I mean, I think what you'd be inclined to think on a first reading of the poem is like, oh, she's talking about the kind of feeling of being charged up, you know, or of being sort of moved, there is a charge, or like there's a, but then with the line break, it's for the eyeing of my scars.
01:22:01
Speaker
I think you're right that this is a moment that came to her as though she was zapped by divine inspiration or something at 4am, but then of course leaving it in the poem is something that comes later.
01:22:23
Speaker
This sort of gets us into the kind of final movement of the poem, Alyssa. Maybe it begins again for one more time. I don't know. So, so are Dr. So are enemy. I am your opus.
01:22:44
Speaker
Yeah, it feels like a new movement, right, at least, like a new act. Yeah, so what do you, I mean, if you had to give a kind of, if you had to put in a few words what feels new or what's sort of new about the tone or the voice or the kind of direction of the poem as it turns towards its final several stances, what would you tell us?
01:23:13
Speaker
Yeah.
Power Dynamics and Poem's Conclusion
01:23:16
Speaker
Oh yeah, that's so, so much like dying felt like, okay, now I'm going to sort of deliver.
01:23:30
Speaker
deliver my message, this is more like now I am truly gathering my power. Um, and I'm like picturing like Ursula the sea witch, you know, things just start like swirling around here. Um, like it just feels like there's this real gathering of momentum and like,
01:23:56
Speaker
It feels a little terrifying, honestly. So, so hair doctor, so hair enemy. I am your opus. I am your valuable. It's like she's borrowing, but she's got these titles, you know, hair doctor, hair enemy, the sort of figures of authority whom she's addressing. Right, right, and don't you read that? But it's as though she's taking their power, yeah. Uh-huh, and again,
01:24:26
Speaker
This is just one of those things that happen when you read a poem over and over and over again. Maybe some people just get everything about a poem the first time they read it. But I feel like especially a poem this long, you sort of fixate on certain parts and gloss over other parts. But only recently that I sort of realized
01:24:46
Speaker
Oh, a doctor. It's like she's talking to the doctor who gave her the electroshock treatment because she's like, but also she hated it. So much. Yeah. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Exactly. So it's like she's just like, oh, another figure of rage, you know, like I've I'm pulling in these figures of rage, like Nazis, my husband who just cheated on me and was like, oh, also the doctor who gave me electroshock therapy, like he suddenly
01:25:15
Speaker
In there and it's like she's just sort of like addressing her enemies like now now is my time now is when I I truly overpower you and so it's like that sort of
01:25:31
Speaker
I think that the humorous tone that comes in is really, it's like that's pushed aside. Now shit gets real basically. I don't think anything from here down after I Am Your Opus is funny. I think it's like chilling and awe-inspiring.
01:25:54
Speaker
The pure gold baby that melts to a shriek. What a line that is. Yeah, that's wild. That melts to a shriek. It's like, you know, in order to, I don't know, when you try to, you can't picture that. It's not a sensible way of talking. That's sort of what I see in my mind when I read that is like,
01:26:16
Speaker
film like a like a little like sped up little film strip or something with a kind of sound effect layered into it, you know, I don't know what it means to melt to a shriek, you know, melting gold. Yeah, I don't know. And it's the funny way I turn and burn again with these sorts of like internal rhymes and insistent rhymes.
01:26:40
Speaker
And do not think I underestimate your great concern. There's so much contempt in that. Probably that's the longest line in the poem too. I think so too. I think so too. And then I got a really short one. Ash, ash. Yeah. And this idea that it's like on the one hand,
01:27:06
Speaker
She's giving herself up, sort of presenting herself to the authority figure who's this despised, you know, and kind of masculine and Germanic and whatever else kind of abuser. And, and yet she's gone. Like ash, ash, you poke and stir flesh bone. There is nothing there. A kick of soap, a wedding ring, a gold filling.
01:27:36
Speaker
the sort of things that are left behind, you know, the burning of her body. But jokes on you, right? Because she's, you know, she's coming back or something. Yeah.
01:27:53
Speaker
And do you hear Shakespearean echoes and that ash, ash stanza as well, sort of you poke and stir. I feel like double, double toil and trouble kind of. Yeah. Oh, right, right, right. Yeah, maybe. I mean, that feels like the spirit of the thing. It does seem like a moment that's invested in
01:28:08
Speaker
like witchcraft or a kind of witchiness, like those witches in Macbeth. I don't know, I'm still thinking in a way too about that Lady Macbeth comment, which feels to me. Yeah. There's like so many, it's not even like metaphors really. It's just like we're in this like metaphorical territory where the references are just kind of
01:28:39
Speaker
everywhere in all directions. So like, I mean, when I read that a cake is up a wedding or a gold filling, I do think of like the Holocaust.
01:28:48
Speaker
but you don't have to necessarily. But of course, it's already planted there from the beginning of the poem. Yeah, no, I think it's there for sure, yeah. But the kind of biographical reading at that moment too might say, well, a wedding ring is an interesting thing for her to have in the poem where it seems like it's, you know,
01:29:13
Speaker
it's being shed or discarded, you know, it's a kind of a signifier and had been a really meaningful one to her of a certain kind of identity and is now sort of sloughed off or grown beyond, yeah. Beware, beware. How does the action arise? Yeah, the god-hair Lucifer, it's just the escalation there. Yeah.
01:29:42
Speaker
Yes, right. Like I'll leave you silly worldly enemies behind now. Now I shall confront God and the devil. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. So we got to talk about the final stanza. Out of the ash, I rise with my red hair and I eat men like air. Um,
01:30:10
Speaker
I'm going to ask an impossible question, at least. Get ready. Are you ready? What does it mean to eat men like air? Oh, that's the wrong question. No, it's not. What's the right question? No, it's the right question, but it is impossible because this is one of my favorite lines of poetry.
01:30:40
Speaker
ever, anywhere. But it's also an exemplar of what a great line of poetry does, where I think it just transcends meaning. Sorry. So the wrong part of the question was the what does it mean part. But it's not wrong if you wanted me to say it doesn't mean anything other than I eat men like air. It's so
01:31:06
Speaker
I was saying those lines that feel like beginnings are anti-final. This is the most final. This is the finalist of final. It cannot be questioned. It cannot be reckoned with. It has to come out of this poem. I think that is the miracle of this poem. This poem makes that line possible.
01:31:28
Speaker
And you can only understand it as the last line of this poem. If it was in another poem, it might mean something, and that would be it's failing. But here, all it means is I eat men like air. And it's just the most perfect final line for this poem.
01:31:53
Speaker
But yeah, it just feels to me like this is one of those poems that teaches me like this is what a poem can do that no other kind of art can do, you know?
01:32:04
Speaker
So I'm going to I'm going to I'm not letting go of it yet, but I I'm going to sort of shift the way I'm asking about it because I think you know, I think you're exactly right. I think maybe what does it mean to eat men like air is that is the wrong kind of question to be asking about the right moment in the poem. And also, I mean, well, and I think
01:32:26
Speaker
you know, you described it as perfect and like perfection is a very Plathian idea too in all ways. You know, I think of the poem Edge, of course, like the woman is perfected, right? Which also means like complete, you know? Or that's the meaning she has, I think, in mind. So the question, what if I reframe the question not as like, what does that line mean? Or what does it mean to eat men like air? And instead asked it as like, what does it do?
01:32:56
Speaker
to say, I eat men like air. So she's doing this kind of theatrical performance. And she tells us that at the end, let's imagine we're inhabiting the kind of fiction in which she's on stage and we're hearing that line. How should we feel about that line? Or what does that line do to us?
01:33:25
Speaker
I mean, I read it as the sort of ultimate expression of not just triumph, but transcendence. It's kind of like I am become God, destroyer of worlds type shit. Yeah. Yeah.
01:33:46
Speaker
I mean, of course, like all these sort of like enemy opponent figures in the poem, we now see our men. I don't think I necessarily see it that way when I'm just reading the poem before I get to the end. To say, go ahead. I want to hear what you have to say.
01:34:18
Speaker
Well, I think there's something that I have wanted to talk about just in general and in Plath and in this poem is the like weird power of one syllable words, which we sort of talked about in her like kind of mean rhymes. But like, you know, here they're employed to much different effects. And I once heard Dana Levin say,
01:34:46
Speaker
Actually, that's not true. I read her right on Twitter. She had heard someone say once, and I don't remember who originally said this to her, but somebody had commented like, oh, some of the best lines of poetry are just all one syllable words.
01:35:03
Speaker
And ever since she said that to me, I think about that all the time. So many of my favorite lines of poetry are at least mostly one-syllable words, if not all one-syllable words. There's a classic one from Milton from Paradise Lost, which I'm not going to be able to quote. Lakes, fens, bogs, something of death. Sorry, Milton is out there. What is the power of the one-syllable word? Why?
01:35:30
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know, but I think that that's part of what is so powerful about it. I mean, I love a long
01:35:41
Speaker
word for difference or a long line for difference every now and then. But I feel like for a statement that is that sort of like spell like and final, the fact that it's all one syllable words, it's like the emphasis does not stop. Because if you have a long word with a lot of syllables, there's going to be some
01:36:02
Speaker
um some like not emphasize syllables there's probably a more eloquent way to say that that's right it's it's like each word like the word the unit that is the word and the unit that is like the accent and so this is like in an accentual language like english yeah they they sort of perfectly coincident and i eat men like air it's like
01:36:28
Speaker
There's a kind of isomorphism or something between the sound and the sense that makes it sound spell-like. Yes, because you can kind of give it a little like iambic sing-song. But I feel like when you read the full poem and you get to that line, your inclination instead, like the poem has taught you to give power to every single word. And I read it as like, and I eat men like air.
01:36:58
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, that's great. Equal emphasis on every word. Every syllable counts in that line. There's absolutely nothing that you can glide over. Yeah. So in a way, maybe if the poem begins with theatrical performance, it ends with that other kind of performance, like the performative utterance in the J.L. Austin sense, like the
01:37:25
Speaker
The words that make the thing happen. You can imagine her actually disappearing in a ball of fire at that moment. Which makes it feel magical or spell-like. I love that.
01:37:46
Speaker
Okay, Elisa, I feel like we could just keep talking, turn the page to the next poem, or now let's do daddy, I'm ready. Why stop now? I know. Well, the reason why is...
01:38:03
Speaker
you know, I'm taking up too much of your time and who is going to listen to us ramble on any longer than we've already done. But before we end, I want to ask if you'd be willing to read the poem out loud for us one more time in your voice.
Final Reading and Reflections
01:38:18
Speaker
I would absolutely love to. And thank you so much for this. So enjoyable.
01:38:26
Speaker
I haven't had an hour long plus conversation about a single poem with anyone in a long time. It's been a real pleasure for me. It's the best. Lady Lazarus. I have done it again. One year and every 10 I manage it. A sort of walking miracle. My skin bright as a Nazi lampshade.
01:38:55
Speaker
My right foot, a paperweight. My face, a featureless fine Jew linen. Peel off the napkin, oh, my enemy. Do I terrify? The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth. The sour breath will vanish in a day. Soon, soon, the flesh, the grave cave eight will be at home on me, and I, a smiling woman. I am only 30.
01:39:25
Speaker
And like the cat I have nine times to die. This is number three. What a trash to annihilate each decade. What a million filaments. The peanut crunching crowd shoves in to see them unwrap me hand and foot, the big strip tease. Gentlemen, ladies, these are my hands, my knees.
01:39:50
Speaker
I may be skin and bone. Nevertheless, I am the same identical woman. The first time it happened, I was 10. It was an accident. The second time I meant to last it out and not come back at all. I rocked shut as a seashell. They had to call and call and pick the worms off me like sticky pearls. Dying is an art.
01:40:18
Speaker
like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I have a call. It's easy enough to do it in a cell. It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
01:40:40
Speaker
It's the theatrical comeback in broad day to the same place, the same face, the same brute, amused shout, a miracle that knocks me out. There is a charge for the eyeing of my scars. There is a charge for the hearing of my heart. It really goes.
01:41:00
Speaker
And there is a charge, a very large charge for a word or a touch or a bit of blood or a piece of my hair or my clothes. So, so, ere doctor. So, ere enemy. I am your opus. I am your valuable, the pure gold baby that melts to a shriek. I turn and burn. Do not think I underestimate your great concern.
01:41:30
Speaker
Ash, ash, you poke and stir. Flesh, bone, there is nothing there. A cake of soap, a wedding ring, a gold filling. Hair god, hair Lucifer, beware, beware. Out of the ash I rise with my red hair and I eat men like air.
01:41:58
Speaker
Elisa, that was a terrific reading. Thank you so much. I loved how it felt just right and also quite different from Plath's reading, and I'm really glad you indulged us with it. The whole conversation has been a delight, and I just want to thank you for taking the time to talk with me.
01:42:18
Speaker
And I want to thank the listeners for hanging out with us for the last hour and a half plus, whatever it's been. It's been a terrific conversation and we have more coming soon. So please stay tuned. Make sure you're following the podcast and all that good stuff. And there will be plenty more conversations coming soon. Be well, everyone.