Hughes Vs. Hitler: The Absurdity of Keyboard Researchers

 

Early this morning, during my usual Facebook perusal, I noticed a particular comment on a friend’s post. Don Levy is a fine poet, and an active reader who shares his interests with others on the web. He’s been posting about a different poet every week, and last week his poet of choice was Ted Hughes, former Poet Laureate of the UK and widower of Sylvia Plath.

Hughes’ role in Plath’s suicide has been debated for decades now. An ardent band of Plath devotees has gone so far as to regularly chip his surname off her headstone, blaming him entirely for her sad ending. Whether these folks take into account her long history of mental illness prior to meeting Hughes is unknown.

Even here in 2023, Don got so much flack for his choice that he felt the need to apologize. Many people supported him, and made the argument for the work and the poet as being separate entities to be considered apart from each other. One gentleman however, with research on Wikipedia to support his opinion, declared Hughes a “psychopath,” and likened his so-called killing spree to that of Hitler.

Anyone’s suicide is a long reaching tragedy that affects many more than can be anticipated. To make Hughes’ case more complicated, his lover, Assia Wevill, lived with for several years afterwards, and ended her own life and that of their small daughter in a similar fashion to Plath. Hughes’ son with Plath, Nicholas Hughes, committed suicide as well, in 2009 and well after the deaths of both his parents.

Considering her long history of mental health struggles in particular, it is difficult to blame Hughes directly for Plath’s suicide. Theirs was a marriage fraught with struggles, the plight of artists as well as husbands and wives. Only those two know the full stories, and we are left to piece together the truth, or some sensible version of it, from diaries, letters, and most unreliably, their poems.

Certainly comparing Hughes to Hitler is an absurdity not even worth discussing with Professor Wiki. Hopefully his next source of “facts” won’t be the wretched Gwyneth Paltrow film of several years ago that exploited the agony. Surviving daughter Frieda Hughes wouldn’t even give permission for their poems to be used, and the producers were reduced to fictional Sylvia and Ted quoting from Shakespeare like starry-eyed freshmen.

Full disclosure- for almost a decade I was the host of an annual event I called, “The Sylvia Plath Bake-Off.” Looking to draw attention to a monthly open mic here in the Hudson Valley, I came up with several themes, and this one took off with a life of its own. I don’t regret the events now, although as I age I do become more acutely sensitive the pain that drove Plath to the oven. No one came in laughing about her method of suicide, although the usual levity was present, the same that one often experiences at funerals. Poems were sympathetic odes, not satirical rants. I have no plans to revive the series, although many remember it with great fondness. I am too old to find much more to ask of Plath and Hughes, having given all I could expect to my selfish cause.

National Poetry Month 2019- Part III !

The month ended with a bang for me, if poetry readings can ever be described as having that effect. I was kindly asked to curate an hour of poetry at the Woodstock Library as part of their Saturday evening series. Although after forty-some odd years of writing I could easily fill the hour with my own musings, I decided instead to divide the time up between myself and three other poets I’ve grown to love and respect. And, instead of a reading of our own work, I asked them to select a poet or poets whose work had influenced theirs, and to share that poet’s work as well as a few selections that reflected that influence. 

The variety in the presentation was predictable, and yet wonderfully rich and surprising in its scope. Marianna Boncek, whom I’ve known since our days at SUNY New Paltz in the early ‘80s, read the work of her mother, Barbara Boncek, and her daughter, Rachel Sanborn. Both are poets of substance, and Barbara was one of the first “civilian” poets I encountered after graduation. The old Stone Ridge Poetry Society, which used to meet regularly at the Stone Ridge Library, was my Gateway Group for poetry endeavors in the real world. Luckily, Marianna included some of her own wonderful work, inspired by family as well as local history in many instances.

Michael Platsky, former host of the currently homeless Harmony poetry reading series, was another poet I encountered after college. He was a regular at the testosterone-riddled Tinker Street readings, and his piece about pissing on a bus tire in NYC as a boy beside Allen Ginsberg has lingered in my mind for years. Platsky, who is too humble about his own work, read instead the poems of the late, great Dan Propper, a former Woodstocker and accomplished poet of the past. I had a chance to hear Propper once or twice in my early poet days, and have the good fortune to possess a copy of a CD of him reading many of his greatest hits. Passing the torch is what Woodstock poets do best, and Platsky honored Propper in excellent form. 

My poetry companion Guy Reed, another one who is too humble for his own good, is a transplant from Minnesota, and the inspiration for My Minnesota Boyhood, my reimagining of his childhood on the prairie. In addition to being active on the local poetry scene for almost two decades, Reed has consistently sought inspiration and information from academic poets whenever possible. He read the works of three of his favorites: James Wright, the elder half of one of the few (if not only) father/son Pulitzer team, the recently passed Jack Gilbert, and the very much alive Marie Howe, whom he has studied with. Reed’s commitment to poetry, and his careful study of others’ work, has benefitted his own voice as well as my own. 

I had no choice, really, but to read some of the better-known poems from, if not my favorite poet these days, at least the poet I am most identified with publicly. From around 1992 to 2002, I was the host of the annual Sylvia Plath Bake-Off. It started as a catchy theme for a monthly reading I was hosting at the AIR Studio in Kingston, and soon morphed into a life of its own. Eventually, we attracted the attention of Pillsbury, who apparently owns the copyright to the phrase “Bake-Off.” This inspired me to add a baking contest to the already chaotic proceedings.

For those interested in more details, here’s a link to an account I authored for Plath Profiles, an academic publication devoted to, of course, all things Plath: 

http://www.angelfire.com/indie/airstudio/images/Rice.pdf.

But, more important for me these days is how far, and how close, I have come to Plath and her predicament. One of the many reasons the Bake-Off, with all its smarm and casual swagger, would no longer be possible for me is because I have lived through all the ages that Plath did, and then some. I have been an artist, a woman, a wife, and folks, the struggle is real, and continues to this day. I was never inclined to motherhood, and give her credit for the effort she put into those dual careers that women seem to believe they must carry in order to be judged at least equal to their male counterparts. Motherhood would have broken me. 

Motherhood may have been part of what broke Plath, but she was challenged from the beginning. What is a marvel is how much she accomplished in her short life. When I was the age she was at her death, I was starting another new chapter, moving to Albany, taking a shot at grad school to see if academia was where I belonged after all. It was not. Her work overall is excellent, although most of it weighed down with the visible labor of her efforts. Her final year, the poems she knew would “make” her reputation, burn with the fire of Lady Lazarus. In many ways there was nowhere for her to go from those heights. 

I don’t take her life, her death as lightly as I once did. Like the women in Romeo & Juliet, I have passed from being Juliet, to her mother, and rapidly approach the role of Nurse, laughing at the gravity, weeping at the innocence of passion. As I have aged, her life has revealed itself to me in all its complexities, as has my own. May we both rise, may we all rise.