yesterday was my last day of summer semester. i delivered a speech on why "Crash" is a racist film & a presentation on a project on...sylvia plath...and honeybees....and cheating jaguars...and daddy-complexes...happy apple pies...and such.
consists of ten prose poems, heavily informed by Sylvia's (yes, first name basis) "Bee Poems" & also "Daddy" & "Lament" in conjunction with her journal entries (mad, mad stories, domestic consolations, rough & tough Ted Hughes, etc.) Other sources were research on bees, attempted research of Otto Plath's dissertations & my own poems.
Excerpts, fancied lines:
1. Intro (erasure)
"fight against a simple-mindedness, a narcissism, a protective shell against competing, against being found wanting To write for itself, to do things for the joy of them.
What a gift of the god?
Create Queen: a mad, passionate Queen. Immediately I want her husband to keep bees, and I know nothing of bees. My father knew it all."
2. Maestro of Bees
The sting of bees took away my father
who got sick in a minute & wouldn’t see a doctor (I am alive & so-there!)
and I’ll never speak to the Queen again
He survived the honey-flavored cancer
and wasn’t he lucky? isn’t it awful that (the blood hive-holed my brain)
the sting of bees took away my father
he rots in a grave he barely paid for
bee-bearded near death, the man had tantrums (a shot went home, a sniff of cocaine)
and I’ll never speak to the Queen again
3. the only one...huge enough for me
"The women lie down for artists.
The mad girl (only a silly girl) scars her legs with nails
through her hands. The stigmata, I said, frozen.
Lesson learned & bang smash on the mouth
Chased by red-gold Whiskey Macs. The bandeau
Is blood-soaked. The wimple, bruised & I
Stink of decaying orange from the vandal.
“I shall keep,” he barked, my blood"
4. The Beekeepers
"We were interested in starting a hive, so I dumped the babies in the factory past a row of orange stucco cottages that flood whenever the river rises. We felt very new & shy within a yard of miscellaneous Devonians in raincoats, bulgy tweeds, shirtsleeves. I had not thought to bring a sweater. I stood for a moment, on the bridge-end.
The man in black is the rector. He carries his dark felt head. The midwife is in the blue coat. She too has a black box head. Everybody had screening. I felt barer & barer. Have you no hat? Have you no coat?
I have a boiler suit. "
5. apple-pie happy
"I was getting worried about becoming too happily stodgily practical: instead of studying Locke for instance, or writing---I go make an apple pie, or study the Joy of Cooking, reading it like a rare novel. Whoa, I said to myself You will escape into domesticity & stifle yourself by falling headfirst and fast into a bowl of cookie batter. And just now I pick up the blessed diary of Virginia Woolf which I bought with a battery of her novels Saturday with Ted. And she works off her depression over rejections from Harper’s (no less!---and I hardly can believe that the Big Ones get rejected, too!) by cleaning out the kitchen."
6. The Contents of the Black Box
"She came with sugar candy. She smelled of vanilla when our morning gruel, coffee was black & bitter-edged & diabetic, He needs it, honey, twice a day.
He’ll keep you in a cigar box & twenty-five just like you (rather crude) until you’re planted in the family plot. Escaped the panzer-man, did you?
O & isn’t he the bees knees! Fourth husband material, indeed. You know, in bed, he smells like a butcher. Sure, he’ll write a book to you. Saying “sweetness, sweetness” to the gas chamber with you!"
7. The Red Queen's Race, The Requeening Game
"I put on my red-hot shoes & join in the swarm: the race of winged, unmiraculous women, those spasmodic tricks. Some Dody bird, who I took for long dead, explained the rules of the hive:
The Red Queen needs no pawn to defeat the black rooks.
The Red Queen hears no backtalk from her cell in the mute sky.
The Red Queen is your competitor. You compete for the hive."
8. The Queendom of Dreams
"Waking, I can't help longing for lost Edens, but I am only an outlet blocked as with wax.
The Queen is waking in a constructed cell built by too dreamy a drone. It’s sure to collapse, a suffocating cuddle death. A caged & wild pulse there at the center, but I know now that my ribs aren’t broken.
My pen fell from my hand after two aspirins & I fell asleep: head swimming off “The Island of the Dead.” Strange visions read about: “Why Men Desert Their Hives.” The hive is a black box. The hive is an algorithm.
Electrocution in tinfoil veins, a new satellite shot into stars; The planet halted & at once I was lifted up, died in my stomach & fell forward, hung in middle of a room, someone twirling me about. Faceless crowding & I spun & they spun: surgical, distant, stellar. Me & my experimental predicament."
9. The Cellar Jar
"a.m.
I have my honey, a jar of it.
I will sleep through the wintering. Better than shock treatment.
p.m.
Today, you made a fatal decision. And you vacillated like a nervous seesaw-- gulped, chose blindly & immediately wanted to reverse a decision which is speeding into finality now already on the w of mails, minds &secretarial files. You are an inconsistent and very frightened hypocrite:
you wanted time to think, to find out about yourself, your ability to write, and now that you have it: practically 3 months of godawful time, you are nausea, a stasis. You are plunged so deep in your own very private little rote forbidding and enormous.
Your mind is planned, diagrammed for you—practically the way it will be at Smith next year: and just now that kind of security seems desirable—it is just another way of absolving you of taking responsibilities for your own actions & planning, really, although now the issue is so confused it is hard which choice would take the most guts: and which kind of guts. Marcia i you are doing neither: the woman at
you can now learn it—you won’t have it this good again, baby. "You
i think there are probably three people who read this, so you three, i need something to do with my time for the rest of july & august, and i am going to spend some time crafting or working on visual representations of poems, prose, etc.
With that in mind, if anybody would like to be the recipient of any sort of crafty, zine-esque, versions of any work on this blog, or would like to read full versions of the plath pieces, it would not only give me something to do and give me some new & keen editing eyes, but make me feel super-duper.
email me: nikkimarss@gmail.com
hi, deidre!
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