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My Ariel
Sina Queyras
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eBook - ePub
My Ariel
Sina Queyras
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About This Book
Where were you when you first read Ariel? Who were you? What has changed in your life? In the lives of women? In My Ariel, Sina Queyras barges into one of the iconic texts of the twentieth century, with her own family baggage in tow, exploring and exploding the cultural norms, forms, and procedures that frame and contain the lives of women.
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Topic
LiteraturSubtopic
Kanadische PoesieYears
The psychiatric pitfall that I see is your succumbing to the unconscious temptation to repeat your motherās role ā i.e., martyr at the hands of the brutal male.
āRuth Beuscher, in a letter to Sylvia Plath, 1962
Trigger warning: life is long, violent, and unjust.
ā Anonymous
Judging your mother is like throwing a boomerang.
āNelly Arcan
Years
Who rivals? you wrote in 1958. Sappho? Browning?
Rosetti, Dickinson, Lowell, all dead. Sitwell, Moore ā aging
Giantesses ā only Adrienne Cecile Rich (little, round & stumpy)
Came close, and you would lap her. Woolf, too, you say
In July 1957, admonishing yourself to write passing
Thought after passing observation in a brief before-bed fling.
Notes are the best part of your journals, Sylvia, random
Accumulations: ball gowns, tiaras, squeezing Tedās rosy mother,
Holding a lovely droll baby, ideas, ideas, girl fights for
Freedom and integrity. Say it in a novella if not a poem.
All the aspirational entries: Reality is what I make it!
I can do it! Just sweat! All the covetous notes: America,
Winter 1959, dinners and parties, a Lowell evening
With Hardwick, perhaps you might outdo her reputation
As Harvardās biggest bitch. So much to aspire to, from
The Yale Younger to the New Yorker contract ā the diamonds
And tiaras of the poetry world. You were ambitious
In the way of your generation. You made lists: money in,
Stories out, poems in, words drafted, ideas, ideas, sent
āJohnny Panicā to Accent. Joy: show joy & enjoy. But then
Philosophy, you realize. Philosophy! If you donāt
Get that in you shall lag behind your mark.
What fury of frustration ā¦ keeps me from writing what
I really feel, you ask? Muscle, muscle, must build
Discipline: you attack like a boxer, but all you feel
Is lack. Meanwhile dull Rich and dull Hall publish reams
Of dull poems. When I tell my baby boomer poet friends
Iāve turned to you, they raise their brows.
āHer mind claws along,ā one poet tells me.
And then there is the business
Of your succumbing to the patriarchy with such force.
ā¦
It never occurred to me to love or not love you, Sylvia, you
Died in 1963, at thirty, two years younger than my mother was
When she gave birth to me. She liked to watch bitch flicks,
She held me close, scratching the names of movie idols
In long columns on my back. What a dump, sheād say, what
A man. The sky snapped Kodak blue for us all equally,
Even so far from your trajectory. Spring 1962, my father
Rolled out the front lawn, my siblings were confirmed
A few weeks before Frieda and Nicholas, a month or so
Of bliss before Assia and David Wevill arrived in Devon where
You told the bbc you and Ted were moving because
You were both equally concerned with domestic and career.
ā¦
My mother is always in bed. Her dedication to her fatigue
Is legend. She is done in. She has been since 1969.
My oldest sister cooks and cleans, ferries her to and from
Doctors who keep thinking she is dying and call me home.
The last time I arrived mid-semester, scattered, nail-bitten,
I found her, a ghost woman, floating on a berg in a large
Green room. Empty beds eddied around her.
The salt air was cold; her bones sharp peaks blanketed
In snow. The shock of her, so frail, my own body
Seemed suddenly without bone, I was an avalanche
Of feeling flooding the forest floor.
I dropped my pack, my face too, Iām sure,
And then I caught the one open eye: That suit?
Donāt tell me youāre still wearing that same suit?
ā¦
London, June 1960, cocktails at Faber and Faber.
You drank champagne, swirling your sour milk breasts,
Delighting in the scent of diapers clinging to you like
The three generations of Faber poets. You were immensely
Proud when the camera clicked. You wrote your mother to say
The bbc had asked to see your poems.
Eliot had offered to read and discuss any plays in verse
Ted wrote. You end: my own aim
Is to keep Ted writing full time, but you
Had already sensed your own power: I sit on poems
Richer than any Adrienne Cecile Rich! Crammed with lyrical
Tension: all brain and beautiful body at once.
ā¦
My mother is up and eating her pudding.
Her teeth are too big, she can no longer chew
And so she keeps them in a fountain glass by the bed.
Her purse pokes out of the drawer ā occasionally
She taps it the way we tap our pockets for our phones ā
She can never be far from her purse: she hides
Hundred-dollar bills in secret folds. She is alone, always
Ready to pay cash. Who knows who will need what
Incentive to serve?
The wolf at the door, or the wolf inside? I worried so
When she lived among the young crackheads she employed
For everything from company to carrying out the trash,
Offering life tips and bags of groceries, while navigating
Their chemical trigger moods as deftly as she did her own.
This is my beautiful daughter, she says now, to the nurse,
Lifting her head slow, cocky as a turtle. Of course
You wouldnāt know that the way she dresses
Like a man. Slam. Turn. The nurse raises a brow, adjusts
A pillow. Your mother is āunique,ā she says, persistent:
One day at deathās door, the next heckling for a cigarette.
ā¦
What is it that gives us confidence, not once, but in
A life? Finished Woolfās tiresome The Years, last night,
You note, She flits, she throws out her gossamer nets ā¦
This is not Life, not even real life: there is not even
The Ladiesā Magazine entrance into sustained loves,
Jealousies, boredoms ā¦
What was Woolfās childless life like, you wonder
On a day you also record several rejections ā Paris Review,
New Yorker, CSM ā a day spent with Ted, who caught
Two crabs, you also note the loud, shrill voice of a mother,
Imagine her eating the best out of her husband
And then the whip: If I donāt write, in spite
Of rejections, I donāt deserve acceptances.
Yes, you conclude, To write, be a Renaissance woman.
And that includes birth: A woman has 9 months
Of becoming something other than herself, of
Separating from this otherness, of feeding it and being
A source of milk and honey ā¦ Babies fix things, you thought,
They humanize: Ted should be a patriarch. I a mother.
To express our love, us, through ā¦ the doors of my body.
Having succumbed to the patriarchy, the older poet says,
Now she wants to replicate it.
ā¦
I make my mother tea. She smokes. I watch her smoke.
I canāt make her eat, or lift her into the shower.
She lets me wash her feet, but only because
She can still talk. Donāt worry about me, she says,
Reading my thoughts. I want to live. I love my life,
Small as it is. Itās your wardrobe that worries me. Well,
That and what yo...