My Ariel

Sina Queyras

• Verlag: Coach House Books
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781770565326
• Thema: Letteratura
• Thema: Poesia canadese

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.

Years

The psychiatric pitfall that I see is your succumbing to the unconscious temptation to repeat your mother’s role – i.e., martyr at the hands of the brutal male.

–Ruth Beuscher, in a letter to Sylvia Plath, 1962

Trigger warning: life is long, violent, and unjust.

– Anonymous

Judging your mother is like throwing a boomerang.

–Nelly Arcan

Years

Who rivals? you wrote in 1958. Sappho? Browning?

Rosetti, Dickinson, Lowell, all dead. Sitwell, Moore – aging

Giantesses – 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 Ted’s 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 Harvard’s biggest bitch. So much to aspire to, from

The Yale Younger to the New Yorker contract – 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

‘Johnny Panic’ to Accent. Joy: show joy & enjoy. But then

Philosophy, you realize. Philosophy! If you don’t

Get that in you shall lag behind your mark.

What fury of frustration … 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

I’ve turned to you, they raise their brows.

‘Her mind claws along,’ one poet tells me.

And then there is the business

Of your succumbing to the patriarchy with such force.

♦

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, she’d 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.

♦

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, I’m sure,

And then I caught the one open eye: That suit?

Don’t tell me you’re still wearing that same suit?

♦

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.

♦

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 – occasionally

She taps it the way we tap our pockets for our phones –

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 wouldn’t know that the way she dresses

Like a man. Slam. Turn. The nurse raises a brow, adjusts

A pillow. Your mother is ‘unique,’ she says, persistent:

One day at death’s door, the next heckling for a cigarette.

♦

What is it that gives us confidence, not once, but in

A life? Finished Woolf’s tiresome The Years, last night,

You note, She flits, she throws out her gossamer nets …

This is not Life, not even real life: there is not even

The Ladies’ Magazine entrance into sustained loves,

Jealousies, boredoms …

What was Woolf’s childless life like, you wonder

On a day you also record several rejections – Paris Review,

New Yorker, CSM – 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 don’t write, in spite

Of rejections, I don’t 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 … Babies fix things, you thought,

They humanize: Ted should be a patriarch. I a mother.

To express our love, us, through … the doors of my body.

Having succumbed to the patriarchy, the older poet says,

Now she wants to replicate it.

♦

I make my mother tea. She smokes. I watch her smoke.

I can’t make her eat, or lift her into the shower.

She lets me wash her feet, but only because

She can still talk. Don’t worry about me, she says,

Reading my thoughts. I want to live. I love my life,

Small as it is. It’s your wardrobe that worries me. Well,

That and what yo...