Topic: Dismemberment - Lady Lazarus

[Endless Whisper]

Im putting this separately but its pertaining to my dismemberment thread. Sylvia Plath, rest in peace dear poet, put this experience excellently in her infamous work:

Lady Lazarus

I have done it again.
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
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
0 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 ate 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.
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.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
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, 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've a call.

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
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr 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.

Ash, ash ---
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there----

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

[Jaharkta]

I grew up adoring her. I'm a poet in my own quiet way, and in my adolescence and young adulthood, I admired the hell out of her. What a craftsman she was. Even the route of her suicide, followed by Anne Sexton's, evoked some schoolgirl romanticism in me.

Now I want to shake her shoulders, and tell her to obsess on the skin of the victims on her own time.

Artists go through this nihilistic phase of blood and gore... they think they're reaching their own dark side by going there. My take is, it's a fantasy, for the most part. I want to see them grow up, and put away the gore, and to look back on their preoccupation with it as a necessary phase of youth and drama. Nothing more.

[Endless Whisper]

Do you think she might have felt either guilt of being part german, or like some speculated, it was a way of purposely distancing herself from her father? I do kinda feel the same way, I think .. well, she was mad, so have to cut her some slack. She wasnt totally in control of her mind, cause you have to be mad to put your head in an oven. and her almost death at ten may have affected her too, apparently in this poem it did. But I do kinda cringe that she became immersed into identifying with the suffering of holocaust victims, obviously in this she did. The camps were the bar none, hell on earth by far. So choosing that, to try to understand hell, you can only suffer so much. But maybe she did, really immerse herself go to far - like the oven and its eerie that she chose that.

But I can see value in the darker areas for poets. Like Poe, his work. But sure, rather artists not kill themselves or die of alcoholism or drugs and whatnot. Or cut off their ears Yeah those darker areas can be a tough journey. Steven King seems to do it okay. Course he looks like he comes from the underworld tho, lol.

[Jaharkta]

I think she was legitimately disturbed in her own right, but I also suspect that she deliberately chose gruesome topics in part as an overcompensation to being female.  A woman poet still was not so much a "contender" in the literary world in her day ... they still had to counter the stereotype of being "sentimental". I believe she donned this fierceness to compensate, competing with other poets (including her husband).. but in the end, it surely was a mask.

[Jaharkta]

A good poet must be unsparing ... and concise.
The ones I like best can see the world as it is, and yet ... still reach for the stars.

Shock value wears thin...