Poetry

[Secular Sanity]

I know you hate when I say it but it’s hard not to. You are interesting, that’s for sure, C C! I don't think that I even have one friend that would know who she is.  

I’ll leave you with one more before I go.

I’m pretty sure that I found one of her old boyfriends, Richard Sassoon.

He never spoke about her. I wonder why.

Well, I’m off to a party. Outside and in the heat, 103 degrees to be exact, ugh!

See you later, C C.

[Leigha]

I agree with SS, CC. I've enjoyed your insights, and you share your knowledge & opinions, without making anyone feel small.

[C C]

Well, I’m off to a party. Outside and in the heat, 103 degrees to be exact, ugh!

Yikes, and the fire season approaching again for the state, too.

I’ll leave you with one more before I go.

I’m pretty sure that I found one of her old boyfriends, Richard Sassoon.

He never spoke about her. I wonder why.

That was his attitude before he met Andrew Wilson, anyway. His book (which I haven't read) surely clarifies the "why" of it, but these bits only offer a glimpse of why he left the relationship.

According to this piece, after Wilson tracked down Sassoon, the latter said he left the relationship because he found "Plath, as did other lovers, too volatile, intense and demanding, and too inclined to play her admirers off against each other. Wilson makes a good case that had Sassoon stayed in Paris to meet Plath as planned, she would not have returned to Cambridge to resume her affair with Hughes and marry him four months later."

So he probably knew about Hughes, and she had so many boyfriends before even the two of them that of course it would sometimes appear like one was being wagered against another. College kids and their tangled webs, even in the early 1950s.

Surrounded by students from well-to-do families, Plath was self-conscious about her own family's financial struggles. In contrast, Sassoon was supposedly from a "rich family of Iraqi Jews". But no mention of 20-century snobbery playing a role. He suffered depression himself, but it was probably milder than Plath's. "I think Richard always felt displaced, he described his parents as cold and he was raised by nannies. I think he felt a profound sense of alienation which he went to a lot of trouble to try to cure."

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/book...ughes.html

One of the things you can’t tell from reading Mad Girl’s Love Song, Andrew Wilson’s book about Sylvia Plath, is how its author managed to track down so many new sources in what is surely one of the most revisited territories in 20th century literary history. It’s also one of the most fractious, full of vicious partisanship and acts of almost pathological appropriation. Yet to Wilson, libraries and individuals handed over bundles of documents that had never been seen before – records from Plath’s mental hospital, correspondence from her mother, writings and photographs long kept by her lovers.

[...] One person’s reading of another – however sophisticated or slanted – is partly the subject of Janet Malcolm’s short but seminal book about the warring Plath-Hughes factions, The Silent Woman. It was this book that propelled Wilson to track down Richard Sassoon, the lover Plath was seeing before she met Hughes – and indeed, as Wilson reveals, the person she was attempting to stay with even afterwards.

In 1993, Malcolm wrote: “Of all the men in Plath’s biography, Richard Sassoon is the most elusive and, in many ways, the most beguiling. The habit of longing for him has passed from Plath to the community of her biographers. Not one of them has been able to find him; he has disappeared without a trace. Not only his whereabouts but his entire post-Plath history is unknown. As Hughes has been trapped and imprisoned in the Plath legend, so Sassoon has flown out of it like a bird of summer.”

Wilson laughed a little as he read out this passage on stage – because if that wasn’t an invitation, he hardly knew what was. Sassoon turned out not to be difficult to find. He lives in Colorado; he is listed in the phone book. He told Wilson he had never spoken about Plath and that he never would. But the pair struck up an email correspondence, and eventually Sassoon allowed Wilson access to information and letters, and he sent him a short autobiographical story that shed extraordinary light on the turning point at which Ted Hughes came into Plath’s life.

Things could have been very different, Wilson’s book suggests – or perhaps not so different. Sassoon was a self-described depressive when he met Plath. Plath was already a Lady Lazarus. But Richard Sassoon is still alive. [That was "still alive" in 2013.]

---

I agree with SS, CC. I've enjoyed your insights, and you share your knowledge & opinions, without making anyone feel small.

Likewise. Both of you have a knack for invigorating this place when you're around. Which makes it all the more a shame, the difficulty in keeping new members here...
Something about disregarding a pachyderm in an undersized chamber comes to mind. Not sure what that's about.

[Secular Sanity]

Yikes, and the fire season approaching again for the state, too.

Yeah, it was one hell of a sweaty day. On the way home, I noticed smoke coming from up north. Must have been from that 9000 acre fire near Canyonville Oregon.

That was his attitude before he met Andrew Wilson, anyway. His book (which I haven't read) surely clarifies the "why" of it, but these bits only offer a glimpse of why he left the relationship.

I don't have it but I've searched through it. Here's the link. If you search in it for "Widener Library", it’ll take you to the part about Edwin Akutowicz and her hemorrhaging. At the end of the story, Andrew Wilson asked, "But what had caused the hemorrhage?"

Paul Alexander contends that Plath had aborted their first child, a few months after her marriage to Hughes.

"If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two..."

You can’t help but wonder…an illegal abortion, perhaps two?

Peter Davison said that she was on the lookout for a man that would anchor her instability, and I was at best a leaky life preserver.

It’s possible, but unlike Andrew Wilson, I wasn’t able to link Richard Sassoon’s linage to Siegfried Sassoon.

Interestingly though, I did find a few short stories by him. One was called "The Sinking". I couldn’t find the story but he has a copyright to another titled, “THE CROWDED BEDROOM”, a one -act farce by Richard L. Sassoon. And then there’s this one, "The Fly".

Wilson said in his book that Sassoon wrote to her on August 1st, “You must not be sad, Sylvia, you will have a delightful time in England—witty and intelligent people, friends you will make easily, writing circle, theatre in London, very good music performances.” It was likely that he would take up a place to study in Paris—if so, it would be relatively easy for the couple to continue seeing one another—and she should not worry; she would only have to choose, he said, between him and Mephistopheles.

Ever notice how Mephistopheles, with his characteristic inability to believe in anything, never actually did anything? It was always Faust.

Well, anyhow, Wilson thought that it was more likely guilt that was her source of sadness, and that the choice she was making wasn’t between the devil and Sassoon, but between Sassoon and Peter Davison.

It's addicting, that's for sure, but I have to rush off again today.

[Leigha]

https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/201...farrokhzad

She was an Iranian poet, who was considered controversial in her writings and film directing.

[Leigha]

Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep
By Mary Elizabeth Frye

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sun on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there; I did not die.

[Leigha]

[Image: GvKdCdb.jpg]

[C C]

Hey, it's the fun month. You can blame it all on too much of the Halloween spirits, like I do.

October Portents -- C C (See See, Cece)

I may have seen the bale-wife once
In a tall grass glade where the grey cat hunts.
Why she grieves so far from the fen ...
Is beyond my ken, it's beyond my ken.

I may have heard the bale-wife thrice
At a furtive hour when the owl spots mice.
When she's a sign of eldritch fears ...
Folk cover their eyes, they cover their ears.

I may have felt the bale-wife's hand
As my two children played on leaf strewn land.
Distant clouds were gravid with rain ...
A bode is a bane, its bearer a bane.

- - -
Hell flies swarm in an ancient well.
But only a dream, no story to tell.
Smell of rot from a deep dry well.
But just a nightmare, no story to tell.
- - -

I wish the bale-wife would depart
And cease to disquiet a mother's heart.
Why does she appear these Fall days ...
To wail and amaze, to bellow and blaze?

I wish the bale-wife could relate
What she beheld in the caverns of fate.
Is it thine or is it mine or ...
A quite distant shore, some quite distant shore?

Perhaps I'll grasp this sad wraith's past
When I taste solace from a drinking flask.
Trust I have in these spirits known ...
But not those windblown, oh not those windblown.

- - -
Offal birds on an ancient well.
It's only a vision, no story to tell.
There's nothing in a deep dry well.
No hole in morrow, no story to tell.
- - -

---

Sleeping Beauty Sublime C C (See See, Cece)

Over sanctum walls,
Down deep hallowed halls,
They creep like silence so cancerous.
Invaders surround
A body spellbound.
The girl in the jar is dangerous.

That Archdeo dreams
Asleep in its dream
As a maiden fair, does anguish us.
Her guards ascetic
Were quite pathetic.
The girl in the jar is dangerous.

To the royal court,
Fleeing monks report:
We bring ill word, do not strangle us.
The Doom Sect has seized
What cannot be freed.
The girl in the jar is dangerous.

Their tidings dismay.
Advisors give way
To the monarch who will sanction thus:
Forces I shall send
To oust the madmen.
The girl in the jar is dangerous.

Up flowing spring rills,
Up wooded foothills,
Trudging loftily the rangers must.
By midday they hear
Lurking zealots jeer:
The girl in the jar is dangerous.

The fanatics warn
Like stoic first born:
This shrine we claim, do not anger us.
Or we shall decrease
The incarnate's peace
The girl in the jar is dangerous.

King's agents prevail,
Search underground trail,
Find a bottled form which answers thus:
Sleep no longer binds
This mountainside shrine.
The girl in the jar is dangerous.

Skies are imploding,
Landscapes are folding,
A mind in a jar is dangerous.
O the world is due
Its doomsday brew, BUT...
Is woken god a mere stranger us?

[Secular Sanity]

You're too modest but you probably know that.

 Bravo, C C!

Thanks for sharing.

[C C]

Still generic enough if you don't live in the US during November.


Where the hell is Davidson? -- CC (See See)

When is Davidson returning?
We're assembled here... waiting, yearning.
Beast and fowl are carved for the feast.
But an empty seat at table's end
Casts doubt upon what we intend.

When is Davidson coming back?
In his quick trip out did he lose track
Of dinner's time and signs above?
How many holiday sheaves accrue
At raptus warehouse he dashed to?

When is Davidson returning?
His bread, lamb, fish and wine are turning
Eyes from jams, yams and pumpkin pies.
His employee is still talking shop,
Predicting any jiff he'll drop.

When is Davidson coming back?
Was he assailed by a heart attack?
Trumpets and Babylon strumpets!
Could he at least get here long before
There are maggots rife in the boar?

When is Davidson returning?
This patient party is discerning
That though our vigil has gone flat,
It's clearly not due to misplaced trust.
He's just not as famished as us.

Did others give it this much slack?
In the Clarion we read that lack
Of saucer to take them above
Justified all the more their hope.
Hot damn, now that's the way to cope!