Reading Response 6: Poetry and Plath

Sylvia Plath’s “Stillborn” really resonated with me this week. Normally her works are too abstract for me to get in to, but for some reason her extended metaphor of poems as children seemed truly apt. I think it’s the images. It’s so sad to imagine little poems with their perfect “toes and fingers” and “little foreheads bulged with concentration” staring “stupidly” at their ‘mother’ Plath, and not speaking to her (Burroway 312). It happens to every writer, it seems. Some wonderful idea comes along and you play with it and play with it and finally write it down only for it to lie there pathetically, not at all the vigorous, emotional piece you wanted. So you put the poem away, or in a moment of pure frustration rip it up and refuse to write any more about it. Perfectly normal. And yet, somehow I want to cry now for all of those little scraps of ideas that didn’t make it anywhere. They’re mine, mine alone, and I want to comfort them and baby them and turn them into something wonderful; help them grow up, as it were. And yet, like Plath writes, they are “Stillborn” and besides reusing some tiny scrap of their ‘genetic material’ in another new poem, there is really nothing to do. They’re dead, and we, their mothers and fathers are “near dead with distraction” (Burroway 312).