Strephon Kaplan-Williams Books

We don't know if Plath's poem or poetry will last through the ages as poetry. It is certainly popular in contemporary America among young college adults. We think because it is about a father-daughter relationship. What appeals to these young adults is the last line, especially, "Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I'm through." Note it ends with the same rhyme ending in the first stanza, "Barely daring to breathe or Achoo".

Sylvia Plath
DADDY

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time ----
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off the beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine,
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You ----

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two ----
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

Sylvia Plath committed suicide soon after writing this. We note the natural tendency we all can feel when young that life is simply too hard. As with many suicides from their suicide notes and other things they say before taking their lives, the suicide person tends to blame others for their suffering and their need to end their suffering.

Is this such a good basis for writing poetry? Sylvia Plath was from a child on up describing the life around her in word images. She liked doing that. But then, Daddy died while young. Here I am explaining a poem by explaining a poet. Is this a No-No? Is this not what readers do, even if you tell them to experience the poem in itself?

This is the subjective premise, that the poem needs explaining by reference to the life of the poet and then also by reference to the life of the poem reader. This poem is one of the most popular on a poetry website because it gives the over fifty commentators the initiative to discuss through the medium of the poem their own experiences with daddies, with parents, with men who have fucked them over, so to speak.

It's much easier sometimes to analyze a poem's meaning in terms of the life of the poet, than to stick with the life of the poem and what that evokes for you. Since many daughters have difficulties with first fathers and then other men in their lives, this poem appeals to them as a self-confessional experience.

Sylvia Plath is classified by those who know as a confessional poet. They write in imagery as self-confession. This emphasizes the experience of the poet as part of the experience of the poem.

Thus Sylvia Plath has one a kind of immortality for her self-confessional poems by taking her own life. She supports her thesis of the difficulty of a woman's life, caused by the man, and proves the thesis true by a self-sacrifice of life itself. She bows out.

The poet is needed to explain the meaning of the poem. What could be more real than a suicide to illustrate the poem's message? How many poets and poems can compete with that. Sylvia Plath is her poetry. And because she is real with us, because she is her poem, then we cannot just read, we must experience with her her poem and what it does to us subjectively.

Perhaps then Sylvia's poems will last, not because she committed suicide, but because she confesses her experience to us and thus makes us confess to ourselves and our friends our own experiences of both the poem and the subjects she writes about.

Gene Derwood's Poem By Comparison

We have a practice here of comparing well-known poets to neglected poets like Gene Derwood and Oscar Williams. We don't push for certain results but we do have the poets 'relate' together through their poems. We choose Gene Derwood's most recognized poem, To Gordon Barber, Lamentably Drowned In His Eighteenth Year. In this poem Gene Derwood, my mother, is writing directly about a friends son. The Barbers were good friends of Gene and Oscar, considerably richer than Gene and Oscar, but the rich have their losses too.

Gene Derwood
ELEGY - ON GORDON BARBER
Lamentably Drowned in his Eighteenth Year

When in the mirror of a permanent tear
Over the iris of your mother's eye
I beheld the dark tremor of your face, austere
With space of death, spun too benign for youth,
Icicle of the past to pierce her living sigh--
I saw you wish the last kiss of mother's mouth,
Who took the salted waters rather in the suck
Of seas, sighing yourself to fill and drench
With water the plum-rich glory of your breast
Where beat the heart escaping from war's luck.

The poem goes on for several good verses. It is an obvious and heart-felt poem. Drowning has killed the son my mother writes about. But lack of love almost killed me. Confused? The trouble is that for me not touching me as a mother and the brutality of boarding school made me very afraid to touch a woman. I couldn't. Gene Derwood, the poet, could feel all these feelings for someone else's son, but for me what she felt was not expressed.

When is the right moment to express feeling in poetry and when is it the best to express feeling in another form, such as touching someone you really like? I had to find this out in life.

Gene Derwood does not suspect in the poem that the son has taken his own life, but a life is taken, presumably by accident. While Sylvia Plath talks almost directly about suicidal feelings and then the decision to "bow out" in "I'm through," Gene Derwood sings, "Perhaps you had largess of choice that you went gaily to the waves and all our mourning should be to rejoice?"

What Derwood means here is that other boys Gordon's age were going to war, not only dying, but killing other boys their age. While terrible to die at age eighteen, as the poet depicts, it is still better to die this young death than to "go to death by making death to pass." Note that my mother's logic is not too good here. It does not follow that by going to war as a soldier you will be the one to die or to kill somebody. Therefore it is not better to die like a drowned cat because of accident or suicide.

Another example is that it has been reported that Robert Bly's son died of suicidal drowning in the lake before their home in Wisconsin. Bly is an American poet who knew my father, but who in later years led the men's movement by emphasizing healing father-son relationships. No psychologist but a poet, perhaps he played too much the shaman-hero with his men because he did such things as having fifty men drumming out their masculinity all at once in the redwoods of Northern California. Robert Bly wrote about and emphasized the Iron John folk story in which the hand of a Iron John reaches up from a lake and grabs people and pulls them under the water to drown. Coincidence? Is life a coincidence? Or is it determined by what we do?

What is it about poets and death, anyway? Why can't they just write poetry? Why do they have to go through themselves the terrors they write about? Is the message, don't write poetry or you will be plunged into an abyss of archetypes? Too many poets have been either, rather crazy, or actually crazy. I think reading poetry is a lot safer than writing it. Do you want a list of all the modern poets who have committed suicide or gone crazy? I won't give it!

Sylvia Plath as a confessional poet is allowed to do anything with and to herself because she is she. Whatever she does is all right, if not always admirable, as long as she confesses, and confesses mightily. This is the attitude. Her only obligation to her fellow creatures is to confess all, and having the ability to confess all she has the right to "do all," and thus she takes her own life, not as simply an emotional individual, but as a poet individual. The poet fits the poetry and the poetry fits the individual.

Gene Derwood died of cancer at age forty-five. Cancer can be seen also as a kind of self-producing death, a bowing out of the suffering due to life. When cancer people are actually in their dying process they often cry out at last that they want to live, that they were wrong to neglect themselves, life and the body. Cancer people are usually too focused on others. They may feel great thoughts as persons and as poets, but these they project out there. They do not deal with their own suicidal depths.

The confessional poet, Sylvia Plath, does seem to do a good bit of "blaming Daddy" for her suffering, but she includes her own suffering. She expresses a dark love. She says in effect, "I am suffering because of you, Daddy!"

Is this not love? Is this not a kind of love that especially women know? They allow themselves to suffer at the hands of a man, and they think that this is love. Yet real love must always have a basis in strong self-love. Sylvia Plath shows in her poem and in her life that she is almost without self-love anymore. She has interpreted suffering as love, and such a view does her in.

Gene Derwood
SO MAN! (slightly edited)

Hallo to man, the pleasuring, lording creature,
Tool wielder of the brain and pottering hand,
Lord of the hungering mind, fierce hunter breacher.

Man thinks. Can anything escape such danger?
The vegetable must swell at his command.
The cow yields bursting, with her calf a stranger.
Dazed hens lay day and night at his demand.

The tree pulps into paper, as his speech
Requires the long-grown lives for reeling sheets
Of speedy words. All beasts pant fast to reach
the far-receeding haven where no man beats.

The hawking birds wilt down their startled creasts,
Meeting his vollied presence in their air.
The fishes thin, the heaving whales attest
With mammoth suicide, his fatal care.

He rips earth open for her ancient veins
Of molten splendour. Toppling floods give room.
Faced by his dams, the lightening knows his chains.

Carver of soap and carrots, steel and flesh,
Biped of upright dust and throbbing head,
Hurling your wilding intellect into the mesh
Of its own webbing, left by right hand led.

You blade, you scythe, recoiling your own swathe,
Forgives not the potter and the lathe.

Comment: This is written during the Second World War years and shows the ecological perspective of this perceptive poet way before ecology achieved recognition in the general culture.
This poem shows Gene Derwood's love of words. She writes with a painter's intensity in juxtaposing dabs of painted words and concept-forms to convey a lasting message that humankind is on scruteny by all poets at large. This poem reveals one of the primary conflicts in society. While the communists and socialists of Gene's day would say that the core conflict is between workers and their capitalist masters, this poet contends that the clash is between capitalist materialists and the poets of conscience.
While poets have not power, they do have righteous perspective. Capitalists and their followers, the consumers of the world, have no perspective on nature itself. The poet is powerless, except in perspective. Gene Derwood's poem here cuts across the throat of modern persons who see themselves as the exploiters of the world we live in and will soon destroy.

Dear Strephon, the editor of Rain Taxi was kind enough to forward your e-mail. I came to know and appreciate your mother's work through Willard Maas & Marie Menken who were my mentors, 1960 - 1970, and who earlier were your mother's close friends.
I came to write the poem about your mother from two combined sources: the few poems I have on hand included in Oscar's groundbreaking anthologies, The War Poets and New Poems 1940 and from the liner notes to Gene Derwood Reading from her own poems (33 1/3 rpm Clark & Way, n.d., (c) 1955).
I don't believe my style of poetry fits in with that of Gene's, but that does not limit my appreciation for her work. I discovered in my research that she prophesied her own death in one of her poems from which I quote the two lines in italics. ...and, yes, please include my poem on your site if you think it fits in. All the best, Gerard Malanga.

Gerard Malanga
THE FIRST BOHEMIAN

Gene Derwood liked what she called living in 'upper
New York Bay.' Far from the amenities. A rooftop world
of seagulls seabreeze air laundry unfurled
weekly. Sheafs of yellowed paper mottled carbons
shawls draped over end-tables, chairs.
Exposed plumbing, the kitchen neatly swept,
paint-flaking walls, smudged sun-lit
windows facing east and south along the swindsept fringes,
or the dream she soon forgot
among her mss, O velvet kitten is it you who claw
My sutured throat...?

(By coincidence I attended a party which Oscar hosted at the loft in '62 in honor of Robert Bly & James Wright - the only time I had opportunity to visit. So my description of the loft is largely reconstructed from memory's imagination, G.M.)