Nothing So Terrible

Was reading an interview with poet Mary Oliver yesterday in which she said it was a shame that the world has Plath as an example of what poetry is, because now they've got a certain impression of the art that doesn't reflect all its facets.

At least, that's my Next-Day interpretation of what I read that she was saying.

It bothered me a little.
I relate too well to Plath.

But what Oliver was trying to say is true to an extent, and from a certain point of view.

The assumption that all poetry is the tortured confessional of a suicidal woman is, like all assumptions, obviously only a facet of the whole. What is an assumption, after all, if not a portion of a whole, as in Saxe's poem about the blind men and the elephant? Is the elephant all of these things or none of these things?

All of them, I'd say.

I don't believe you can write much of anything without bits of yourself accidently getting into it, but it's only confessional if you are choosing to confess something.

Certainly not all poems have to be about something dark, tortured, or insidious.
Mary Oliver is an example of that.
She prefers to see the "bright sides" of things and offer those up to the world as trite solutions or an answer to societal ills.
The way I've worded that sounds highly judgemental coming from a woman who by nature can't help but see the bright side of everything sooner or later, no matter how hard she may try to focus on "reality."
It's all relevant anyway.
Your reality is what you make of it, and the opinions of others doesn't necessarily have to have any effect upon that.

Oliver writes a lot about nature, and draws all of her solace from nature, it appears.
I can appreciate that.
I draw strength from Lake Michigan.
And when my hair fell out at the age of fourteen and I had to adjust to thinking less of physical, material matters, it was comforting to think of nature; of how the leaves return to the trees in their season.
It grew back.
I admit I decided to think of Life in that way, and I dare say that is what has kept me alive through considerable strife - the philosophy that all things pass or resolve themselves, given enough time.

I digress here.

I think I only wanted to say that I'm glad of Plath. I celebrate that nothing is so big or terrible that it can't be put into words and then expressed as art, transforming it into a thing of beauty and strength in its own right.

I choose to make that a theme in my life and in my art.

If this had been Oliver's only criticism, I would most likely not have posted this. Additionally, she said that Plath and those of her ilke were mistakenly using poetry as therapy - and, using Sylvia Plath as an example, that obviously the "experiment" was a failure.

Why?
Is the assumption that, because Plath ultimately committed suicide anyway, that her opinion of the use of poetry was rendered invalid?  That her poetry is therefore less valid?
I don't suppose Oliver meant it like that, but that's how it reads all the same, and I think it's deplorable.

Of course poetry is not the same as therapy, and the only purpose for writing it is not that one be seeking solace from some personal torment. Of course not.

But it can be.
And who is to say that it sometimes shouldn't be?
The beauty of the medium is that it can be manipulated any way the writer wishes, and in turn interpretated in any way the reader is able.
A poem can be physical, metaphysical, personal, impersonal, free-range or follow the strictest of codes. The choice is up to the individual. Any judgement rendered by others is somewhat meaningless, unless the author reads what they have to say and realizes that the poem did not accomplish what they meant it to. And guess what? I don't think that makes it any less a poem. Nothing that we write and publish before the eyes of others is our own any more. It is shared and experienced and re-experienced meaning somethingdifferent to every person who reads it, because there are as many interpretations as there are people upon this earth.