plath / hughes

I was thirteen when I first read The Bell Jar.

I grew up in Chattanooga, went to an arts and sciences magnet school (where a second language was learned from kindergarten on, where theatre and art were a regular part of the curriculum, and dissections of nurse sharks occurred in the parking lot) and we had summer reading lists. I think The Bell Jar was one of the options for freshmen, though I could be wrong. Did those list-makers know, when they put together that list, how much angst they were encouraging in their students? I had moved by the time I spotted it on the list, but being the reader that I am, I asked a friend to save her copy of the list (which includes all the grades' assignments) so I wouldn't miss out.

And I fell in love.

And I expanded to Anne Sexton and read Girl, Interrupted in the summer sun (while my mother changed a flat--I remember sitting on a park bench in downtown Appleton while my father looked on; gender roles in our house were always a little muddy).

When I was fifteen, I photocopied pictures from Plath's biographies and put them up my bedroom wall, which was entirely made of cork and tucked away in the basement.


And when I started my undergraduate career here at the U of MN, Frieda Hughes came to what was then called The Hungry Mind bookstore (later Ruminator, and after expanding to a second store in the Open Book, it folded), located on Grand just next to Macalaster. I made my friend Jesse come with me; this was my first "author event." (I was nineteen.) Hughes was touring to promote her own book of poetry, Wooroloo, and I sat, rapt, and guiltily kept thinking: This is the daughter of Sylvia Plath, this is the daughter of Sylvia Plath.



And, as you may have already heard, the son of Sylvia Plath committed suicide last week.

These kinds of things always rock me a bit, the early losses of people whose lives have always been in my periphery. (A side note: I'd been going through a Natasha Richardson marathon last week--Gothic and Evening and The Handmaid's Tale--and then.)

So my question to all of you, I suppose, is this: who is it for you? Maybe it was in high school, maybe some other time, but who moved you in such ways, in the days before poetry became a daily part of your life? Who began to open up those doors for you? Plath started it for me, and Sharon Olds really cemented it, among others, but I'm curious as to your beginnings.