power politics

Plath: me too, me too. When I first read The Bell Jar, I felt intimate with Sylvia. It was something about the body, merging with an(other) abject current, and there finding a voice. Now I sometimes wonder if I read Plath's death into her writing - and feel guilty that my reader's tooth/claw might have preyed upon her actual turmoil. But in whatever scorched earth, the ecstasy of Plath's language - its own carnival - disarms. So: maybe violence doesn't thrive here after all, even that which I fear in myself-as-reader. Plath's generous tumult seems to generate more of itself, with or without me.

Which is why I have to share this section of a four part poem by Adrienne Rich, "For Ethel Rosenberg," which features in an anthology I'm reading for my nuclear study, Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age.

But first, a slightly sheepish plug for Fission Kitchen, where I'm studying nuclear power, from bombs to bulbs, from light to might: Visit http://fissionkitchen.tumblr.com to learn more and take a short, anonymous nuclear survey.


iv.
Why do I even want to call her up
to console my pain (she feels no pain at all)
why do I wish to put such questions

to ease myself (she feels no pain at all
she finally burned to death like so many)
why all this exercise of hindsight?

since if I imagine her at all
I have to imagine first
the pain inflicted on her by women

her mother testifies against her
her sister-in-law testifies against her
and how she sees it

not the impersonal forces
not the historical reasons
why they might have hated her strength

If I have held her at arm's length till now
if I have believed it was
my loyalty, my punishment at stake

if I dare imagine her surviving
I must be fair to what she must have lived through
I must allow her to be at last

political in her ways not in mine...

(1980)