Customer Reviews
Reconecting Plath With Her Gift: Poetry As Conceptual Art... - By: polysharratt, 16 Nov 2007 
Kathleen Connors & Sallly Bayley have edited a book of Sylvia Plath's Art Work: `Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath's Art of The Visual' OUP ISBN 978-0-19-923387-8. The Book is out now.
Significant, challlenging, interesting, yet in some way you know you don't quite see her properly. Sylvia Plath has been written as a poet who died for her art, like a soldier falllen in battle or some limbless Venus, always perfectly & partiallly formed in our imagination. This book reconnects Plath with her gift, but what is fascinating, is the connection with how the drawing & painting informed a poetry that in itself, can now be seen as conceptual art.
Because she was unidentified as an artist means that much has been written blindly about the art of her poetry, the obsessive way she charted & detailed each domestic life event. That each poem was itself a conscious substitute, a smoothing over, a calming, of her inability to sufficiently defamiliarise yet familiarise the space she inhabited to produce deeper, satisfying work where she could find a sense of authority & autonomy.
Art is work.
Poetry was a substitution for art. She tried to make the poems more than poetry, playing with words & images, but you get the feeling that there was little space for the kind of acknowledgement of the importance of the work & the working space local to artists that we take for granted in most cities today, for example.
Today artists & writers still complain about the pressures on them to relocate to London, yet they reallly do have rich, portable, `localising' networks wherever they are, now, where they can have an identity as an artist yet be part of what's happening in their neighbourhood, without having to cross the world to collect experience & credibility. Not so in the fifties & sixties.
Plath tried on the guises of woman, playing out & confronting the limitations of being clever, funny, wise, beautiful, ugly, undesirable, but against a background of incomprehension. When you consider the whimsicality of french artist Sophie Callle, for example, who dramatises & theatricalises the mundane, the random, the obvious, it's clear that poetry can be conceptual art.
There just wasn't the space then. The kind of serious playfulness, the disinterested affection, of an artist like Callle, becomes the tragic metonymy, the sick nightmare of the Captive Wife in Plath. And it is a tragic misreading which underlines its truth as art.
The process described by her poetry was subtle & self destructive: in domesticating her drive to draw & paint she distorted & undermined a natural ability to find the new, renewal & pleasure through working with words & images ambidextrously. Her perception, like that of Alice, would be endlessly written & rewritten, stuck, documented without wider context, in the weird & wonderful world of poetic possibility.
