On October 21, 1962, Sylvia wrote her therapist-turned-confidante Ruth Beuscher a long letter in which, describing her writing, she said, “I have become a verb instead of an adjective.” About three months later, in a letter to her close friend Marcia Brown Stern, she took this a step further: “I feel like a very efficient tool or weapon,” she wrote. Although the phrase referred to motherhood, it’s hard not to apply it to Plath’s relationship with her poems from the time. Reading them, especially those very last poems from January and February 1963, I am reminded of the old joke about a small person walking a very large dog:
"My first book, The Colossus, I can't read any of the poems aloud now. I didn't write them to be read aloud. They, in fact, quite privately, bore me. These ones that I have just read, the ones that are very recent, I've got to say them, I speak them to myself, and I think that this in my own writing development is quite a new thing with me, and whatever lucidity they may have comes from the fact that I say them to myself, I say them aloud."
It was a pleasure to read this. Really look forward to your book.
"My first book, The Colossus, I can't read any of the poems aloud now. I didn't write them to be read aloud. They, in fact, quite privately, bore me. These ones that I have just read, the ones that are very recent, I've got to say them, I speak them to myself, and I think that this in my own writing development is quite a new thing with me, and whatever lucidity they may have comes from the fact that I say them to myself, I say them aloud."
~ Peter Orr Interview
Scary to feel you are being moved by another force even if it's poetry. Also exciting to be so immersed in such richness. Hold on tight!