You're — Poetry is for everyone #6
An inspirational teacher and an uncompromising artist.
Welcome to the latest edition of poetry is for everyone. Each week I intuitively send out a poem that is speaking to me that hopefully in some numinous way speaks to you too. It is my intention to keep the selection diverse and interesting and introduce you to some new writers along the way. Feel free to make suggestions or recommend your favourite poets/poems to the group in the comments.
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The first time I read Sylvia Plath I was sixteen and boy could I not get enough of her heady melancholy. And O how I could relate to her pain. High school had not been kind to me, I might have thrived there if I’d felt safer but generally at my school it was about survival.
At age sixteen though I was heading into the Sixth Form where my year’s terrifying cluster of 250 teenagers raging against the confines of education had shrunk down to a far more manageable 150-something all of whom (or at least most, at a guess) wanted to be there. A real life bumper car frenzy fraught with danger suddenly turned Mario Kart as those of us that remained, breathed an almighty sigh of relief. The antagonisers had left the building.
Whilst a part of me remains vehemently at odds with the education system I was a part of (I wrote about this in a piece which actually sparked the idea for this weekly poetry curation if you fancy a look) suddenly school became more about learning again not just an angst-ridden social dance of awkward interactions, staving off bullies and second guessing how best to score points — with the less friendly teachers as much as the exams. But there were a few exceptions, my A Level English Literature teacher who introduced me to Sylvia Plath, was one.
Christine Fairhall: ethereal, artsy and everything a child who grew up reading Matilda could wish for in a teacher. She would have drawn beautifully as a Quentin Blake illustration too or better yet, a Tim Burton wide-eyed creation aching with vulnerability. Gentle, quirky, kind — think frizzy bob with a fringe, honey-coloured almost cartoon-like a-symmetrical hair, possibly dyed. I remember her wearing long flowing skirts, always colourful, oversized cardigans, chunky boots; her tiny frame always wrapped up like a bear hug. Black eye-liner, too. She wasn’t like my other teachers dressed fit for an office, she genuinely felt like something out of my imagination and much like me I can only imagine how she would’ve faired amongst the violently flung insults and sometimes chairs of my former peers from those earlier years, but I hadn’t been taught by her then.
She was softly spoken. She listened. It’s impossible to place her age given that every adult then I just perceived as ‘older’. I’d probably place her in her early to mid 30s thinking back but she had a wickedly girly laugh, it spilled out of her occasionally when she couldn’t help it. She hated the word ‘moist’. In fact she was the first person who ever made me think about words in that way — as feelings that you can’t shake off. Words not to like. Words to love. The deep, visceral joy of assonance, words that rhyme in secret through vowels alone. It changed my relationship with language forever. It made me consider poetry and writing completely differently; how deliberate a writer could be with their choice of words — that the really good ones didn’t waste a syllable.
There was something of the Sylvia about her too which perhaps leant itself rather beautifully to sharing the work with us with such extraordinary empathy. She truthfully conveyed the violent passion between Plath and her fellow-poet husband, Ted Hughes, who we had also studied the previous year with another teacher but never with the same gravitas of emotional investment. You really felt as though she knew them, or she understood their experience because she had known something similar. She didn’t romanticise their highly dysfunctional relationship nor the bleak reality of Plath’s suicide at 31, crystallising her forever amongst the tortured artist set which Elizabeth Gilbert refers to as those who consciously or not declare —
I shall destroy myself and everyone around me in an effort to bring forth my inspiration, and my martyrdom shall be the badge of my creative legitimacy.
Elizabeth Gilbert, BIG MAGIC
— cut to sixteen year old Sian who fell for those things anyway for a time, but Mrs Fairhall was older and wiser and perhaps what she knew already meant that she knew too much. She served as a portal to the truth of this complicated poet who struggled deeply to contend with life, and love, and motherhood and perhaps because of that, Mrs Fairhall impressed upon us the poem I am going to share with you below. It is the poem that goes against everything that the symbol of Sylvia Plath’s icon predominantly stands for and how I choose to think of her, for symbols are nothing without sustenance and this one I believe speaks far more to a vulnerable hidden truth by showing us her capacity for love and how she loved. As radiant with vitality as the flourishing child (Plath and Hughes’ first, Frieda) that it was borne for.
You’re
by Sylvia Plath
Clownlike, happiest on your hands, Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled, Gilled like a fish. A common-sense Thumbs-down on the dodo’s mode. Wrapped up in yourself like a spool, Trawling your dark as owls do. Mute as a turnip from the Fourth Of July to All Fools’ Day, O high-riser, my little loaf. Vague as fog and looked for like mail. Farther off than Australia. Bent-backed Atlas, our traveled prawn. Snug as a bud and at home Like a sprat in a pickle jug. A creel of eels, all ripples. Jumpy as a Mexican bean. Right, like a well-done sum. A clean slate, with your own face on.
I am now an affiliate of Bookshop.org so if you’d like to read more from any of the featured artists on our growing poetry curation, I have put together a selection on my page <3