What Sylvia Would Have Done

What happened today is I finally had a moment to troll through e-mail and found a rejection notice for an article I had submitted months ago. The good news is I had gotten to enjoy a weekend of blissful ignorance before reading the note. And it was also a rejection with options: 1. Revise the article and be more scholarly next time and the journal may let peers review my piece or 2. Revise it to make the piece shorter and they'll publish it online without peer review. If the journal was a boy that I had just confessed to crushing on, the editor's note was akin to him saying "I like you too, but you can't be my real girl friend in public, however your unruly nature attracts me, so we can fool around on the side."

As if a boy ever says however.

I can't help but think of Sylvia Plath.

My first introduction to Plath was through my sister who had read The Bell Jar when she was a teenager. I could tell there was something dark and alluring about the book for her and that intrigued me, but unlike my eldest sister I wasn't much of a reader as a kid and could tell by the width of the paperback that it wasn't for me. It would be over thirty years before I read The Bell Jar and only after I had read Plath's poetry, her journals, and listened repeatedly to the BBC recorded readings of her work. One needs a fairly deep mix of despair and exaltation to linger a long time with Plath.  I was finishing my MFA manuscript in poetry, had two children under five, was in a tenure mess at work, and writing, being a writer, became as essential as air yet as unattainable as breathing on Everest's  peak. What resonated with me in Plath's work and life was her struggle to find her voice and to have that voice heard.

On the same trip Back East when I found the old Rachel Carson book (1-6-10 post In Rachel Carson Country), I had bought two sets from the series Voice of the Poet, the book/cassette (yes cassette tape) combos that allowed you to hear poets read their work while following along in print. I was feeling the weight of New England's drizzle and gloom, so I picked Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.  Sexton grew tiring, her voice grinding with smoke and booze, but I memorized every pitch, tenor and rhythm of Plath's poetry. The fever of her desire palpable, the struggle to balance motherhood with the poems clawing to get out. The thin booklet that accompanied the tape included this excerpt from a letter to her mother, October 16, 1962, just two weeks before she made the BBC recordings:

"I must have someone with me for the next two months to mind the babies while I get my health back and try to write. . .I am a writer. . .I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name."

I heard a child cry in the background as she read. Last month I read Wintering by Kate Moses, a novel based on Plath's life around the time she made these recordings. It created a haunting and vibrant image of this struggle.

So back to the rejection. I try to imagine what Sylvia would have done. Plath would have taken the rejected piece and slipped it in a new, clean envelope, neatly written another address on the front, and bundled up her babies in the pram and walked to the post office.