Disclaimer: I never had a 'Plath Stage' but Nick Mount gave me
Ariel when I was finished writing my first book. I think he had an extra copy on his shelf.
I'm reading
Track & Trace (
Zach Wells) and come across
Kaddish which riffs on Sylvia Plath's
Daddy and is thankfully also very much its own poem. What I love about Plath's poem is what I love in this poem, the lean lines are engorged with violent, blooming sounds and levelled with domestic and physical imagery.
If
Daddy speaks to those primal anxieties, that mess of identity, language and its inevitably frustrating brethren--innaccesability--Wells'
Kaddish measure up the same fat cut with insights turned on their head, self knowledge busting the margins. The foriegn "Ach, du" becomes the clear-as-can-be "you" and the brute is the speaker, the man himself wears the shoe Plath's speaker didn't dare sneeze in for fear.
Plath has been criticized for her appropriation of history, her use of Aushwitz (Dachau, Belsen, the entirety of Third Reich imagery!). Wells' speaker, being "a bit of a Jew" (Plath) shrugs off the victim motif and realizes himself in the "stubborn, wicked and true" man his grandfather was. There is a full fledged understanding of being, a certain powerlessness of will in the act of recognition--Plath's
Daddy died too soon for the speaker to kill him whereas Wells' speaker needn't have known the man in life to know he is the very brute he's been told about in the family lore in which we're all subjected.
I'm so sold on those sounds: the "clear beer", "an Arab, a Jew", "Achoo", "Boohoo", the sounds in "threaded in her like a screw" and "chuffing me off like a Jew" are enough for me to have read and re-read these poems all week while I was supposed to be doing other things.
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