Word: plath
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...point to his repeating Pound's advice: to remember the old virtues of economy, force and precision; not to be afraid to make readers think; to remember that poetry should be at least as well-written as prose. And Marc Leib's review of a posthumous collection of Sylvia Plath's play and poems has some points to make about what's wrong with the tendencies of contemporary poetry-writers. He complains about the endless, pointless description that bad writers insist on producing and after clearing Plath of the usually valid suspicions brought to confessional poetry, Leib makes a hopeful...
...role in photography than they have had in the other contemporary arts, and their work is strong. Diane Arbus, whose retrospective is currently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, speaks with the power of social critic as poignant and shocking as the biting poetry of sylvia plath. Her portrait of identical twins stores at us not with the duality of nature's superior creation, but with the power to draw us into an interaction with their freak world; her portraits do not scare us away, but take us directly into a curious, unexamined world...
...subjected the hallucinated blankness of urban life, mostly in and around New York, where she was born and lived, to a uniquely truthful scrutiny, like Eurydice with a lens in the tunnel to Hades. A year has passed, and now Arbus is as much a cult figure as Sylvia Plath; a collection of her photographs is due to be published this fall, and the Museum of Modern Art has given her a posthumous retrospective. It is by far the most moving show in what, to date, has been a generally boring art season in Manhattan. For Arbus did what hardly...
...Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (Bantam...
Though Berryman was a mature poet of far greater range and accomplishment than Sylvia Plath, the manner of their deaths makes some comparison inevitable. The most arresting similarity is a common rage and mourning for the loss of a father in childhood. Apparently there is no healing this deep, mysterious psychic wound, and Berryman's complaint is harsher than Plath's. Her father succumbed to disease; his shot himself. "When will indifference come," he pleaded in Dream Songs...