Beyond that she has voiced a strong, clear assessment of Plath, much as Alvarez did in his memoir, and it’s hard to see why hers is not, at the very least, as valid as his. As Merwin and I talk, sudden, tropical rains come and go. Merwin's father had violence in him, too. "I'm very sort of egotistical and impatient.". At a Halloween party while Ginsberg was away, Trungpa ordered everyone to undress. at last the wind in December Another problem is that Hughes may have been a violent man. Kizer, herself a potential candidate for chancellor, was outnumbered The only way to resolve this antinomy is to introduce a secondlevel reflexive causality: I am determined by causes (be it direct brute natural causes or motivations), and the space of freedom is not a magic gap in this first-level causal chain but my ability retroactively to choose/determine which causes will determine me. He has nothing new here except an eccentric (and baseless) theory about the origin of the “voice” in two of Plath’s late poems. I believe that artists today can no longer afford the luxury of splendid aloofness or untouchably tender self-indulgence. In 1969, she killed herself in the same way as Sylvia (by gassing herself), but killing along with her also Shura, her daughter by Ted. Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. He had begun to rediscover his "American" voice and to explore his family's secrets. His poetry has an onrushing, murmurous "Poetry is physical. There was a fair amount of physical punishment. They started to cut. Alvarez’s review, blindly unfair as it is to the painstaking treatment of Plath’s poetry in Bitter Fame, has helped me to distinguish two strands in her posthumous mythology. "Watch," he says. Yet Dido was a devouring figure who wanted to inhabit Merwin's In Boston, Merwin abandoned verse plays. It wants to be a forest! Merwin's first poems were hymns he wrote for his father. became infatuated with Merwin. very existence. a writer who lived with Merwin during the late 60's. still asleep beside me while Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Plath idolized Merwin -- she wanted to be pure like him, free to just write. and not going to bed with her." Hitler and Mussolini Weren't Evil Geniuses: They Were Idiots, Dante Alighieri Was Really Bad at Propaganda, James Salter: The Writer's Writer who betrayed all Writers (1), Hollywood, the world's top propaganda machine, Things in Hong Kong are not the Way you Think They Are, Sobre la independencia nicaragüense y España, Notes on the History of Slavery: Spanish Preferences, La Nobleza Castellana durante la Reconquista (3), Honey-Pot Searchers: The Best Jeffrey Epstein Theory Ever. Early in their relationship, they were invited to the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colo., a center for Buddhist studies where Allen Ginsberg was teaching. As Pound said, poetry has one pole in reason and one pole in music. He was a scholarship student at Princeton in the 40's -- Initially, Kizer wanted the prize to go to Gwendolyn Brooks, an African-American. His 1960 collection, "The Drunk in the Furnace," is less precious than Merwin's previous work, Lenore Marshall Prize. It was a very violent scene." Alvarez feels it was “tasteless” to include Dido Merwin’s memoir. © 1963-2020 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved.

“To lose one wife through suicide may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two wives looks like carelessness. Merwin and Graves quarreled. ), Merwin's father almost never spoke of his own family. Page One Plus |

The facts in her piece were double checked (by the poet W.S. Weather | " In his house, Merwin has a zazen Welcome Even then, Merwin Recall the line from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest: “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness”—does not the same go for Ted Hughes? It's like making a joke.

Another They were married in a Buddhist ceremony in 1983. Yet many reviewers have found it one of the most illuminating things in the book, and, like all the main contributors to Bitter Fame, Dido Merwin knew Plath a great deal better than Alvarez ever did. drops falling one by one into

Ms. Hughes appears not to have read what I wrote. Later, Merwin got back at Graves in a poem: "Opportunist, shrewd waster, half calculation,/Half difficult child; a phoney, it would seem."

The epithet "pretty boy" has haunted him all his life.

But James Merrill was chairman of the jury.

"Everything's got to do with listening," Merwin says. figures cowered together before the guru like a chastened Adam and Eve. (sign in | sign up). sitting in white. "Dido's ex-husband said she always wanted to own a poet," says Merwin. Learn how your comment data is processed. She returns to this again and again. under the moon The images seem etched; sometimes they come together with an almost magnetic force. He was in his twenties at the time, in fresh possession of a BA from Princeton, recently divorced, and exploring France shortly after WWII. I can't bear to be here!' Automobiles | Unlike most poets, he doesn't teach. Classifieds | Dido Merwin’s memoir describes how Sylvia tore up ‘all Ted’s work in hand: manuscripts, drafts, notebooks, the lot’, because he was half an hour late from a meeting with Moira Doolan, the head of the BBC Schools Broadcasting Department. But we need to understand it. Merwin's grandfather was a drunken, violent riverboat pilot on the Allegheny. None of the many snide comments that I quoted in my review of Bitter Fame seem to me at all witty and if Ms. Stevenson seriously believes that all she was doing was making fun of Plath’s “youthful absurdities” and indulging in “a little levity with regard to the self-importance of any artist,” then, in Dorothy Parker’s words, “I am Marie of Roumania.” And if it is a symptom of nineteenth-century Romanticism to expect a biographer to show respect and sympathy when writing about a major talent, then I am happy to be called a Romantic. Site Index | A minor symptom of this is that both became smokers under the strain of separating. A Merwin poem is a highly crafted thing. "I was not going to go peacefully," Merwin recalls. "The word Lowell used was 'history.' no one except those I knew Eventually, he broke up with Dana Naone. ". | When he was younger, his face was almost faunlike -- the eyes To find Alvarez fiercely proprietorial in the defence of a sort of idolatry of her, in the style of the feminists, is nevertheless dismaying (though Alvarez deplores here the libbers’ views on Plath). Trungpa's bodyguards tried to batter down the wind with many clouds When he isn't writing, he's down in his forest, trying to restore it to its primeval state. Enough with Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath Already, in this review of the latest product of the never-stopping Hughes/Plath industry.

But somehow I don't think she's a master." In 1952, Merwin published his first book, "A Mask for Janus." The house, small and quite dark, is built on the lip of a dormant volcano, Haleakala, that rises 10,000 feet above the sea. ( Log Out /  I myself suggested the book to Anne Stevenson (I am not a party to the Estate). Schwartz again at a dinner party in New York. But Merwin didn't return her affections. National/N.Y. “. And the complaint wasn’t presumably restricted to her correspondence with others. If, in the story of modern literature, there was ever a person who exemplifies ethical defeat, it is Ted Hughes.