Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Poetry & Subjectivity (Who Is I?—Plath & Ashbery)



“I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart: I am, I am, I am,” wrote Sylvia Plath.

And John Ashbery wrote, “My guide in these matters is your self, / Firm, oblique, accepting everything with the same / Wraith of a smile, and as time speeds up so that it is soon / Much later, I can know only the straight way out, / The distance between us.”

When you speak, when you write, how many times do you begin a sentence with the word “I”? Well, it is I who am speaking, I who am writing, but isn’t it odd that the one word that represents my self—I—is the one word I have to share with everyone else?

The “I” of the poet, the “I” of the poem, the “I” of the reader—both Plath and Ashbery write from the poetic I. This is at least a convention of lyric poetry. So, Who is I?

10 comments:

garrett said...

This post is a little late, but we continue this lecture on Thursday with Ashbery....

nanuka said...

...Javier said he liked Ashbery a lot, so hopefully he will be there, anything that you recomend??

ZSEBORUCO said...

The Complete Works.

ZSEBORUCO said...

No te creas mai dir diana...
Dicen -lo cual es improbable- que su "Autorretrato con espejo convexo" es su gran poemario. Dicen que yo lo tengo y que no lo presto....no se crea! Pasa por el. No se crea: te lo llevo al rato....

ZSEBORUCO said...

y todo guadalajara dice:

javierjwoo said...

I only said that I liked the very few poems by Ashbery I've read. As I know this is the favorite poet of Sergio, I will attend the lecture tonight, if only to presence the debate between Ashbery and Plath fans. Hope!

nanuka said...

...we, the ones that like Plath, we are intese, remeber that...

szalvador said...

Plastic
Fantastic Ashbery
Ashbery Road
Ashbery Fields For Ever
Ashbery this Ashbery that
A day in the life
Ashbery your self
Ashbery I

nanuka said...

...I like more Salvador than Ashbery...

szalvador said...

Oh Lady, milady...