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Take Your Poet to Work: Sylvia Plath

By Will Willingham 13 Comments

What if you could take your favorite poet to work with you? Imagine finding a poet in your cash drawer when you open it to make change. Or think about how much fun you could have with your favorite poet answering all your calls for the day. We can’t wait to see what our favorite poets will be doing in your workplaces on Take Your Poet to Work Day.

Take Your Poet to Work Day is coming July 16

To help you play and celebrate with us, we’re releasing poets each week in a compact, convenient format you can tuck in your pocket, tool belt, or lunchbox. Last year, we gave you Sara Teasdale,  Pablo Neruda,  T. S. Eliot,  Rumi,  Edgar Allan Poe,  and the reclusive Emily Dickinson (for folks who work at home). We even released a full collection,  The Haiku Masters: Matsuo Basho, Yosa Buson, and Kobayashi Issa.

This year, we’re building on the collection, adding one new poet each Wednesday, up until the big day. We started the celebration over the past few weeks with Langston Hughes,  Adrienne Rich,  John Keats,  William Butler Yeats,  and Christina Rossetti. Today, we introduce a 20th-century American poet, Sylvia Plath.

Take Your Poet to Work Day is just one week from today! Get all the details and a shareable infographic about Take Your Poet to Work Day.

Take Your Poet to Work: Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath Take Your Poet to Work Day Printable

Click here for a downloadable version of  Sylvia Plath Take Your Poet to Work Day Printable that you can print, and color and cut out for the big day.

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath, one of the most well-known female poets of the 20th century, was born in Boston in 1932. Her father, a German immigrant and college professor, died while she was still quite young, in 1940, but his authoritarian manner left its mark and their troubled relationship found expression in her poetry.

Plath moved to England after college to study at Cambridge, where she met and married English poet Ted Hughes in 1956. The couple had two children before Hughes left Plath in 1962.

Her first collection of poems, Colossus, was published first in England in 1960, and later in the U.S. She was known as one the confessional poets, much of her work—notably dark and often violent—was autobiographical and considered by some critics to be self-indulgent. A semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, was published in 1963 and reflects on her experience in her late teens when in a severe depression she attempted suicide and was hospitalized.

Many of the poems in her best known collection, Ariel, were written in the months after Hughes left. Of the poems, Thomas McClanahan wrote that “the everyday incidents of living are transformed into the horrifying psychological experience of the poet.” Joyce Carol Oates wrote that the poems “read as if they’ve been chiseled, with a find surgical instrument, out of arctic ice.”

Ariel, as well as two other collections, was published after Plath’s death by suicide in 1963. In 1982, she became the first poet to receive the Pulitzer prize posthumously for The Collected Poems.

Morning Song

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Mad Girl’s Love Song

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell’s fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan’s men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you’d return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

Learn more about Take Your Poet to Work Day and our featured poets

Check out our Poetry at Work Day Infographic and help spread the word

Discover more Poets and Poems

Post and illustrations by LW Lindquist.

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Will Willingham
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Will Willingham
Director of Many Things; Senior Editor, Designer and Illustrator at Tweetspeak Poetry
I used to be a claims adjuster, helping people and insurance companies make sense of loss. Now, I train other folks with ladders and tape measures to go and do likewise. Sometimes, when I’m not scaling small buildings or crunching numbers with my bare hands, I read Keats upside down. My first novel, Adjustments, is available now.
Will Willingham
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Filed Under: Baby Poems, love poems, poetry, poetry and business, Sylvia Plath, Take Your Poet to Work Day, Villanelles

About Will Willingham

I used to be a claims adjuster, helping people and insurance companies make sense of loss. Now, I train other folks with ladders and tape measures to go and do likewise. Sometimes, when I’m not scaling small buildings or crunching numbers with my bare hands, I read Keats upside down. My first novel, Adjustments, is available now.

Comments

  1. L.L. Barkat says

    July 9, 2014 at 9:07 am

    How do you do it? You totally caught the Plath look. (She’s a force to be reckoned with, both visually and in her poems 🙂

    Speaking of which, great poems.

    Reply
    • Laura Brown says

      July 9, 2014 at 10:39 am

      It’s that one arched eyebrow.

      Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Take Your Poet to Work: William Shakespeare - says:
    June 3, 2015 at 8:01 am

    […] To help you play and celebrate with us, we’re releasing poets each week in a compact, convenient format you can tuck in your pocket, tool belt, or lunchbox. We started our celebration two years ago with Sara Teasdale, Pablo Neruda, T. S. Eliot, Rumi, Edgar Allan Poe, and the reclusive Emily Dickinson (for folks who work at home). We even released a full collection, The Haiku Masters: Matsuo Basho, Yosa Buson, and Kobayashi Issa. And last year, we added Langston Hughes, Adrienne Rich,  John Keats, William Butler Yeats, Christina Rossetti and the beloved 20th-century American poet, Sylvia Plath. […]

    Reply
  2. Take Your Poet to Work: Walt Whitman - says:
    July 8, 2015 at 8:01 am

    […] To help you play and celebrate with us, we’re releasing poets each week in a compact, convenient format you can tuck in your pocket, tool belt, or lunchbox. We started our celebration two years ago with Sara Teasdale, Pablo Neruda, T. S. Eliot, Rumi, Edgar Allan Poe, and the reclusive Emily Dickinson (for folks who work at home). We even released a full collection, The Haiku Masters: Matsuo Basho, Yosa Buson, and Kobayashi Issa. And last year, we added Langston Hughes, Adrienne Rich,  John Keats, William Butler Yeats, Christina Rossetti and the beloved 20th-century American poet, Sylvia Plath. […]

    Reply
  3. Take Your Poet to Work: William Wordsworth - says:
    June 9, 2016 at 10:13 am

    […] Keats, William Butler Yeats, Christina Rossetti and the beloved 20th-century American poet,Sylvia Plath. And last year, we introduced the Bard of Avon William Shakespeare, beloved poet Maya Angelou, […]

    Reply
  4. Take Your Poet to Work: Elizabeth Barrett Browning - says:
    June 15, 2016 at 8:01 am

    […] Keats, William Butler Yeats, Christina Rossetti and the beloved 20th-century American poet, Sylvia Plath. And last year, we introduced the Bard of Avon William Shakespeare, beloved poet Maya Angelou, […]

    Reply
  5. Take Your Poet to Work: Seamus Heaney - says:
    June 22, 2016 at 8:01 am

    […] Keats, William Butler Yeats, Christina Rossetti and the beloved 20th-century American poet, Sylvia Plath. And last year, we introduced the Bard of Avon William Shakespeare, beloved poet Maya Angelou, […]

    Reply
  6. Take Your Poet to Work Day: Jorge Luis Borges - says:
    July 4, 2018 at 8:43 am

    […] In 2014, we added Langston Hughes, Adrienne Rich, John Keats, William Butler Yeats, Christina Rossetti and the beloved 20th-century American poet, Sylvia Plath. […]

    Reply
  7. Take Your Poet to Work Day: Rosario Castellanos - says:
    July 12, 2018 at 8:28 am

    […] In 2014, we added Langston Hughes,  Adrienne Rich,  John Keats,  William Butler Yeats,  Christina Rossetti and the beloved 20th-century American poet, Sylvia Plath. […]

    Reply
  8. Take Your Poet to Work Day: C. D. Wright | says:
    June 19, 2019 at 11:09 am

    […] In 2014, we added Langston Hughes,  Adrienne Rich,  John Keats,  William Butler Yeats,  Christina Rossetti and the beloved 20th-century American poet, Sylvia Plath. […]

    Reply
  9. Take Your Poet to Work Day: Mary Oliver | says:
    July 4, 2019 at 5:01 am

    […] In 2014, we added Langston Hughes,  Adrienne Rich,  John Keats,  William Butler Yeats,  Christina Rossetti and the beloved 20th-century American poet, Sylvia Plath. […]

    Reply
  10. Take Your Poet to Work Day: W. S. Merwin | says:
    July 10, 2019 at 8:03 am

    […] In 2014, we added Langston Hughes,  Adrienne Rich,  John Keats,  William Butler Yeats,  Christina Rossetti and the beloved 20th-century American poet, Sylvia Plath. […]

    Reply
  11. Top 10 Totally Fun Teaching Ideas for National Poetry Month | says:
    March 17, 2020 at 5:00 pm

    […] Edgar Allan Poe T.S. Eliot Rumi Emily Dickinson John Keats Adrienne Rich W.B. Yeats Langston Hughes Sylvia Plath Christina Rossetti Walt Whitman William Shakespeare Maya Angelou Wisława Szymborska Anna Akhmatova […]

    Reply

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