This poem arose out of two conflicting, but overlapping instincts. The first, my need to parse out my mother's encouragement for me to explore gender nonconformity in my childhood, juxtaposed with her transmisogyny after I came out. The second, to investigate my first experimentation with—what I then perceived as—drag, as a site of burgeoning queer desire. The meeting point: how both threads lead me back, inexorably, toward violence.
torrin a. greathouse on "Ode to the First Time I Wore a Dress & My Mother Did Not Flinch" |
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"From Sylvia Plath’s Tragic Death to Her Brilliant Life"
"Plath herself felt, as she wrote Beuscher, that these poems were 'written on the edge of madness,' and Clark astutely observes that 'Edge,' the last poem Plath wrote, 'gives the uncanny impression of having been written posthumously.' But there was also the 'iron will to live,' as Plath described it to Clarissa Roche, a friend from Smith who visited her at Court Green, the house in Devon she had shared with Hughes for less than two years. If only that will had prevailed."
viaTHE NEW YORK TIMES |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Dan Beachy-Quick on "Alcman 89"
"Studying my declensions, conjugating those verbs, the endless rote memorization of vocabulary, all felt meaningful in relation to this wild, instinctive possibility—that thinking was the body’s work, that apprehension in all its senses (grasping, fearing, knowing) was the thinking poetry could offer, a thought that is a sensation, as natural and instinctive as the hawk’s dive is to hawk or the mouse’s hiding is to the mouse, all eyes bright with purpose." |
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