Back when I was writing with my friends Ron Collins, Lisa Silverthorne, and Brian Plante (we called ourselves “The gang of four”), one day Ron and I got to talking about poetry. He mentioned Edna St. Vincent Millay. I told him I’d never read her work, as I’d had a negative impression of her based on nothing except her formal and old-fashioned sounding name.
Also based on the fact she wasn’t assigned in school.
“She’s great,” Ron said. “You should read her.”
And so I did. Ron was right. Edna St. Vincent Millay is a smoking hot, blazing poet.
Even though I had a poetry class with Adrienne “Rhymes With Bitch” Rich, I was seldom assigned any poetry written by any woman (other than Rich and her reading partner, “Mad Dog Black Lady” aka Wanda Coleman).
Of Sylvia Plath, I’d only read The Bell Jar when I was young, and hadn’t really understood much except unhappiness. What a sad life, I thought. Her young children were in the home when she took her own life by turning on her gas oven and sticking her head inside.
Most people familiar with British literature know that Sylvia Plath’s husband was Ted Hughes.
Ted Hughes! I did know that guy, and did have his books. Poetry takes up little space on the bookshelf, so thanks to my undergraduate degree (British/American Literature) I had an entire shelf of British and American poetry (95% male-written) from the 17th Century to today. I read nearly all of this man’s poetry and did not fully comprehend for years that he was Sylvia Plath’s estranged husband and the father of her children.
After Plath died, Hughes went on to become England’s poet laureate, and, according to Wikipedia, “Critics frequently rank him as one of the best poets of his generation and one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers.”
I read all of Ted Hughes’ shit and only yesterday did I read “Daddy,” by Sylvia Plath, written shortly before she died in 1963. She and Hughes were married for seven years, but during the last year of their marriage, he left her with their two children to pursue an affair with another woman (mentioned below).
Another fun fact: I hadn’t known until recently that Assia Wevill, the woman for whom Ted Hughes dumped Sylvia Plath, also took her own life after Hughes left her in 1969, but unlike Plath, Wevill didn’t act to protect her children’s lives (Plath put wet towels to seal her kitchen and left food, water, and clean clothes for her children). Wevill also took the life of their young daughter Shura.
Here’s a sample of Hughes’ work. It’s from 1959, so he was with Sylvia at the time, and it’s clearly about the threat of nuclear war:
A real ear, that one. Best of the 20th Century. Ted Hughes, OM OBE FRSL.
This tin-eared jack-booted pedant did in not one, but two wives and one child, and is officially regarded as “one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers.”
The reality is, Ted Hughes must certainly have been exactly what Sylvia Plath called him: a fascist. He was a dull, wordy, little-to-say poet. I say this having read all of his boring, pedantic fumes while being told how great he was … I have a bachelor’s degree in this stuff and none of what I’m commenting on was ever indicated to me by any instructor, male or female, including “feminist scholars”.
One year after I was born, Sylvia Plath set forth the type of damage men like her father, like her husband, like Adolf Hitler and Reinhard Heydrich, like Joe Biden, Jair Bolsonaro, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Donald J. Trump, have done to our world.
All of them, the “leaders,” and all of their followers, their acolytes, their sycophants, their toadies — every last one of them — Sylvia described what they were. She wrote how she’d adored her father and Hughes until she couldn’t any longer because of what they were and are — and then she put food out for her children, sealed the doors of the kitchen, turned on the gas and stuck her head in the oven.
I understand why she did it. It’s no joke to say that part of her lack of desire to live was because she was a master poet and the man she married, encouraged, introduced to other poets, and who left her for another woman, Hughes, a tin-eared fraud and bully.
This isn’t truly about gender bias and its cousins, racism and classism, and the “patriarchy.” It’s about privilege.
Privilege for incompetents, narcissists, and outright evil people costs us all serious deficits in quality of life and positive self-worth. Men, you may be thrilled with everything about your life, like people like Dan Bilzerian and Andrew Tate say, but it’s more likely that you’re not thrilled with your life in all regards, aren’t that excited about your job, and don’t feel like you have a decent work-life balance.
Rationalizing any flaw one could enumerate, and making endless excuses for problems has destroyed countless scientific research efforts. Officially, seven of every ten research “studies” can be found to contain errors in data collection or analysis, and officially, two percent of research studies don’t just have flawed data, their data is fabricated. This process is constantly put forth as “opposition” to religious faith, as if these flawed, very human activities are somehow a reason not to acknowledge a higher power or to have spiritual beliefs.
Rationalization of failure and poor behavior has propped up rape, murder, and theft under color of authority in any organized structure, from the family to schools to churches, and in my lane — promoted the shittiest of writers with the least imagination to the height of bestsellerdom, awards, and unlimited cash and recognition.
Bill Hicks “got it.” One of his most famous routines was about the 1992 “classic” film starring Sharon Stone’s vagina, Basic Instinct. If you don’t know Bill Hicks, here it is.
Hicks’ famous “piece of shit, walk away” could be applied not just to Basic Instinct and other films and TV shows, but also to many pharmaceutical drugs, ultra-processed and highly-processed foods, factory farming and food processing, fast food and “fast-casual” food, clothing and fabric manufacture, cars, public works, the criminal justice system, cell phone service, internet service, furniture manufacture …
Anybody who’s ever tried to do a good job in a bad environment knows what I’m talking about.
None of us knows just how much these mind-chains have imprisoned our personal lives, but we can have a good idea of how big a price, collectively, those of us in the U.S. have paid. Life expectancy in the U.S. is more than four years less than any comparable nation. The U.S. retirement age continues to grow older as other nations allow their workers to retire at younger and younger ages. I worked for decades before realizing that my concept of retiring at age 65 was very much out of date.
When the murder clearance rate falls below 50% and your nation has the world’s largest prison population by percentage and numbers, it should indicate there may be some problems in the criminal justice system.
When three-quarters of adults are overweight or obese, it’s probably not a problem related to “personal failings” and a “lack of willpower.”
When there is no ability of any citizen to influence any decision through voting, writing one’s member of Congress, or even — as our local communities discovered recently — addressing local government regarding issues — it’s time to consider that perhaps, the way we’ve all been educated and raised — isn’t the most accurate or realistic.
I didn’t think this was the world I was born into. But I was so sadly mistaken.
The first step in any recovery is to admit that you are powerless over the substance or activity that has taken over your life.
I don’t want my daughter, my former students, and their families and friends to continue to live in these ever-declining conditions.
As individuals, we are all powerless to combat these problems. But together: we can. I want to say that AI technology will help but as long as these chains are present, improvement is likely to be halting, slow, and frustrating.
If I could die and come back as a medieval nun, I might just do that because yes, if you give things a hard look, that is exactly how bad it is. If you gave any two people representative poems of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, I guarantee 99 out of 100 people would say Plath’s poetry made sense and was emotionally impactful, while Hughes’ poetry was harder to follow and had little impact.
The people who said Hughes was “one of the best writers of the 20th century” would disagree. Along with those who deny that ultra-processed foods are bad for health.
Like that: it’s all the same.
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