I met her on my 16th birthday, when her poem “Child” fluttered out of the homemade card my friend had given me and onto the linoleum high school floor. There, lockers slamming and snowflakes from the walk to school still melting in my hair, I locked eyes with the first poet that would rock my little suburban-good-kid world.
The poet was Sylvia Plath. There are full years of my life in which I would have shied away from admitting such a thing.
That same year, our English teacher asked us to research and present on a poet of our choice. During this time, we had a substitute teacher. He walked around the classroom, asking students who they were working on. When he came to me and spotted Plath’s picture on my computer screen, he chuckled and offered a conciliatory: “Don’t worry, you’ll grow out of her.” I stared up at him, unsure how to respond, heat crawling behind my cheeks.
“Plath is a teenage girl poet,” he explained patiently to my silence.
I tried to argue with him, but was at a total disadvantage, probably in part due to his estimation of teenage girls (and being one myself… “She is relatable” did not help my case one bit). I quickly learned that this dismissive attitude towards Plath is widely held. Sensitive to criticism and eager to impress, I decided that to be someone worth taking seriously I needed to grow out of her. I hid my own poetry with the same sense of embarrassment as I viewed hers, and, for more than one reason, eventually stopped writing poetry altogether.
I found my way back to poetry before I found my way back to Plath. It wasn’t until the first year of my Masters of Creative Writing, when I was given the task of researching a writer of my choice, that I hesitantly took her book off my shelf – her Collected Poems, gifted to me by my little sister one Christmas back in high school. A book I had toted from apartment to apartment yet had barely opened. In the front cover my sister had scrawled, “Because Sylvia just gets it.”
“Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing,” that first poem I read of hers says. As I re-immersed myself in her work, I felt as if Plath had indeed been filling my clear eye with “colour and ducks, / The zoo of the new” on that very first encounter, back in Grade 10. “She gets it,” my sister and I had said, but perhaps what we had meant is that she was putting words to things we didn’t know words could be put to. Instinctively, I wanted to be able to do the same – to mess around with images and language until it created something new and strange and, at the same time, deeply recognizable.
And, for the record Mr. Substitute Teacher, I find her much more “relatable” in my mid-twenties (now a substitute teacher myself!) than I ever did at sixteen, and I think you would, too. Her malaise with modernity, her wit, her attempt to infuse a world with beauty and meaning when it seems full of anything but… not to mention that she makes elegant language look effortless!
Anyway, all that to say, when Plath said,
With luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content
Of sorts. Miracles occur.
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance
Miracles. The wait’s begun again,
The long wait for the angel,
For that rare, random descent,
I felt that.
Mirjana Villeneuve recently graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. Her work has been published in print and online in publications such as Blank Spaces, untethered, Hungry Zine, and the Lake Effect 9 Anthology (Upstart Press, 2019). She now works as a high school teacher in Ottawa, Ontario.