Preparing to be Disappointed?

Listening to - Eight Lines - Steve Reich

Maybe the BBC are not that good after all. This article seems to be saying that the film Sylvia is all gloss and no substance. This may be the case; I am already prepared to be very disappointed but the article has a picture of Ted Hughes and a woman they claim is Plath who is in fact Hughes' wife Carol. (Update at 12:37pm - They have taken the picture down and replaced it with a picture of Gwyneth Paltrow).

They also have a picture of Shannon Hunt, a student at Smith, who processes Plath's manuscripts into online lists, dressed as the poet for a college ball. Reminds me of Woody Allen's dismissal of Plath in Manhattan :-

WOODY ALLEN'S GLIB LINE from Annie Hall: "Oh, Sylvia Plath, whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the schoolgirl mentality."

I am still in the middle of reading Experience by Martin Amis and have just read the paragraphs about his contemplation of suicide that he says he would never have carried out while his parents were alive and not ever now he has children. Thinking of suicide is an insult all suicides I think he said, probably meaning that a very few people may have a genuine reason for taking their own lives but normal melancholia is never enough. Though as this admission was prompted by discussion of problems with his teeth (which are far more painful than my one brush with root canal work), it does seem to be trivial from the start, which I suppose is his point. It is all a bit breath-taking what with the stuff about Nabakov and you could easily feel that you are in danger of sounding like Sting with what must be the worst and most pretentious line ever in a pop-song (sounds like a category at the Brit Awards). Witness in case you have forgotten :-

He starts to shake he starts to cough
Just like the old man in
That famous book by Nabokov

(Great tune though! Well the original certainly is. Not sure about the 1986 version.)

Now Listening to - Whore - a tribute to Wire

Resolution - Make the poetry less over-blown. I have been telling myself for ages that poetry should be passionate, the verbal equivalent of gothic and yet having read all the poems I have written in the last two years in one go, I have decided that they are just too much. They need to be lighter in voice if not in subject matter. Maybe that is just what comes of reading them all in one go, late at night.