Journals

Journal: It appears there are several definitions. The first and most commonly used defines a  newspaper, (true to the French root word jour - day - and its offspring noun journaliste) or magazine. The second denotes a diary or private record of daily events, observations and thoughts. There is a third, more obscure definition, relating to that part of an axle or shaft that rests on bearings. If you're interested in mechanics, feel free to look it up, but here we're sticking with newspapers and diaries.

Not counting a number of what are called 'freesheets', the UK's national daily news publications currently number eleven. The oldest established is The Times (1785) and the most widely read is The Sun (1.2 million copies daily). Some even have the word daily in their names (Express, Mail, Mirror, Star and Telegraph). For the sake of completeness, the other national dailies are the Financial Times, Guardian, I and Morning Star. Then there is a host of daily newspapers at a regional or local level, like the Blackpool Gazette (for which I write a monthly football column during the season). 

Of course, not all news journals are daily. The titles listed above actually only appear on week days, but most of them also have a weekly companion, featuring the word Sunday in their names. The exception is the Observer, which also happens to be the longest established (1791).

Beyond newspapers, there are also hundreds of journals, more usually called magazines or periodicals, that are published sometimes weekly but usually monthly, devoted to specific areas of general interest. such as aviation, cars, cookery, fashion, gardening, geography, history, knitting, music, photography, politics, sailing, science, and various sports too numerous to mention.

Finally under the first definition come the rather more high-brow journals devoted to specialist rather than general interests, where university academics publish research papers, unveil discoveries, debate theories, intellectualise in refined ways about arcane or leading-edge knowledge of astronomy, chemistry, linguistics, literature, medical science, physics or whatever floats their cranial boats.

journal entry

However, what I really want to write about is journal as in diary, or as the French would call it, journal intime as opposed to agenda or engagement calendar. I have kept one at various times in my life. I've destroyed them all, just as Ted Hughes burned Sylvia Plath's last diary shortly after she committed suicide.

Many famous people  have had their journals made public (often after their death). Among the earliest was the  English diarist Samuel Pepys, who kept a dairy of his daily life from 1660 for ten years (it runs to over a million words). Then there was Daniel Defoe, whose 'Journal Of The Plague Year' recounts the awful events of 1665/1666. The latter is not a true journal, given that Daniel was only five years old at the time of the Great Plague, but it is based on the contemporary diaries of his uncle Henry Foe.

Over the last few hundred years, the journals of many famous artists, authors, politicians, scientists and society figures have been published, and not always posthumously, from Dorothy Wordsworth and Charles Darwin to Captain Scott, Virginia Woolf, Anne Frank, Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela and Edwina Currie. They differ from autobiographies and offer interesting insights into the authors and their milieu. if one has the inclination and the luxury of time to read them.

I mentioned the poet Sylvia Plath just now, and it was Cynthia Kitchen's blog about a favourite poet (or two) that made me home in on Plath - and by extension Ted Hughes. Sylvia Plath wrote a diary from January 1st 1944 (aged eleven) until her death in February 1963 (aged just thirty). The early volumes of diaries remain unpublished and are currently housed at Indiana University in Bloomington, for research purposes. Her adult diaries, commencing in 1950 when she became a student at Smith College and covering the next dozen years, were first published in abridged form in 1982 as 'The Journals of Sylvia Plath'. They were edited by Frances McCullough, with Ted Hughes as consulting editor. Hughes withheld two diaries from that publication, in addition to the final diary that he claimed to have destroyed because it contained passages he didn't want her children to have to read. Eventually, the two withheld diaries were yielded up and in 2000, the publication of 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath', containing 50% previously unpublished material, was hailed as a true literary event, giving as it did a fascinating insight into the woman, the writer and her ultimately tragic life.

posthumously published diaries

For anyone unfamiliar with the tangled web that was the relationship between Plath and Hughes, here's a quick overview. Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, USA in 1932. She was a bright and precocious young lady (IQ of 160) who started writing poetry aged eight. At eighteen, she went to college to study Literature, developed a habit of self-harming and made her first attempt at committing suicide. She won a scholarship to come to the UK and study at Newnham College, Cambridge. She met Ted Hughes at a party in February 1956. They admired each other's poetry. Hughes was a couple of years older than her, had studied English at Pembroke College, Cambridge and had just had his first work published. They were married four months after they met. As Plath put it:

"We kept writing poems to each other. Then it just grew out of that, I guess, a feeling that we both were writing so much and having such a fine time doing it, we decided that this should keep on."

They moved to America for a couple of years and Plath taught briefly at her alma mater, while Hughes taught at the University of Massachusetts, but returned to the UK in 1959 and bought a flat in London. 1960 had all the hallmarks of a propitious year. Hughes published 'Lupercal' a prize-winning poetry collection, their first child was born, and Plath published 'The Colossus', her first poetry collection. 

By 1961, Sylvia was confiding that she was in an abusive relationship, and that Ted's physical violence towards her. caused her to miscarry her second pregnancy. That summer they bought a house in rural Devon, where their second child was born at the beginning of 1962. They had let their London flat to a couple of writers, David and Assia Wevill and soon Hughes was embroiled in an affair with Assia (with whom he was also to have a child). Plath's reaction was to try and commit suicide again by deliberately crashing her car. Ted and Sylvia separated in the autumn of 1962 and she moved back to London with her two small children to rent a flat in Primrose Hill, in a house that W.B. Yeats had formerly occupied.

The winter of 1962–1963 was one of the coldest on record in the UK. It was dubbed The Big Freeze. In her tiny flat Sylvia went into a burst of creativity, completing a novel and most of the poems that would comprise the posthumous collection 'Ariel', but the flat was a miserable place, the pipes froze, the children—now two years old and nine months—were often sick, and the house had no telephone. She sank into a deep depression. Her novel, 'The Bell Jar', was published in January 1963 and was met with critical indifference. She wrote to Hughes in early February saying she was planning to return to the USA with her children. Maybe she was hoping that would bring him back. He did visit her, but clearly it didn't go well. By then he was already in a relationship with another woman in addition to Assia. In fact he was with this third amour on the night Sylvia decided to take her own life.

On the morning of Monday 11th February, with her children still sleeping soundly, she sealed herself in her kitchen, with towels and tape to stop the fumes from spreading to the rest of the flat, turned on the gas oven and put her head deep inside it. 

cancelled passport

As Plath lay dying in her freezing Fitzroy Road flat on that Monday morning, barely a mile away on the other side of a snow-covered Primrose Hill, the Beatles commenced  recording their debut LP 'Please Please Me' at Abbey Road studio 2. They laid down the whole album in a single long day, fuelled by milk to keep their voices functioning, and finished late in the evening. A leading Beatles chronicler (whose first wife, I was told, also committed suicide) later wrote: "There can scarcely have been 585 more productive minutes in the history of recorded music" 

Ever since I've known that two such culturally significant events - a bright beginning, a sad ending - happened so very close together in space and time, I've been fascinated by the fact. I've been mulling over the possibility of writing a poem that imaginatively ties the two events of that singular day together, and now I've realised the opportunity, with the slightest sprinkling of poetic licence.  I hope I've succeeded. You'll be the judges of that.

A Singular Day (11th February 1963)

Milk bottles stand forlorn sentinels

on a doorstep at 10 am as the Beatles plug in,

first take of the day: There's A Place.

Some dark tragedy begins when pipes,

passion, hopes freeze. 23 Fitzroy Road also

home to WB Yeats, a blue plaque attests.

Does she, too, cast a cold eye, Medea like,

then decide to spare her babies her fate, even as

icy talons grip her wearied heart?

Do You Want To Know A Secret?

What horrors that final journal could spill,

a truth too awful to tell. Misery.

She seals the room with deliberation,

turns on that slow, monoxide hiss and lays

head deep within the stove as peace

comes dropping slow, a woozy whirling

blackness into the run-out groove of eternity,

earthbound, no more play.

Over the hill, barely a snowy mile away,

the Beatles tear into A Taste Of Honey, and how

Sylvia had loved her bees,

those messengers between gods

and men, symbolic of a rustic idyll that proved

illusory, happiness beyond reach.

All afternoon, shocked friends come

and go, woeful witness to this quiet drama,

some wracked by tears, some with guilt

while in Abbey Road the Beatles

power on though Chains, Anna  and Hold Me Tight.

They're shredded, getting very near the end.

A bottle of milk hastily downed,

one last Twist And Shout belted out

at full throttle. Job done

...except for reverberations in the ether of 

Love, Love me do. The Beatles board their train

to Lime Street. A hearse negotiates the wintry night.

Sylvia Plath and child 

As a footnote, Ted Hughes didn't write another poem for three years after Sylvia's death, but as her widower, he became the executor of his wife's personal and literary estates. Assia Wevill also committed suicide by gassing herself and her child some six years later. Ted Hughes eventually remarried and  became Poet Laureate.

Thanks for reading, S :-(

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A Favourite Poet (or Two)

The problem in choosing one poet from the legions that have had an influence over a lifetime is the feeling that there are ghosts gathering in the room, perhaps displeased with my choices. So it must be those alchemists of the language who “ blew me away “ on first reading them, who made me fall in love with poetry when I had no intention of writing any.

Dylan Thomas drew me to visit Laugharne and I still have a painting of him sitting in his workroom overlooking the estuary of the river Taff writing the wonderful “Fern Hill,” “And Death shall have no Dominion.” The dissolute lifestyle and too - young death were part of the attraction for me. Brendan Kennelly was a poet who I felt connected with, each time I read him something different emerged. Someone said a poem should move the head, the tongue and the heart and I try to remember this as a guide. Another Irish poet, whose eccentric style was a joy to read was Paul Durcan, who I was lucky to meet on a course and really enjoyed his company.

So after this preamble I have selected the two greatest influencers, in my honest but totally unoriginal opinion as mind-blowers. They are Ted and Sylvia. I was hooked years ago by Plath, not having read anything to compare with her, and Hughes’s affinity with nature has produced some of the best writing on this subject I have read.

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston Massachusetts USA in 1932 and was educated in that country until she received a Fulbright scholarship to study at Cambridge England. It was here she met Ted Hughes and an immediate relationship was formed. Sylvia wrote poems tied to her personal experience and used starkly expressive work tied to a feeling of alienation. Her well known poems are “Daddy” “Lady Lazarus” and the novel “The Bell Jar”. She was a major poet of the Confessional school which Robert Lowell belonged to.

Ted Hughes was born in Mytholmroyd in 1930 deep in the Calder Valley of West Yorkshire and was heavily influenced by the huge overhanging cliff there and his adventures in the countryside making him have a realistic, non sentimental view of nature. He had an attachment to folklore and mythology. He went to Cambridge University in 1951 and married Plath in 1956.

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

Their story is not a happy one although their meeting of hearts, souls, body and mind produced strong, passionate poetry, Ted didn’t fit the restrictions of children and marriage and escaped from their farm in Devon to commence an affair with Assia Wevill, who although giving birth to a daughter couldn’t get him to commit to her.

Sylvia, left with two young children in a London flat in the extremely harsh winter of 1962//3 killed herself. Ted was devastated and stopped writing for 3 years but then Assia also took her own and her daughter’s life.

It is a high octane tragedy and you wonder how Hughes recovered enough to carry on, remarrying eventually and becoming The Poet Laureate in 1984 .One tale he told was of studying English at university and the essay wouldn’t gel so he went to bed and a fox in his dream showed him its charred paws saying “ Look what you are doing to us”, He changed his course the next day to Anthropology. He died in 1963.

This poem was written after that dream and is his first animal poem –

The Thought Fox

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest: 

Something else is alive 

Beside the clock’s loneliness 

And this blank page where my fingers move, 

Through the window I see no star: 

Something more near 

Though deeper within darkness 

Is entering the loneliness: 

Cold, delicately as the dark snow 

A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf; 

Two eyes serve a movement, that now 

And again, now and now, and now

 

Sets neat prints into the snow 

Between trees, and warily a lame 

Shadow lags by stump and in hollow 

Of a body that is bold to come

 

Across clearings, an eye, 

A widening deepening greenness, 

Brilliantly, concentratedly, 

Coming about it’s own business 

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox 

It enters the dark hole of the head. 

The window is starless still, the clock ticks, 

The page is printed. 

                                Ted Hughes

You’re

Clownlike, happiest on your hands, 

Feet to the stars and moon-skulled, 

Gilled like a fish. A common-sense 

Thumbs down on the dodo’s mode 

Wrapped up in yourself like a spool, 

Trawling your dark as owls do, 

Mute as a turnip from the Fourth 

Of July to All Fools' day, 

O high-riser, my little loaf. 

Vague as fog and looked for like mail, 

Farther off than Australia. 

Bent-backed Atlas, our travelled prawn. 

Snug as bud and at home 

Like a sprat in a pickle jar. 

A creel of eels, all ripples, 

Jumpy as a Mexican bean. 

Right, like a well-done sum. 

A clean slate, with your own face on. 

                                  Sylvia Plath 

A more cheerful one during her pregnancy.

Thanks for reading. Cynthia Kitchen

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Confessional Epiphany

One bored day in my dingy Manchester flat I picked up a magazine, flipped idly through it and found a poem. I knew nothing about poetry except for the War Poets, a smattering of Shakespeare and some Tennyson read under the counter at a Saturday job selling corsets. I would no sooner have tried to write a poem than I would have attempted cartwheeling down the central reservation outside. My eyes flicked through this short piece of verse and I was blown away. What kind of writing was this and who is Sylvia Plath? I remember that moment because it had the same effect as when I heard "Love Me Do" for the first time. This was new, exciting and very different, setting up a hunger to know more. 

Critic M.L. Rosenthal coined the term Confessional Poetry, in reviewing Robert Lowell's 'Life Studies' published in1959. A branch of Postmodernism emerged in the U.S.A in the 50's which are poems opening to personal faults and frailties. Plath put the speaker herself at the centre of the poem. The literal self in Lowell's poems is the literary self. In some of Plath's poems the figures are generalised and not real life. She observed the poet should be able to manipulate experiences with an informed and intelligent mind, a perfect vehicle of expression for the orderly, disordered mind. The best confessional poetry has a universal appeal. 

There were others who had a fascination with death and took their own lives, John Barrymore, Anne Sexton among them and their life stories make compulsive reading. The poem that had such an impact on me is "Mirror".

(image credit Charlotte Unsworth)

Mirror 

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. 

Whatever I see I swallow immediately 

Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike. 

I am not cruel, only truthful‚ 

The eye of a little god, four-cornered. 

Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall. 

It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long 

I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers. 

Faces and darkness separate us over and over. 

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me, 

Searching my reaches for what she really is. 

Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon. 

I see her back, and reflect it faithfully. 

She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands. 

I am important to her. She comes and goes. 

Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness. 

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman 

Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

                                                                      by Sylvia Plath (1961) 

Thank you for reading this, Cynthia.

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Confessional Poetry

A quick definition of Confessional Poetry would be that it is poetry focused on the ‘I’.

It deals with subjects polite society would rather sweep under the carpet. It is raw, fearless, emotive and unflinching.

Or as Robert Lowell put it in his National Book Award acceptance speech: ‘It is huge blood- dripping gobbets of unseasoned experience’.

Robert Lowell, W D Snodgrass, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton are the four poets most often cited as ‘Confessional’. However, it was, and still is, a controversial title. The form is often criticized for being self- indulgent. Even Snodgrass, arguably the first confessional poet, dislikes the term intensely.

W D Snodgrass

Poet and novelist Lavinia Greenlaw says, ‘no one wants to be called a confessional poet…It suggests all you do is blurt your feelings. But to work explicitly with the self requires extraordinary judgement and control’. These poets aren’t simply wailing into the void. They are still working within the constraints of poetry. Rather like a doctor describing a wound, brutal but precise.

Confessional poets wrote about then taboo subjects such as mental illness, familial drama, suicide, and sexuality. Of the four poets mentioned. Sylvia Plath is probably the best known and loved. Two of her most famous poems, ‘Daddy’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’ are great examples of confessional poetry, dealing with the death of her father and suicide attempts, respectively.

Sylvia Plath

In our century, when many people have Instagram, Facebook, or whatever is the latest social media app, people often reveal the raw, personal details of every-day lives. In that context, it can be difficult to see confessionalism as a distinctive approach.

Much poetry today can be thus classed as ‘confessional’ even if it doesn’t claim that title or acknowledge the influence behind it.

I have written a slightly satirical poem to conclude my blog.

The Confessional poetry sentence
State who you are, what your purpose is,
the name of the poem - something informative
and honest like a post-it note on your forehead,
equally, describe the world in which you move,
if there are places you want to avoid, the nature
of your baggage, what you need to make a go of it,
in turn, define the meaning of everything, say what
will change and what will stay the same, making sure
you have allowed for sufficient instances,
then you can relive that moment of happiness,
the one you revisit so that it takes a toll on your health
and causes you to drink, developing crise de foie,
ulcers, anxiety, stress, headaches, an arrhythmia,
so that you want to sue the past for medical damages,
yet when it was suggested that you let this moment
go in the hope that your health might improve
as one might give up smoking or try a vitamin,
you said; what’s the point of living without any joy?

Thank you for reading and do add any comments you have about this style of poetry or today's social media confessional approach.

David Wilkinson

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