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No.cvmer 13, 1971
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Sylvia Plath:
Crossing the
Sylvia Plath, CROSSING THE
WATER: TRANSITIONAL PO-
EMS, Harper & Row, $5.95.
By ELIZABETH WISSMAN
BRUSS
Because it is almost a decade
since her death, there is a
spectral quality about this re-
appearance, this new volume of
poems by Sylvia Plath, which
seems like the fulfillment of her
own macabre prophecy:
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it-
("Lady Lazarus," from Ariel)
This is actually Plath's second
posthumous book, with a third,
Winter Trees, expected to ap-
pear very soon in its American
edition. In the chronology of her
short creative life, Crossing the
Water is prior to Ariel, the
agonized collection which ap-
peared in England, so close upon
her suicide as to be almost the
fruit of it. And if the poetry of
Crossing the Water is, as I be-
lieve, inferior to her later work,
it is all the more a reminder of
her artistry. These 'transitional
poems" (as they are sub-titled
are removed enough from the
death to cease being treated as
its relics. Instead of the bio-
graphical fascination with the
corpse of Sylvia Plath, perhaps
now we shall see some serious
treatment of her hard-won po-
etic Corpus.
The collection contains 56
poems, nine of which appeared
in the British edition of Plath's
first volume, The Colossus, but
were excluded by Knopf when
the volume was released in the
United States. Some of the ex-
clusions are trivial enough, ac-
complished but ultimately deri-
vative, laden and eventually ov-
erpowered by her Thesaurus-
words, like so much of Colossus
itself.
The old god, too, writes aure-
ate poetry
In tarnished modes, maun-
dering among the wastes,
Fair chronicler of every foul
declension.
But a group of five poems,
"Who," "Dark House " "Mae-
nad ," "The Beast," and "Witch
Burning," appear to have been
an unaccountable or irresponsi-
ble omission. Not only are sev-
eral of these compelling in
themselves, but-together with
the final two poems which ap-
pear in truncated isolation in
the American Colossus--the en-
tire series was originally a sin-
gle work entitled "Poem for a
Birthday." It is an ambitious
and severely private poem, as
it now appears in its full shape,
one which presages the privacy
of Ariel, and makes that book
appear less like the "spontan-
eous overflow" and gilt-edged
case of demonic . inspiration
which it has too often been
deemed. The poetry differs from
Ariel, especially because Plath
relies on vague mythologies.
reminiscent of the Pantheon of
Robert Graves, to provide pub-
lic entrance into a highly idio-
syncratic phenomenal field:
The month of flowering's fin-
ished. The fruits in,
Eaten or rotten. I am all
mouth.. .
Mother, you are the one
mouth
I would be a tongue to. Mother
of otherness
Eat me. Wastebasket gaper,
shadow of doorways..
"Poem for a Birthday" appears
to be a cycle of the progress of
growth and a disease, told in
terms of ripening rather than
decay, with crisis almost coinci-
dent with harvest:
Sickness begins here: I am a
dartboard for witches.
Only the devil can eat the
devil out.
In the month of red leaves I
climb to a bed of fire.
Without its predecessors, the fi-
nal poem in the sequence-"The
Stones," which does appear in
the American edition of Colossus
-seems almost beatific, with its
peaceful surface gratuitously
clouded by the irony of some
dim pain. We can not under-
stand why "This is the after-
Hell;" we do not perceive, lack-
ing five earlier poems which
chronicle the depth of the dis-
ease, how false, how facile, are
the notes of recovery:
My mendings itch. There is
nothing to do.
I shall be good as new.
Boss: Daley of Chicago
Mike Royko, BOSS: RICHARD
J. DALEY OF CHICAGO, Signet,
$1.25.
By DAVE FRIEDO
Richard Daley, in addition to
being mayor of Chicago, enjoys
the distinction of having lied to
Walter Cronkite on national
television during the furor of
the Deniocratic National Con-
vention in C h i c a g o in 1968.
Many Americans probably re-
member Daley telling Cronkite
his justification for using mas-
sive police force in the city
streets right outside convention
hall. The situation got so out of
hand that even convention dele-
gates were harrassed ahd news-
men were singled out by the
police as prime targets. Daley
calmly turned to Cronkite and
said:, '
Let me say something I never
said to anyone. It's unfortu-
nate . . but the television
industry didn't have the in-
formation I had. There were
reports and intelligence on my
desk that certain people plan-
ned to assassinate the three
contenders for the presidency;
that certain people planned to
assassinate many of the lead-
ers including myself. So I took
the necessary precautions.
On the face of Daley's state-
ment viewers probably believed
that he was right or close to it
What authority could immed-
iately deny his statement? The
real question is what respon-
sible official would blindly ac-
cuse Daley of lying? Responsible.
officials and thoughtful viewers
would take the time to get the
facts and figure out what was
the real story amidst the con-
fusion and chaos inside and out-
side the convention.
As Royko astutely points uot,
Daley had time on his side.
It was an effective ploy be-
cause nobody could dispute it,
at least immediately, and Da-
ley knew that the impressions
made during the convention
were those that would harden
and endure. His story might be
poked full of holes in the fu-
ture, but that didn't matter.
Daley lied because he had to
say something in behalf of the
insidious use of force by the
C h I c a g o Police Department.
Even high sources close to Daley
-Earl Bush, his press aide, a
U.S. Attorney and the head of
the Chicago F.B.I.-stated flatly
that Daley's story was a fabri-
cation.
In essence the television net-
work and Walter Cronkite had
been duped into permittin
Daley to use the medium of tel-
evision to perpetuate Daley's
own personal program of deceit.
But this was nothing new.
Over twenty years ago when
Daley was an underling in the
~.city's budget department he was
trained by the Machine in the
sinister and sometimes vicious
use of political graft, corrup-
tion and payoff. Daley's rise to
power is the ugly distorted Hor-
atio Alger story of a poor boy,
molded by prejudice and hypoc-
risy, who learns political manip-
ulation in its most base and
ignoble forms for the sole pur-
pose of stimulating his own rise
to power and, to perpetuate the
For the student body:
FLARES
by
Levi
A Farah
I A w t " . _
tyranny of the Machine which
fathered him.
It is the story of an Iish
Catholic reared in the blind tra-
dition of we-do-it-because-we-
know-its-right-right for .hem,
not anybody else.
As mayor, Daley sponsored
programs to build giant and un-
needed buildings, the monstrous
Chicago airport-things the peo-
ple could see and which prodided
means to stuff the pockets of la-
bor unions and big contractors.
It is interesting to note that
Chicago always pays the maxi-
mum wage. scale, not the mini-
mum as other cities. Structures
scheduled to be completed after
elections are often rushed to
completion with expensive over-
time payments so that Daley can
cut ribbons while he campaigns.
Armed with this "proof" that he
was doing his job, he then sys-
tematically ignored cries for help
by the city's poor, uneducated
and minority groups. He let an
aging "friend of the family" rule
the Health Department until an
almost unanimous outcry by
heads of the major hospitals and
health agencies forced change.
Daley had selected this friend
because he enjoyed the "distinc-
tion" of having delivered most
of the Daley family into the
world.) For their noble effort to
improve one of the sorriest
health records of any major city
in the country, Daley sent his
army of building inspectors to
work, as he always did when he
was challenged, to ram costly
improvementsdown the throats
of the upstart administartors.
They should know better than to
defy "King Richard." One hos-
pital alone was forced to add a
mililon dollar staircase to meet
the requirements of the building
code, a law written for the ex-
press purpose of providing a tool
to force reckless and unenlight-
Today's writers . .
Liz Bruss is a doctoral stu-
dent in English who counsels,
teaches, and, when not working
on her dissertation, writes re-
views for the Daily.
Dave Friedo is a second-year
graduatedstudent. in journalism
who finds Chicago interesting
as only a New Yorker can.
ened thinkers into the Machine
way of thinking.
Boss is a tale of corruption,
manipulation, racism and poli-
tical payoff on a scale almost
unequaled in U.S. history. (The
record of Tammy Hall in New
York and the graft of the Grant
administration b e i n g probably
the saddist of all.) Royko, col-
umnist for the Chicago Daily
News and whose collection of
columns I May Be Wrong, But I
Doubt It was published in 1968,
writes with a good deal of ener-
gy. He presents Boss Daley and
the city of Chicago brewing in a
por of sinister vices, boldly re-
ported. It is rather a sad tale
that Royko pieced together from
c a r e f u 1 interviewing and re-
search; The book is well-written
and Royko is fair yet he spares
no one, including the media.
People are quoted and written
accounts are used to corroborate
his view.
If there is one thing wrong
with the book, Royko could be
cited for hitting too long and too
hard. The story doesn't build or
try to rationalize from the myth
to fact. It starts with Daley, the
evil one, and never let's up. Roy-
ko shows us Daley the good
Catholic going to mass every
niorning, and every afternoon,
spending his time cheating the
people of Chicago out of govei n-
ment services. Welfare services
denied, hospital services denied
and responsible use of police de-
nied, leads inevitably to the di-
sease and death of many citizens,
But citizens don't have the power
to change their plight. What's
power. The vote. And the Ma-
chine buys, steals and muscles
its way toward winning this vote.
Each chapter of the book is
prefaced by a few' short pieces
of testimony from the trial of the
"Chicago Seven" presided over
by Judge Julius Hoffman. So
even though the book covers a
time span from Daley's youth to
the present, it makes clear that
all of what Daley's Chicago
stands for was accurately tele-
scoped into the misbegotten
events of the 1968 Democratic
Convention and police riot. And,
one does not come away from the
book with a feeling that Daley or
his kind are about to leave Chi-
cago. Unfortunately the Machine
is still intact.
Water'
Many of the elements of the
later poetry are here, in "Poem
for a Birthday"-even some of
the same neutral, self-absorbed
narration, in which the r-oles of
victim and spectator are com-
bined into one.
They are turning the turners
up, ring after ring.
We are full of starch, my
small white fellows. We
grow.
It hurts at first. The red
tongues will teach the truth.
Later, of course, there will be no
more pain in this victim, it will
all be bloody laughter ("What a
thrill-My thumb instead of an
onion.") and side-show barking
at one's own execution ("There
is a charge / For ,the eyeing of
my scars, there is a charge / for
the hearing of my heart-It re-
ally goes.") It is tempting to
discuss all the poems in Cross-
ing the Water in such terms,
since Ted Hughes has so plainly
allowed h i m s e 1 f teleological
hind-sight in arranging this vol-
ume of his wife's pre-Ariel work.
The opening poems, for example,
are landscape meditations, like
many in her first volume, with
the spine of the poem built upon
the chronological sequence of
the traveler's approach to, or re-
turn from, "the scene."
* The cliffs are edged with tre-
foils, stars and bells
Such as fingers might em-
broider, close to death
Many of the incidental decora-
tions of the landscape poems will
re-appear in Ariel, no longer as
places visited, but as visitations:
I do not stir.
The frost makes a flower,
The dew makes a star,
The dead bell,
The dead bell,
Somebody's done for.
There is a great deal of ex-
periment with diction in Cross-/
ing the Water, a steady reduc-
tion in the number of syllables
per word and in the number of
words per sentence. In an early
poem, in terms of its placement
in the volume, the lines enjamb
and a single sentence sprawls
across most of a stanza; in
"Crossing the Water," the title
poem and the last, no sentence
covers more than two lines.
More important, perhaps, is the
kind of statements or non-state-
ments which are being made
with these sentences by the close
of the volume - questioning,
commanding, riddling and curs-
ing, the texture of the lyric voice
no longer has the discursive
quality so prominent in The Co-
lossus.
Black lake, black boat, two
black, cut-paper people.
Where do the black trees go
that drink here?
Their shadows must cover
Canada.
The worn, the childish epithet
becomes a favorite mode of un-
derstatement, when hyberbole is
not enough:
I shall never get out of this!
There are two of me now;
This new absolutely white per-
son and the old yellow one,
And the white person is cer-
tainly the superior one.
The collection is more than a
group of fragmentary experi-
ments; there are full poems
here, but none which their au-
thor wholly approved:
These poems do not live: it's
a sad diagnosis.
. O I cannot understand
what happened to them!
They are proper in shape and
number and every part.
They sit so nicely in the pick-
ling fluid,
They smile and 'smile and
smile and smile at me.
And still the lungs won't fill
and the heart won't start.
If there is any thematic unity
to this volume, above the ob-
vious one-ness of technical ex-
ploration, it is the total ina-
bility to foresee any future for
her life and for her art, to un-
derstand any of the "develop-
ment" which may seem so ap-
parent to us.
.A last hook brings me
to the hill's Northern face, and
the face is orange rock
That looks out on nothing,
nothing but a great space
Of white and pewter lights,
and a din like silversmiths
Beating and beating at an in-
tractable metal.
The finest and the most fin-
ished poems in this collection
all concern aging and eschatol-
ogy.
The voice of God is full of
draftiness,
Promising simply the hard
stars, the space
Of immortal blankness
between stars
And no bodies, singing like
arrows up to heaven.
("Window")
In me she has drowned a
young girl, and in me an old
woman
Rises toward her day after day,
like a terrible fish.
("Mirror")
Crossing the Water is indeed
a rite of passage, but it is no
arrival, in terms of knowledge
or in terms of self-assured art.
The future is a grey seagull
Tattling in its cat-voice of de-
parture, departure.
Age and terror, like nurses, at-
tend her...
Photos .
Today's photos were selected from ART AND LIFE by Udo
Kultermann. (Praeger, $12.50)
This critical montage-equal parts of criticism and photo-
graph-presents a survey of the artistic achievements of the
Sixties. Kultermann's primary focus is on the Happening, which
he sees as coming "closer to the heart of the human situation in
our time than any other form of contemporary art." It is the
Happening, after all, which best embodies his notion that the
significance of today's art, in a democratizing sense, lies in its
capacity to employ elements of experience directly-without un-
necessary cultural filters.
Television, as process, becomes the artistic medium with the
greatest potential. In Kultermann's words, "Museums, theaters,
concert halls, etc., are cultural institutions set apart from daily
life, while television is part of almost everybody's immediate
environment."
For Kultermann, art is a means of healing a sick and iso-
lated society. Since primative times, art has been man's special
way of confronting his existence. But to do this in a democratic
society, old artistic props must be put aside while the audience
regains the stage.
U.M. FRESHMEN, SOPHOMORES & JUNIORS
SOUTHERNERS ONLY
if y-u were born and lived all of your life before coming to
Michigan in the Interior South (Tenn. Georgia, Arkansas, Mis-
sissippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Alabama) and would like to
be a paid participant in a U of M dialect survey and were a
freshman here last year, please call 764-0349 between 8 and
4 for further information and/or appointment.
We're onlyhalfa world away.
Come join us forless than half the usual price.
New low round-trip air fare
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Your dollar is still worth a dollar
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What else?
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