‘Liberating Poetic Chaos’

Sylvia Plath worked hard at her poetry throughout the 1950s.  She studied, read widely and mastered a range of poetic techniques, writing hundreds of poems.  Her work received awards and prizes, was published in magazines and Plath was regarded as — and regarded herself as — a ‘success’. 

However, by 1960, Plath had become dissatisfied with her oeuvre.  In her poem ‘Stillborn’, she writes, ‘These poems do not live: it’s a sad diagnosis.’   Plath had come to the painful realisation that the poems she had hitherto been writing were not an authentic expression of her inner life.  In conforming her writing to the conventional tastes of the academic, literary coterie she had hitherto aspired to join, she had suppressed her unique, personal ‘chaos’, considering it irrelevant to the type of poetry she thought she ought to produce.  However, limiting her work to the expectations and tastes of others led to the development of the artificial, ventriloquial voice that characterised much of Plath’s earlier poetry.

Plath learned to express, channel and write from her chaos partly by working on exercises with her husband, Ted Hughes.  Plath’s stunning poem, ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ began in this way — ‘describe the view from the bedroom window’.  Plath’s interpretation of that view was stunningly original and preternaturally powerful.  Regardless of theme, form or content, Plath was beginning to write from and about the creative violence (‘chaos’) that animated her spirit, her inner life: by liberating that chaos, she found her voice.

But what exactly is ‘literary chaos’?  W.B. Yeats once dismissed the work of a ‘minor poet’ because, ‘he lacks chaos’.  Although Yeats did not precisely define what he meant, it seems clear that he sought to combine in the term something like the position, attitude and visionary striving from which arises the distinctive voice and reflexive tension that informs and defines a poet’s characteristic expression  — and which constitutes their genius.   Without such chaos a writer might still write competent or even accomplished work.  However, although such work might be admired, for its formal virtues, perhaps, or for its evident lexical or literary skill, it will fail to convince, compe, excite or engage the reader.  Many formally and technically ‘perfect’ poems written without chaos — viveza, mala leche, duende, inspiration, vision, thorn-in-the-flesh — are frankly, dull.

Every poet has chaos and every poet’s chaos is unique.  The fact that a poet’s chaos is undiscovered, unacknowledged, rejected or even denied does not alter these fundamental facts.  Chaos arises from the combination of the circumstances of a writer’s life and work.   Personal experience, family, class, relationships, woundings, joys (etc) are the objective factors impinging.  However, it is the writer’s subjectivity (vision, dreaming, imagination, obsessions, beliefs, atavisms) that exposes, coalesces, controls, directs and articulates the chaos, creating true and original art out of that which was unspoken, formless and void — or merely written, formal and devoid.

Liberating Poetic Chaos is a short course that aims to help poets discover, explore and engage with their chaos and to begin to write from it. Drawing on the work of Sylvia Plath and William Blake in particular, but also other poets (Yeats, Kipling, La Riviere, Lorca, St. Paul) the course will also examine the interface of personal chaos with impersonality of the modern world and use techniques drawn from meditation and magick to help participants find the focus that will allow their chaos to emerge and shape their writing — ‘the light of the mind, cold and planetary’.

Below is the programme of study I’m thinking from working from at the moment.   I reserve the right to change it.