Hidden in Plain Sight

Sylvia Plath, “The Pleasures
of Odds and Ends”

Hidden in Plain Sight
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“To be true to
my own weirdness”
—Sylvia Plath
The Unabridged Journals
October 22 1959
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Drew a surgical picture—A greenhouse stove with
Some flowerpots, gourds—Squashes and pumpkins
Some watering cans—Shed with a hydraulic
Ram, black, glistening—With wet spider webs
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Loops and luminous—Strings, holding the
Whole thing up to—The magic rafters
Amazingly consoling—The beheaded cabbages
Inverted from rafters—Wormy purple leaves
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Tools, rakes, hoes—Brooms and shovels
All with their own—Superb identity
Almost magic—The selfhood of things
How they can convey—Complicated feelings
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“Sometimes the writing is—
so dense, so mentally
entangled and slow to digest,
I can only handle reading
a few pages at a time”
—David Trinidad, “Hidden
in Plain Sight: On Sylvia
Plath's Missing Journals,
Plath Profiles 3 Supplement
________________

Yesterday an exercise—Begun in grimness then
Turning into a new fine—Thing out of the blue
First of a series—Of madhouse poems
October in the tool shed—Roethke’s influence
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Dream of Stella Vine—Florid, elegant painting
My disgusting portrait—So exquisitely garish
Perfectly dreary and—Intriguingly misguided
An original representation—My so-so zest for life
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I love the way Vine—Exaggerates my expression
With heinous haughtiness—Dorian Gray haggardness
A luminous pink-white—Light on the scalloped
And easy face, bug-eyed—With pale blue eye-shadow
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Blue dripping drizzle—Dull green tragic remorse
Dim yellow reflections—A purging, a baptism
Deep breaths and—Possibility of getting close
To the world of things—And animal solaces
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Publishing poetry—Queen-bitch Arielesque
A blond boy named Dennis—Riding sidesaddle facing me
Young juvenile delinquent—One of a gang of youth out
For Halloween last night—Unrhymed & unreasonable
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“Her rigorous intelligence
and determination, her
powerful and demanding
creative drive, require a
certain degree of stamina
from the reader.”
—David Trinidad, “Hidden
in Plain Sight: On Sylvia
Plath's Missing Journals,
Plath Profiles 3 Supplement
_________________

Wet fresh grey skies—Dull smoke-purple and
Blunt umber afternoons—A double amazement
Ted says Dennis is—The rebirth of my other
Deep soul both handsome—And very troublesome
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I wonder about the poems—That are doing me now
I won’t ruin them even tho—Gripping and terrifying
The horror of knowing—That I’m really at bottom
Uninterested in people—An inertia of fatality
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Ted’s dreams about—Killing animals, bears,
Donkeys, maybe even—Me and our babies?
Ill-advised I think—To be write realistically
About his Mytholmroyd—Urge to murder me
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Paralysis again—I’m living with a man
Who has an arrogant—Cold careless rapture
A dark tour de force—Tattooist who’s here
Writing a murder story—With my blood as ink
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I’ve already written—Two unpleasant short
Stories Johnny Panic—And The Mummy
But a poem exists—About Ted and Daddy
With a cold mizzle of—Despair around me
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“One has to work to—
keep up, to decipher,
to participate in the
constant unmaking and
remaking of herself.”
—David Trinidad, “Hidden
in Plain Sight: On Sylvia
Plath's Missing Journals,
Plath Profiles 3 Supplement
______________

My manuscript—For a book seems dead
To me, so far off, so—Far away in the future
Surely I’ll perish—If it ever comes out
Beyond this monastery—Living here in New England
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There’s always this—Passive dependence on
Ted and people around me—To tell me what to do
I don’t have any old—Bad vigor and interest in
The world around me—I keep to myself.
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I should open my eyes—Write a daily journal about
Astrology and tarot, taking—Ted more seriously
I hate being a dilettante—But if I teach and get a
Ph.D. in America I’ll never—End up being a poet…
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“Yet what is at first foreign
and difficult, later becomes
familiar—she's indoctrinated
you, made you care about
each and every detail of her
—David Trinidad, “Hidden
in Plain Sight: On Sylvia
Plath's Missing Journals,
Plath Profiles 3 Supplement
________________

And I’ll never write—Writing is the only way to
Break thru my coldness—My self-consciousness
Despair, impasse—Then a dream about our
Swimming in the Salt Lake—A solid beautiful thing
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This light, this sensation—It’s a part of no story
But a thing in itself that—Works without words
But if I could use words—And felt the joy of writing
Again no matter what then—That would make up for it
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It wouldn’t be a dead thing—It would be a story that I
Could forget myself in and—Everything would just flow
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“the shadow always looms—
tragic life; she's won you
over to her cause. How she
can suddenly draw you into
an experience, an observation,
an encounter—make you live it.”
—David Trinidad, “Hidden
in Plain Sight: On Sylvia
Plath's Missing Journals,
Plath Profiles 3 Supplement
______________

Dangerous to be so close—To Ted day in & day out
With no life separate from—His, a mere accessory
I must have a life that—Supports me inside, my
Own beehive nunnery—Where I can be queen bee
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I don’t want to fade away—Into indifferent middle-age
Disillusioned by rejections—Frozen in my dead dreams
Must never become—Merely a mother & housewife
Fearing any meaning or—Purpose my life might have
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Ted is tired of me stalling—Me talking of Tarot, Astrology
And the Ouija board but then—Not doing anything with it
I’m tired of all too—But Ted has a stronger will
To write than me, someday—Maybe he’ll be poet laureate